Hi! I'm a 47 year old transgendered person. I consider myself somewhere in the no-person's-land between a cross dresser and a transsexual, as I feel that my dressing behavior is to express something feminine in my soul. I've been this way for over 40 years (my first dressing experience was when I was 6 years old), and as a child I was a woman in my dreams. My family life was not accepting of this, however, and I learned fear and how to hide this very well. While I was discovered by my wife in the early 1990's, I only really accepted myself last summer and finally (and honestly) came out to my wife in September. While it's been a bit of a roller-coaster, she is accepting of how I am (it's not easy for her, believe me - it's mostly because I went into a decade plus denial phase after that earlier discovery, plus other issues).
I am only out to my wife and a couple of acquaintances that I have made in the past year (very trusted, very well vetted acquaintances, I might add). I have two college-age kids who do not know. Our youngest is also bipolar; we discovered how bad it was two weeks after I came out to my wife. He had cut up his arms to relieve his stress and told us about his plan to commit suicide over the summer (he was on the way to do it but for various reasons he ended up not doing it). It's been very rough to deal with him, but my coming out to my wife has helped us to communicate with each other just when it was the most important time in our life. The low point was last November when he broke down and attacked me. It's gotten a lot better for us, but he's still very unpredictable.
I've had a lot of people who've found my story and who've either been discovered or wanted to come out to their wives contact me and ask me for help. I started to work on a web site based on some of the advice I've found and what some others have found. I've had a couple of people contribute coming out stories to that site, but it needs a lot of work. It's my way that I'm trying to give back to the transgendered world. I also have a blog at http:// tinasviews . blogspot . com where I'm documenting more aspects of my life as a "middle path" transgendered person.
