I sincerely need help with gender issues (Trans OCD or not?)

Hello everyone, I just wanted to post something here, because I genuinely do not know what to do anymore about the anxiety I have been experiencing since around the 4th of February this year. I do want to apologize upfront for the long read, I hope it won’t be as incoherent as I am afraid it will be, but I just hope you all will be able to skim through it quite quickly, but alas, here goes..
I am a 25 year old cisgender gay male suffering from OCD and ADD. (I have been undergoing therapy for ADD ever since I was 3 years old and it continued until my 15th. I have taken Concerta and Ritalin throughout my life. I know that both diseases can overlap and since ADD makes you impulsive and pretty much an overthinker, this is causing my OCD spikes to be much worse than I have hoped they would have.) (Secondly, everything about my alleged OCD pretty much is a self-diagnosis, I am currently undergoing therapy for OCD, I have only had two introductory meetings so I still have to wait for their professional diagnosis, but I am fairly certain that I suffer from this disease. Both of my parents are pretty neurotic and my dad probably has this disease, I mean he has all of the listed symptoms that can be found on the Internet, but he just has never been diagnosed from it. (I also don’t know what my gender identity is due to this anymore, but I will come back to this issue/point later in my post.)

I have been romantically and sexually attracted to men for most of my life, I came out of the closet on multiple occasions, due to my dad not fully accepting it. I have come out of the closet at first when I was 13, I was internet dating a boy back then and told my sister, who pretty much outed me during a vacation trip with the whole family, I came out as bisexual back then, but I was never attracted romantically or physically to women. On my fifteenth I came out as gay to friends and when I was 19th I came out a second time to my parents, because I was dating a guy and I couldn’t keep it a secret anymore. Mind you that up until my 25th, I have never been attracted to women, the porn I’ve watched was always gay and I don’t know it just didn’t spark my interest.
I have never been aware of gender issues either, because I thought gender expression/identity and sexuality where all the same, so I would just say I was a gay male and I kind of was content with that.
Coming back to my alleged OCD diagnosis, I have always been a highly anxious person, I have suffered from Agoraphobia, ROCD, Harm OCD and maybe if HOCD, but I am not aware of that. I have always been driven by an inexplicable fearing force and I based off my whole life around that topic. I have only just become aware of how I would describe it.

Secondly, I have dated a guy back in 2016 and it went downhill relatively quick and it kind of tarnished my self confidence to a point where I just pitied myself and my existence, I did not entirely want to be myself, because I felt really weird about it. (Not in a gender kind of way, mind you.) I have been self-medicating with weed and alcohol and first and it went from recreational use, to daily usage of about one gram per day. I have been doing so since 2018, well to be frank, since I think around May 2018. This hasn’t helped my anxiety in the slightest and I feel like it has worsened my intrusive thoughts, again I have used weed and hashish to kind of numb myself out, but it also made me ponder A LOT about existential problems. Again, my gender has not been an issue up until this point.
However, around the 4th of February 2018, it has gone even further downhill for me. I think around November-ish my best friend came out to me as transsexual. (FTM) I did not occur to me one bit, I have known him for 8 years and I have never even questioned it. He always was very good at keeping it a secret. I have been slightly transphobic in the last part of 2017 throughout January 2018. I kind of kept my distance, because I found the idea of being born into the wrong gender/sex scary and I just tried to keep it as far away as possible from me. I do want to note that I am NOWHERE near as transphobic as I used to be and I tried my freaking best to overcome this obstacle. We’re even closer as best friends than we have ever been before. I do not want to come off as someone who dislikes transpeople, it is to quite the contrary. I love him dearly and I do not care what anyone is anymore, it all revolves around someone’s soul, since everything else in this life is temporary, it doesn’t matter to me anymore what kind of sex, gender or orientation someone has. If we’re friends, we’re friends.

