It never goes away?

[Ella~]

I'm 43 and I've struggled with my gender identity since I was 5 years old. While I was always super aware of all the individual ways that my gender dysphoria had affected me on a daily basis, I was clearly in denial about the fact that it all added up to single big problem. Finally, 6 years ago, I made the connection between the term "transgender" and my experience of life. That's what I am, and finally seeing and accepting the bigger picture helped me understand myself much better. I even felt a certain sense of pride in myself that I had conquered denial and felt certain that I was done with that forever. No more denial, not for me.

Lately though, I've begun to doubt that I'm free at all from denial and I worry that I didn't come to the right conclusion about my problem. It all comes down to this one phrase that comes up over and over again when people talk or write about gender dysphoria: "It never goes away". I realize now that what I had decided to do (intentionally or not) six years ago when I finally realized and accepted that I'm trans was to do nothing. Do nothing, because surely I could overcome this and surely it would pass. I'm a stubborn person and that sometimes helps me but often does me great harm. I think I've been taking this "it never goes away" phrase as a challenge to prove that there has to be exceptions and that I have to be one of those exceptions.

Nothing is absolute and there certainly must be any number of people for whom this does go away. But, given all the blogs, literature and forum posts I've read on this issue where it's written time and again that this doesn't go away and my brief stint with a gender therapist who said the same, it clearly must be a true enough statement in the vast majority of cases.

Just as I had to make peace with the fact that I'm trans, I see now that I have to make peace with the real implications being trans brings. Yes, I might be one of those lucky rare exceptions, but more likely I'm not and this will just continue to haunt me and hound me until the final second of my life. By accepting that it will never go away, it profoundly changes again how I see myself. Before I saw myself only as person who at the moment is trans. Now I need to think of myself as a person who will always be transgender.

That means that waiting this out is not an option. I know I need to face this and find something that makes me happy and brings me peace, though I'm not sure what that will be yet. I also suspect that I'm probably still in denial about some other things too, and I need to find those and work them right away.

Have any of you struggled with this? Do you believe gender dysphoria never goes away unless you do something about it?

~ Ella

[Cindy]

For 50 years it never went away. I did everything to be a man. I even prayed to gods that I could not believe in and begged for relief from the horror of my life.
Horror?
I'm well educated, well employed, do not struggle for money and live in a country of acceptance. How can I say 'Horror'.

The inability to me was my horror, Cindy lived in a shell called P who protected her spirit and tried to protect her, after he realised he couldn't kill her.

I sought help, even though I cross dressed, went out as a female and interacted socially as a female. I wasn't me. The horror was worse because every time P had to come back to work or to live - Cindy didn't die, just wept hidden in the shell.

Finally I had to accept me, because no it didn't go away.

It has now. I'm Cindy, I'm the woman who was always in the shadow, the problems I thought I would face just disappeared. I lost nothing. I gained a life.

I no longer suffer from gender dysmorphia. Cindy is content as the woman she was born to be.

I'm no longer in any shadow.

[StellaB]

I'm also another one who struggled and doubted over many years. I even emigrated to Eastern Europe thinking that a complete change of environment, language and identity would resolve matters. It didn't.

I can explain it more in terms of acting.. I'm a sort of actress who found herself by playing men.

You know you can think, you can feel  and you can believe all you like, but your life is defined by the choices and decisions you take and your actions.

Things changed for me when I figured that not only was I living a lie and hurting myself and other people around me, I was also missing out on opportunities that were unlikely ever to appear a second time round.

And when you can look back over thirty or forty years and sense that time is slowly passing quicker and your years are getting shorter, that's quite a sobering thought. 

[Carrie Liz]

No, it really doesn't. And this is coming from someone who DID, and still does, believe in God, and ADAMANTLY prayed to be cured of my gender dysphoria for a good 5 years straight. For a long time, I did believe that it was working, that because I was able to ignore the thoughts when they came to me and because I didn't "let" them interfere with my life, that it meant I was cured. But let's be honest, I never was. The thoughts always kept coming back, and even when everything else in my life was seemingly going perfectly, and I had both a love of my life as well as a Godly purpose, all that any guy could possibly hope for, something "up there" always still just felt wrong, felt like I had no motivation for some reason, and just no drive or passion in life. It always felt like something was missing, and that I was lacking something that every single other person I knew had, and I just couldn't figure out what.

For some, there may be a way other than transitioning to cure the dysphoria, but for me there wasn't. Once it started around age 12, there was nothing that could stop it. Even when I gave myself full freedom to wear what I wanted and act how I wanted as a guy, I still felt dysphoria. Because even though those things were enjoyable, they still just felt wrong to me doing them as a guy. I wanted to be doing them as a girl, and I was still sick of my body, and hated the way that I looked, and that never changed no matter what. So for me, finally I made the only decision that I could, and began transition. Now I'm not saying that this is what everyone needs to do. Everyone is different. But for me it was. And in a mere two-and-a-half months of HRT, already I'm finally beginning to like parts of my body for the first time in my entire adult life, and actually feel like my mind is working right. For the first time, my default state of existence is happiness instead of a bland gray dreary melancholy where I constantly felt emotionally brain-dead. So for me, yes, this was what I needed, and this really is the first time in my entire life that my feelings of dysphoria have been easing, and I'm actually able to like myself a little bit. (Still a LONG way to go, though, and I still have SERIOUS depressive bouts sometimes, but as a whole I'm REALLY glad that I finally decided to do this.)

