Hi, not really sure why I'm writing this, but perhaps some of it has to do with me turning 40 three days ago. More of a vent/release process I guess. This is way too long, so cheers if you get to the end
Married almost 5 years ago to long-time best friend-then-lover, who was well aware of my gender stuff since the beginning, even helping me do makeup for a few events, and buying me small gifts when we were friends...more than 10 year ago. I think it's common for girls to be okay with a male friend having crossdressing/girl issues, but they are not okay with their lover/boyfriend/husband having those issues. We now have an almost 1 year old baby, who is wonderful, but my day to day existence at home feels like my head is about to implode. As part of my idiocy, partly due to the gender stuff being in a quite dormant state when we got married, and part of our exchange of agreements/promises, I said I'd stay away from the gender stuff. Well after a few years, amongst the stresses of home remodel, moving states, graduate school, job changes and performance reviews, interactions with the in-laws, our various personalities, etc., the gender stuff has returned in full force and as expected, I can't really deal with it. So whereas I once thought I was ahead of all those "middle aged crossdressers" back in my twenties, since I thought I was dealing with my ->-bleeped-<-, I've entirely reverted and stepped back to a state where I was 10 year ago, or worse. I'm now the middle-age married-kid-house-career "guy" whom i always jeered at for being a ->-bleeped-<-tard about his own situation. I was once "enlightened" in that I was above the standard western society B.S., I was open and free about myself, to myself, among my friends, I would meditate, I had long hair, etc., and all that has changed. It's now as though I'd never addressed my gender stuff, when in fact I've been "addressing" it for 20 years.
I constantly replay my personal history since basically childhood. Part of the problem I have with the standard transgender narrative is that it's only about identity, and any symptom of TG is always and ever and only about "identity", doesn't address the neural mechanisms of depression and anxiety, always referring back to "idendity" as the root cause, and how it's always separable from orientation (oh right, two totally separate and independent variables), and never a mention is made about "natural" proclivities towards masculine or feminine behavior pre-puberty, the body language or speech patterns that stick, etc., except in the discussion about ->-bleeped-<-, which immediately gets shot down... so there is no discussion, really. Any treatment of the typical male persona who "becomes" a girl immediately resolves to some notion of that person finding their "true self" and everyone lives happily ever after.
Why do people think it's this simple? You can slice a matrix into rows or colums, and it's still the same set of numbers. So anything that hints or sniffs of ->-bleeped-<- is taboo, even though I think there is some notion, some hint, some kernel of truth, if not in the strict theoretic sense which is what is commonly bashed, then at least in the characterization of the typical MtF narrative vis-a-vis someone who is attrected to girls, gets a boner from wearing womens clothing, then goes on to full transition, with some identity stuff coming online in the interim. My view is that if there were actually a brain transplant where you took an natal girl and put her brain in a boy's body, the first thing she'd do is probably NOT go and put on women's underwear. She'd probably go to a doctor... so the standard narrative (lots of examples of public-ish MtF figures showing up in innapropriately high heels, large boobs, or short skirts) does NOT fit the girl-in-a-boy's body scenario, although I do believe that scenario exists "for real". I strongly believe, in my case anyway, that the identity stuff happens *after* coming to terms with the crossdressing, hormones, etc., not before.
My personal experience was that the crossdressing came first, leading to feelings of stupidity after jerking off, with strong aversion to "identity" being the "cause". I never thought I was a girl; I only wanted to be one, with the requisite praying-at-night-to-wake-up-a-girl since childhood. I'd come home crying a few times because there was often a particular girl at school (whom of course I had a crush on) that I wanted to *be*. I was neither naturally feminine, nor particularly macho, just normal geeky but handsome (or so I've been told given my physique and looks) so for me the gradual erosion of my male identity happened as a result of having to come to grips with the fact that the gender stuff was never going to go away... so my identity, rather than being either male or female, has just become "transgender", with the occasional foray into "girl" in times of extreme delusion, or "boy" in times when my life plan is clear and there is no stress.
