Hi!
I'm Àlex, from Barcelona, Catalunya. I'm pleased to see such a big community here going around the subject of gender, with almost a board for every aspect of it, and I wanted to present myself before anything :-)
I'm 28, and I've been under the pressure of gender dysphoria for almost a lifetime. I've been having doubts about my gender since I was a child, and my relation with this doubts has been mostly unhealthy, repressing certain feelings for as long as I could in order to... I don't know; in order to fit in and live easy, I suppose. It's funny, because I feel like i've been kidnapped by myself for a long time, and it's like I developed some kind of Stockholm Syndrome through the years; I'm aware that I have very serious gender issues, but at the same time... gosh, I kinda got to like the man I became. And the fear of not meeting my expectations if I ever transition... wao, it's all spiralwise thinking.
So, I've been having these cycles of dysphoria, repression, depression, blablabla... I'm sure a lot of you know what I'm talking about. The thing is that I had enough. This is it. It's over. I'm done with battleing by myself with this confusion, and I have started to come out as someone with an enormous confusion about gender. I'm not coming out as a transgender person, because I honestly don't know if that's the label that fits for me. The more I come out to relatives and close friends, and the more I see how accepting, kind and supporting they are, the more I feel like one of the things that pushed me away the most from going for the sex change was the fear of losing important people in my life and ending up alone, somehow (And the more I realize how stupid this thought was :-P). But still, I'm not really really really sure if I want to go for a full change.
I feel like it's all (at least in my case) more complicated than being a woman caught in the wrong body. Gender issues are complex stuff, and I want to encourage everyone to deal with them the sooner, the bettter. I wish I came out like this before, because I feel so relieved now... every time I tell it to someone relevant in my life, it feels like it's my true inner self taking control and talking, far beyond the mask.
So, there has been a battle all my life, but the transition starts now. I scheduled with gender specialists at Hospital Clinic in Barcelona, and I can't wait to start working on these feelings. I don't know what will come out of that, but I do know that it's the first time I adress these issues with honesty and truthfulness towards myself and the others. Reality against repression.
I'm still in the phase of clarifying, but I'm starting to see where it leads... and I like it :-)
