*sees all the people noticing me enter. Kindhearted as they are they give me space. A little teary eyed I wave shyly*
Hi, I'm Dee and I'm male to female transgendered. Sounds like AA.
Let's actually start with something simple. I didn't so much pick my feminine name as grow into it. "Dee" is short for my birth name, which is actually pretty ambiguous (and no, I'm not gonna share it). It's what my mom, and pretty much nobody else called me. My dearest, closest friends use it. I hope that most or all of you are going to fall into that category. I'm showing you the secret "me", but at least it's like the secret "you".
I'm 54 years old. I didn't think about gender as a young child, didn't long to be a girl. Didn't really think about being one or the other, but actions speak louder than words. I didn't prefer the noisy active games the boys were playing. I would ,and still do, think about how unfair it was that girls and women wear interesting, pretty clothes and boys could not. I've always preferred the bright colors. I grew up in the working class culture of the Midwestern United States. Got picked on, assumed that I was gay. Did some things with the other boys in early puberty. We all told ourselves it was just until we could get the girls interested. Later I had a lot of friends who were girls, dated with some success and put all of that behind me for years. In those early years of puberty I had gynecomastia, which as left me at my current age with small "B" cup breasts. From time to time in my life the woman in me would poke up her shy head and say "I'm here". I could always find a distraction and would forget for years at a time. I remember a lot of those incidents now and wonder how I could have been so clueless, but the flood of testosterone seems to have masked the truth.
Met a woman in college. Met several, but one in particular. She was more aggressive than me, more masculine in some ways. The aids epidemic was in full bloom and I remember thinking one afternoon, "I can either ask her to marry me or pass this up and I'll soon do something really foolish, get aids and die." I proposed then and there. Before you tell me that was a silly reason to get married, we've been mostly happily married for thirty three years. I repressed a lot in those days.
Ten years ago I met and fell in love with a woman who happened to be a lesbian. It's at that time I realized that I'm polyamorous. That woman encouraged me to come out to my wife. She didn't take it well. With therapy we saved our marriage at the cost of my repressing a part of myself. This is important, we'll come back to this. At the same time I realized that I'm bisexual. As I had agreed not to step outside our marriage again, I kept that to myself because my wife had told me, "at least it wasn't a man. I couldn't forgive that.". For ten years I've fought a daily battle with keeping my promise. I don't feel safe or comfortable with only one partner, but I love her so very much.
Shortly after that my testosterone levels began to slowly drop. They're low enough now that it's become obvious and with that, over the last few months I can finally, consciously, admit to my nature, my condition.
I work in the mental health field (not a therapist). In researching a client who happens to be transgendered I began to see myself in what I was reading and could admit it to myself. Frightening and liberating at the same time. I run towards, not away from, the things that frighten me. This feels like jumping off of a roof. Exciting and terrifying. Just like everything else that really interests me; flying small airplanes, riding motorcycles. Are many of us attracted to such pursuits? Other than that I play a lot of online MMOs, almost always as a female character. I came out as a transwoman to one of my friends on my current game who knew I was a male physically. She was surprised that I hadn't realized, not surprised at my state. She said it was obvious to her. I think it really was.
I'm looking for a therapist to help me work out the best way to approach my wife with this. I don't think she'll react well, but I have to try. It can go four ways in descending order of likelihood; she'll dump me, she'll bully me into repressing it like I did my poly nature, she'll accept it but ultimately not be able to handle it, or we can actually keep this together. I don't think I'm gonna tolerate the bullying this time. This is it, either the male part of me dies or all of me does. Not suicide, but I know my health will deteriorate.
I'm sure there's more, but this is long enough.
This is me, Dee Marshall, lesbian (in my own head) transwoman. Now if I were only confident to tell the rest of the world.