Nobody talks about how gender dysphoria is fueled by testosterone, so the "calming" that people get on hormones is by reduction of the dysphoria fuel. Ironically taking hormones reduces the impulse to crossdress and do all the superficial girly stuff which is such the bread-and-butter of non-hormone-taking MtFs. My initial male identity gradually went away after the first few attempts, a few months at a time, of taking hormones. The initial sense was that I was violating an otherwise beautiful male "god-given" body, and I felt totally guilty. Eventually I got over it. This was in my early-mid 20's.
When I first started reading about this on the internet in 1994 -- at that time, in college, I still was a "guy" (though have never been a "man"), who liked my clothing, makeup, and jewelry... and stealing panties from the apartment dryer... but we won't go there
) Engineering background, very much a just a guy. A played sports through high school, and was never accused of being a sissy or gay, etc. I have not an ounce of natural femininity. I enjoyed fart jokes, etc. So to read that my gender issues were about "identity" absolutely did NOT resonate for me. However 20 years later, after having been around the block a few times, without truly jumping in the pool, it has become about identity, but not about having any sort of inherently female identity. For me it seems much more about a "me" identity, or a meta-transgender identity, which is kind of a cop-out, but it's the way it is.
In my history I took hormones on and off through my 20's, and was sort of trying to live in girl appearance outside of work for a little bit. It got to the point with the hormones around age 28 or 29 where I would spontaneously get "ma'amed" without trying, and also without even having any girl clothes on. Just the hair and the plump face were enough. However this triggered a certain line of thought --- now what? Like the dog who catches the car, I didn't know what to do next. I knew the next logical step would be to try to make non-TG friends, but I knew I couldn't carry on an actual personal relationship/friendship with anyone and pretend to be a girl. I think even if I were perfectly passable (which was 3rd or 4th sigma marginal 10 years ago, and 0% chance today), it would still seem false, since my "natural" personality, especially when I'm joking around, is quite typically masculine. Not macho or anything, just a funny guy type. The "dead end" of catching the car and not knowing what's next was an apt metaphor also for SRS -- something that just kind of dead-ends up in there without the rest of the parts.
My long term ideals of perpetuating my privileged white middle class life with wife and kids, etc., were not in line with the short term *extreme* satisfaction I was getting from feeling the effects of the hormones, the body changes, the appearance changes, the feelings of freedom, etc. My conundrum was that following the logical conclusion of my short term tactical respnose to the gender crap, I would never actually juts have a normal "guy" life with wife and kids, etc. During this time I had a trach shave from Dr. O. in San Francisco. Never regretted that a single moment.
(BTW another thing about people discussing orientation vs. identity, etc., which I've never seen discussed, is that orientation also has a marker/tag for the type of person you're interested in. For example I wasn't just interested in girls, I was/am interested in heterosexual cisgender girls. I'm guessing something similar for gay people -- they're not just interested in someone of the same sex, they're interested in someone of the same sex who is also gay. So now not only is there identity and orientation, there is also your target's identity and orientation, and one's own natural (pre-reason, prepubescent, childhood) proclivity towards masculine or feminine behaviors, speech patterns, body language, ie which part of the environment sticks).
I realized at some point that long-term meta life issues like family, job, where I live, etc., were playing into my overall sense of anxiety, so after moving locations back home near parents, and getting out of a job I hated, I felt the overall need to do gender stuff diminish. At that point the makeup, clothing, etc., had kind of just become daily habit.
I visited an ayurvedic doctor to get a completely different viewpoint on my mental state. He asked me if I got turned on by women (yes), if I liked penetrating women (yes), if sex with women felt natural and good (yes), and after that he said was that he saw <male name> here asking why he wants to be a girl, not <female name> asking why she looks like a guy. He mentioned that at least according to the natural ayurvedic approach, hormones are not something that grow on trees or can be grown in the ground... so he recommended getting off them, then dealing with anxiety and depression separately, as that is something they do all the time. I felt like bringing up the subject of separating orientation vs. identity, as I'd been duly trained in modern BS gender psychobabble, but I kept quiet since I wasn't here to argue with him; I was there to get an opinion and different approach. Something in that statement clicked, and (not for the first time), the need to take hormones just turned off. Very strange. I tapered down the dosages.
