Hi, everyone.
I'm new to the forums and finding all of this most helpful and interesting. I feel as if I've finally found a planet where I might belong. Since discovering this site and others, I've been thinking (okay, obsessing a little) about gender and gender issues and examining myself and my own feelings about it, trying to see what applies for me. Actually what started it was seeing the episode of 20/20 a few weeks ago about transgendered children.
Now, I've never thought of myself as someone "in the wrong body" exactly, but I have always been very androgynous in dress and appearance, and generally very uncomfortable in my body. Watching that show brought back a flood of childhood memories, though, about being forced to wear dresses, being frilled up as a totally girly girl, not being allowed to wear jeans or pants, and being subjected to incessant fussing about my straight, fine hair, including being given perms to force it to be curly and being made to sleep with curlers in my hair night after night.
My whole life my family would laughingly tell a story about how I was very frustrated as a small child because I couldn't pee standing up like my father and brother did. I was a total tomboy to the limited extent I was allowed to be, preferring to play with boys and do more traditionally boyish things (although I did have dolls and played with them, too, as a very small child--baby dolls. As an older child I thought Barbie dolls were dumb and couldn't see why the other girls wanted to play with them, although I owned one in an effort to fit in) and even through high school I had many more boy friends than girl friends; my two closest friends in high school were boys (one of them was gay, and the other was a poet and a musician).
I remember all of this (this "you aren't okay as you are, you have to be someone else") as a kind of TORTURE, and I have often described it thus to people. Through my whole life I have had that feeling that many other people here have described of not fitting in anywhere, of not ever being really comfortable with girls and women OR with boys and men, that feeling of being some kind of freak and not fitting in anywhere, with anyone, of always having to pretend to be someone I've never really been.
I came out as a lesbian in my thirties, after being married and having children, and that helped somewhat. Technically I'd have to say I'm bisexual, but my strongest attraction is definitely to women, and I've been exclusively with women for many years.
However, I've become aware lately that I still have always had that feeling of not fitting anywhere, of falling somehow BETWEEN. Watching that show about transgendered children, and the flood of memory and very strong emotions it evoked in me, has made me wonder to what extent my "inner boyness" was simply just shamed and tormented out of me, so that for most of my life I've just suppressed it, buried it completely.
I was fairly often--to my mother's horror--mistaken for a boy as a child, and it has happened to me many times as an adult, even when I've not been consciously trying to look like a guy. Both adults and children occasionally read me as being male, and it always takes me aback a little.
In the last few weeks, since seeing that show and finding myself thinking and reading about gender so much, I've experimented with allowing myself to let that masculine side out more, in my dress, in the way I wear my hair, etc., and I find that it has made me feel SO HAPPY to do that. It's as if a part of me is breathing a huge sigh of relief somehow.
Yet, I still am struggling to figure out what all of this means. I said to someone the other day--I've been dragging various friends and even my adult (very liberal and tolerant) children into discussions about gender and gender identity--that if I was twenty instead of fifty and knew all the stuff I know now, I would totally transition to being male in a heartbeat. Then I was astounded that I'd said that, realizing that it's a pretty strong statement, and wondered if I really meant it, and what that means.
If I could flip a switch and suddenly be transformed, I think I might do it even now. And yet, I also feel at times less sure about it, that it's really something "in between" that I want, that would be ideal for me. For example, I would love to have a male chest--I have pretty small breasts already, but if I could have surgery and get rid of them I absolutely would.
That might be enough for me; although, I'm not sure about that. I've looked at hundreds of websites about FTM transitions and found myself astounded and deeply moved and honestly envious of these people, wondering what it would be like, wondering if I'd find I felt more like myself, trying to imagine it.
I've read all the descriptions of androgyne and neutrois, too, and found that I fit pretty well into them both. Sometimes though, I think I'm a gender slider, that I move back and forth, and this has been validated by a close friend who has told me that she can definitely see and feel me "shift" in different situations and says that my voice even changes slightly. Sometimes I simply feel very gender-neutral, and always hugely ambivalent and ambiguous, and sometimes I'd say I don't want to be any gender.
So where am I with all this? Experimenting. Engaged in lots of self-examination. Reading and watching everything I can find on the subject. Confused. Furious all over again with my family for what they did to me as a child (I was also sexually and emotionally abused and have spent much of my adult life in recovery from the effects of that). I'm also in therapy--have been for a long time--and have been talking about it there, too.
I'm sorry this has been so long, but I wanted to introduce myself and thank you all for the wealth of wonderful information and discussion on this site; I've been so glad to have found it. I'm not sure where this leg of my journey is going to take me, but it feels hugely important to me, like something I've neglected for far too long. I feel as if some sleeping part of myself has awakened and is clamoring to be a part of my life, and I'm trying to figure out how to make that happen.
