Did anyone else feel that they only fully discovered their trans identity after dating?

I sort of had an idea before, since I thought I was a trans man from age 8 to about 14, but had sort of stopped thinking about it for years, once I realized that I wasn’t a man. At that time, I didn’t really know about non-binary people, so I assumed if I wasn’t a man, that I must be a cis female and that was that.

Six years later when I got my first and only significant other, being trans slammed me again like a semi-truck a few months in. By that time, my knowledge of the possibilities had grown tremendously, but up until that point, I still hadn’t thought to really reflect and see which descriptors could apply to my situation.

I was in the process of sorting through a lot of things, as the guy turned out to be a complete asshat in a lot of ways and I was also in the midst of being intensely confronted in new and unexpected ways with manifestations of my orientation and neurotype, but one moment completely did it for me to really unambiguously realize I was not cis.

One day he, a cishet, shared with me that he would not sleep with a trans girl because he felt like her vagina would just be an inside out penis and he said that it would gross him out, even if said vagina was indistinguishable from a cis woman’s vagina. I had debated him on lots of things I didn’t agree with him on up until that point, but this argument just felt special in some way.

I soon realized that I had felt personally attacked in some way and also that I ultimately would not feel safe exploring my gender expression in a relationship with him. This all was also perpetuated by the fact that he was generally displeased with the fact that I did not strictly adhere to stereotypical ideals of feminine appearance, such as leg shaving, and claimed that he was less attracted to me because I had “manly” characteristics.

I sometimes wonder how and when I would have figured it out in an alternate universe, had I somehow not dated, or dated a different kind of person.