Now as with other times that I'd gotten off hormones, each time I lowered the dose, there was an uptick in the gender dysphoria for a few days or more. In cases of sudden discontinuation, the resurgence of testosterone was like eating a can of spinach for about a week or two, then severe dysphoria returning; In the case of slow discontinuation, there was no spinach effect, only a blip of dysphoria. However in this case the dysphoria disippated a bit after a few days as my overall outlook had changed based on my newish life circumstances.
Now also at this time I had opportunity to do a solo trip to asia. During one of these hormone reductions in dosage and ensuing dysphoria uptick, I had the crazy idea to get boobs. Now I'd already had this idea a million times before, for 100 year, but this was different. This one actually smelled like a possibility, as getting surgery in Asia is cheap, and there were zero social implications with my real people at home since I was on my own. I knew I couldn't return to the US with boobs, but if I extended my trip a little, I could get boobs in and out, and recover in time. So I did. I got breast implants in Thailand, and a month later had them taken out in India. Funny thing was I wasn't going around saying my name was <female name>. I was <mae name> and made no pretense as to anything else. Still I was ma'amed, with was pretty cool. The breasts grew on me! Yes pun intended. I LOVED THEM LOVED THEM LOVED THEM. They were perfect. There were a part of me. I couldn't bear the thought of having them removed, but alas my month was up and I had them taken out. I returned to the US to a normal life, and the magic words of the ayurvedic doctor seemed to stick.
So for the first few year of my 30s' I was back in guy mode, and I wasn't really stressing about stuff. I was very very happy. Good job, good house, friends, family, etc. The gender stuff was quite distant from my mind, being relegated to memories and cognitive thinking, rather than expressing as the deep anxiety and emotional turmoil that it normally had. There were a few periods of a similar kind of anxiety to gender anxiety, and I think it's probably from the same neural circuit, but somehow got hooked into a different fixation, but that anxiety lead to body piercing. It's happened before in my 20's and it emerged again in my early 30's. Rather than following the gender stuff, I instead took to poking holes in my genitals and nipples. Wow so I guess I'm only a little bit crazy.
That lasted for a little bit, then disappeared. So then it'd been probably 3 years since any serious gender stuff had arisen in my mind. I was not confident about dating, etc., and I know that the sizable boobs from the hormones was the cause. I really felt like I'd "solved" the gender issue -- I just needed to ensure that the flame of gender dysphoria was not stoked, and I just needed to enure that my life in other areas was fulfilled -- friends, family, job, and an overall sense of direction. So after much contemplation and a quick visit to at therapist on doctor's orders, I went and had gynecomastia surgery. BIGGEST MISTAKE OF MY LIFE, btw, which didn't become that until about 2 years ago. So initially, it was nice to be back to guy looking again. Nice flat chest now, very male, except the nipples are too high and have only pain sensation...
So there I was happily along. Best friend becomes girlfriend becomes wife, and then the gender stuff starts back in again, and here I am. I'm totally f*kced. I can't rightly say I'm a "man" because I *really* don't feel that way. But now I have all the normal duties and obligations of one, not that I mind that stuff necessarily... I just mind it as a matter of "being a man". Wife is 1000% not cool with the gender stuff. Like seriously. So I don't talk about it. I've told her within the past 2 years or so that the gender stuff is the fabric and substrate of every single thought and experience that I currently have, and it's impossible for me to separate gender-based decision from non-gender-based-decisions. It's totally taken over my mind. I can't stop thinking/obsessing/fantasizing/worrying, which in fact is another reason I don't always think the transgender thinking is non-pathological. Suicidal thoughts come and go, as the only way out of this mess. Funny thing is she started watching the TV show Transparent, so at some level she's thinking about this stuff, and sometimes she jokes and asks me if the show is too close to home. We went to counseling a few years ago for overall relationship stuff, and that helped, but we're back to not talking about things.
I currently spend all my non-thinking moments regretting my decisions, how I got here, and what the future holds. I toggle between being actually depressed and just being semi-mopey. It feels like maybe things will change when my wife finishes her school program, but probably not.
Anyway, I could go on forever. I just wanted to get this out there.
