I've had two related experiences. This is bound to be a long post, so I can't fault anyone for skipping.
The first:
I landed myself in a situation in which I decided to meet up with a stranger after communicating with him for a while. He got me high. When I was high, he began to come onto me despite me making it clear I was not interested. I began to freak out and felt helpless and terrified (I'm not relating helplessness and terror to womanhood, for the record). His speech was very manipulative and seemed to try and take advantage of my mental state. When I fell quiet and withdrawn, he became verbally abusive.
This triggered a PTSD episode for me (which, ironically, I had only learned I suffered from two weeks prior with my therapist). I felt so trapped and terrified that I collapsed into the arms of my captor (who did later molest me) in tears and excessive shaking. A lot of the physical, sexual and mental abuse from my childhood flooded my mind -- but so did something else, which I find difficult to describe; it was sort of an inner sense of self, like an aura. I could only read it as two things: female and blue. Strangely, I don't care for blue. However, in the echoes of my memories, that was my self-interpretation. It was pure feeling, not imagery. My only existing sense of self at that time was a helpless little girl.
The second:
This was very recent. Several of my friends took me to a getaway seaside home for a belated birthday celebration. They locked me outside of the house after getting me high and wouldn't let me in. I was too far gone to really understand what was going on, but eventually they told me to go inside and surprised me with a birthday cake perfectly tailored to my tastes. They sang me happy birthday and kept calling me the birthday girl. I felt so incredibly loved that I burst into tears and had to run into another room in complete embarrassment.
While I was in the other room, the inner aura came back, except this time it was a blend of purple and green. Purple is my favorite color. I'm okay with green, but it isn't a stellar color for me. My thoughts were overwhelmed with a mixture of the love I felt from everyone and how deeply hideous I felt. I felt hideous because all of my loved ones perceive me as female, but at the same time I'm overweight and unpassable. I make no particular effort with clothing except to avoid anything starkly masculine. I speak to them in a completely female voice and have very effeminate mannerisms, very long hair, and have been pretty feminized from years of hormones. I felt like a mutant of some kind, and certainly like the person they all loved is still invisible to them -- but they still see her, anyway.
I was quiet for the rest of the night. My friends still made sure to pay a lot of attention to me but also let me have my own space. One, who I've been in love with for a long time, kept making me laugh with subtle gestures and I ended up falling asleep to the sound of his voice by the end of the night. In all the silence, the embarrassment, the self-disgust, and the wake of what I can only equate to a profound schoolgirl crush, the aura persisted -- though my age this time was my own and not child-like.
Both examples really make me wonder just how stressed out I must be underneath my crust, but it's also nice to know that when my mind is all too completely incapable of controlling itself or choosing direction, my sense of female seems to persist as some kind of core.
