OK, this may be long. I have been thinking about this a lot in the last week since I've accepted.
It's late and I am tired, but feel compelled to put this down for you and myself.
Some of this is just facts of my life, some will be speculation.
My parents divorced when I was young and I was raised by my grandparents. There were no girls near me in age in my family, and the closest to where I lived were two Amish girls almost 3 miles away. The Amish girls parents did not let them have anything to do with my brother and I.
My youngest aunt still lived at home till I was 4 or 5. I played with her dolls till one day they were gone and Six Million Dollar Man and Incredible Hulk action figures had taken their place. I was "sensitive", or so I had overheard over and over again, (God, I am crying! I hate this.) So I though this was just more of the boy things they thought I should do. I still don't understand that, I did everything my older brother did and they never insisted he do boy things. When I was seven they pulled me out of summer camp when my cousins and older brother put me in a dress to get into the girls dorm to give a girl a note. They got into trouble but I was the one my grandparents took home. I never thought I was a girl though just different or "sensitive".
This is a fact, watching your mother drive away with your younger brother and sister, you KNOW without a doubt it's your fault. I knew it wasn't my older brothers fault, he wasn't the one the adults talked about. Nothing shaped my life more than that. The the need to be someone parents wanted to keep consumed me. I excelled at being a boy, always the first to be picked. Dodgeball, kickball or baseball it didn't matter, I was good if not the best in my school. My older brother told me years later he stopped playing sports because of me. It never changed how my family looked at me though.
I kept playing for the approval of the other kids but stopped caring if it changed how my family felt about me. Became an all-star football and baseball player in high school, but still hung out with the outcasts. I knew, if no one else did, that I did not fit in with the jocks, I wasn't good enough to be with normal people.
I never thought I was a girl, just different. I hid my whole life from the "how" I was different.
There was no point in the next twenty years,(not even when I would weld steel 20 stories up wearing flowery panties under my clothes) that I thought I was a girl. I had other issues to deal with.
I did deal with them and finally thought I was able to join the human race.
Then 2 to 3 years ago my sex life started to change. Finally I came to the realization that I didn't want to be the doer I wanted to be the doee, and the assumption that I was gay. After my divorce I tried being with a guy and it didn't work out. It wasn't necessarily being with a guy I wanted but being the girl.
Not sexually, or not primarily sexually, but I wanted to be a girl. I didn't want to have sex with anyone male or female with this "thing". Still I didn't think of becoming a girl, just being single the rest of my life.
It wasn't till a week ago when I made my first effort at trying to be a girl that everything came crashing down. It doesn't matter now what the rest of my life is, I just know that it will be a girl doing it. I've tried, I really have, to imagine a future as a man. It's not there. There is nothing left but the girl.
I still don't know when it happened or what caused it or if it was always there. Maybe therapy will help me figure it out.
Truth is I am tired of thinking about it, tired of talking about it and tired of pouring my heart out to people who may, or may not care. Sorry, everyone has been great, I am just tired. Really I'm just emotionally raw right now, and feeling like that little girl again after talking about it.