[JoanneB]

It most certainly, in my case, never went away. Like you since around 4-5 I knew I should have been a girl. Not an option 50 years ago, especially as a second generation immigrant kid in an industrial blue collar religous city. So I did my best to fake being a boy.

Later in life after graduation from college I experiment with transitioning, and went back to trying to be "normal". A few years later after wife #1, tried experimenting again, went back to trying to be "normal". Fell in love again with an accepting woman, but......

Eventually I remarried. My wife is accepting of my TG status and was OK with my occassional escapes from maleness, though it was obviously difficult for her. The occasional escapes would become more frequent under high stress conditions. I slowly slid back into trying to be "normal" with the help of my old friends, Distrations, Diversions, and Denial. The 3Ds. Shame and Guilt were powerfull motivators, still are! Technically the TG feelings never went away. I just didn't allow myself the luxury of entertaining any of their pulls.

THe 3Ds worked fairly well for a good 30 years to "get by". Then the excrement hit the air handler 4 years ago when my life was turned upside down. Much self reflection came as a result of the only thing I really felt bad about as I balloned up an good 40 pounds thanks to junk food and self medicating with booze, was how I couldn't fit into any of my female clothes even if I tried to. The obvious conclusion to the root cause of most of my life's total disasters was being TG and all the behavours I adopted to try to be normal.

So I decided to actually take this beast on. Sought out whatever TG support could be found in the middle of nowhere, after having to move from just outside NYC. Found a fantastic TG group some 90 miles away that litterally changed my life.

IMHO, they never go away, they can be buried, but like a good zombie they WILL eventually make their way back to the surface.

[Lesley_Roberta]

I think more than the realization I am not male, the sadness of realizing I will never get to experience all those life moments bothers me more.

Never wearing a dress as a little girl. I will never get to be the little girl.

Never wearing a first bra as a young woman. Because I can never go back and be the young woman.

Never experiencing so many first moments, because that part of life has been over for so long.

I really enjoy watching anime, and watching all the things the girls go through, and feeling a sort of sadness knowing I can never do any of those fun things genuinely, because those years are gone basically.

So many years missed.

I will never stop having to contend with being dumped in the wrong shell to some extent, but at least I can retain the life moments I have not lost yet. And fortunately there are at least still a few left.

[spacial]

I'm the same as other.

I prayed and as so often happens, didn't listen to the response!

We have dear, wonderful members here, even in their 70s, who are finally living up to reality. I won't list them but they know they are heros.

Make your plan and start. Do what is within your ability.

[Shodan]

Add me to the list. I say I've been denying it for 30 years, because it really wasn't until I was 10 did I really start to think about it. One of my greatest fears when I finally admitted to myself that I had to do something about it was that it was too late for me to do anything about it. That you had to be in your teens or 20s to really successfully transition. I'm fortunate that I've got a very good therapist whose been working on allaying my fears, and I now realize that it's possible and, in fact, my case was more common than I thought. I'm just frustrated that, financially, I can't move forward with it right now. 

[FTMDiaries]

Same here. I'm your age, and I also knew from age 5 that I was being forced into the wrong gender role. I became more & more despondent throughout my childhood because I was raised in a very sexist, misogynist (amongst other things!) society. Puberty was a nightmare during which my body betrayed me: I could no longer convince anyone that I was a boy because I'd sprouted breasts & hips that should not have been there.

I spent all those years thinking I was the only 'weirdo' who felt that way. Well, I must've been weird, mustn't I? After all, that's what everyone was telling me. Nobody in the 1970s had heard of a 5-year-old girl telling her parents that she's really a boy and wants to wear boys' clothes and be called by a boy's name. I was made to feel like I was the only person in the world who'd ever felt this way, and that I was wrong.

But I wasn't wrong or weird. Nor was I the only one. I first heard the term 'transsexual' at age 19, when I read the story of Caroline Cossey. For the first time, I heard about someone whose experiences echoed mine so closely - albeit from the opposite direction - that I finally realised that there's a word for what I am. But my research at the time told me that whilst the surgical options for male-to-female transsexuals were pretty good, the options for female-to-male transsexuals such as myself were terrible. I learned that I would have to permanently lose any feeling down below... and that was a deal-breaker for me. Plus I'm very short and was living in a society of very tall men, so transitioning under those circumstances would've meant jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. So I decided to go into denial and try to figure out how to live my life as the woman I was being forced to be.

I tried everything. Just like a lot of male-to-female transsexuals who tried extremely masculine things (such as joining the military) in an attempt to figure out how to be male, I tried the most extremely feminine things in an attempt to figure out how to be female. Marriage. Children. Breastfeeding. I thought that if I just tried this one more thing, it would click and I'd finally understand how to be a woman and I'd be happy. But none of it worked.

So here I am, in my 40s, married with two teenagers, and transitioning. It would've been so much less complicated if I had transitioned at 19 like I knew I should've, but if I'd done that I wouldn't have had my children. And I've always wanted to be a parent. Never a mother, but definitely a parent. Also, the surgical options have improved since I first looked into them.

No, my Gender Dysphoria didn't go away. It became stronger & more concentrated with each passing year despite my best efforts. I know from personal experience that it gets worse as I'm ageing and I ain't getting any younger. I decided to transition now while I still have the last vestiges of my youth about me... because I shudder to think about how I would feel if I were in a retirement home being treated like a little old lady, looking back on my life and knowing I never did anything to fix this whilst I had a chance to live my one & only life as myself.