So now for the part about me: on the 4th of February, when I came home late night from work, I would usually roll about two joints and just relax, but I got a weird intrusive thought of me having female genitals and as if my own genitals where forcefully cut off from me, and it has up until this day, the 23rd of June that I have been obsessing over the possibility of being transgendered myself. Again I have NOTHING against transgendered people, but I just feel like this is not meant to be for myself. I have been doing the same tests over and over to look for certainty, even though I know how contradictory that is. You will never be 100% certain. I have ruminated, looked for reassurance online by skimming through thousands of similar stories and posts. I have overanalyzed and overthought a lot. I basically wake up nowadays when everything is fine, but at one point during the morning a repetitive strain of questions comes up and I feel compelled to answer them. I cannot seem to look at this situation objectively since gender issues are new for me and well they are essentially hard to ignore. I have never, ever in my life questioned my gender or anything related to it up until this point. This all sounds as if I am suffering from OCD and I am fairly certain I do, but I just cannot seem to distinguish real from synthetic thoughts anymore. I have scrolled through thousands of transgender-outing posts or lists about ‘’These 10 symptoms make sure that you’re this or that, in relation with transgender topics of course’’ and I never really get a satisfying answer. I have tried to accept the feelings of being MTF, but I just do not ever want to transition, start HRT or using female hormone pills, I don’t really know what else someone can do to transition, but it’s just not for me.

As you can see, I kind of lost touch with reality and my days nowadays revolve around the same set of questions: ‘’Are you trans? Do you want to live as a woman? Am I transgendered? Am I secretly a girl and in denial? What if I had lady parts instead of male parts, would I be happy to live as a member of the opposite sex?’’ these questions are always the same, I usually get a satisfying feeling from answering them, by convincing myself with something or something in that sense, when I know the feeling is temporary and it usually starts over immediately if I get triggered. I even used to avoid women, because it would trigger my anxiety.

So this kind of comes to a conclusion right now, do you think I am suffering from OCD (This might be a compulsion; a way of seeking reassurance about a topic… I am sure only I might be able to answer..) or am I actually subconsciously transgendered and does this then mean that I am in denial?
I truly am on the verge of driving myself insane.. and I genuinely do not know what to do anymore… I hope someone from this forum might be able to help me out with this issue.

It's really scary how similar your case is to mine. The thing about ocd and well, obsessions in general, is that you can never really quit until you get a definitive answer of some sort like you said. In one way I could put it like this, you knew for a while to some extent, that you were gay right? You knew that deep in your core liking and going on a date with a woman was completely out of the question for your life. I myself was the same way when it came to my sexuality (Gay 22 year old man here), and it was something that just felt natural, whereas, with tocd thoughts, you just get this shred of anxiety that never goes away.

By no means that you're not accepting such an outcome for yourself mean you're transphobic, same way people who have hocd aren't homophobic. Deep down on some level we don't want this for ourselves because we knew what content, relatively speaking, felt like up until these thoughts came to be. My whole experience spurred on from just talking about acceptance for trans people when the dreaded thought of "well are you trans?" came to my mind. It was awful, and basically set the grounds for me to try and seek help. I learned that my mother had ocd! I knew worries in my life that were external rather than this and I did my own scouring of research, comparing my experience to other actual trans people and wondering if I was destined to come to terms with some form of transition. By the way, don't do that because it makes it worse and only fuels the fire.

The best thing for you to do is accept these thoughts are not going to go away, there will be triggers but you have to persevere. Just because one person has made a life-changing decision does not mean you have to follow suit in that way. You have to learn that no matter what you have a life that you can still live despite this. Even then, you're free to write your thoughts and fears on this board, it could really help because I've done so in the past when I felt absolutely dreadful in regards to this. Long story short, are you trans? no, if you were, you wouldn't be fighting it for so long trying to seek out the assurance that you aren't and I only wish you the best with it. Intrusive thoughts can be mean but at the end of the day? You're still in control of, not those thoughts.

Hey, I don't really have any advice but I am struggling with the same thing. I am also gay but I have been having trans thoughts I can't cope with