OTOH --
"Schizo-Morphia" (Latin: "split shape") a term I made up. It's the anxious post-transition realization that you're still who you've always been, but no longer who you were.
I'm not changing who I am, not changing my name, not changing the way I dress. I assiduously refuse to revise some sort of "personal bio" that integrates the narrative that once I was me and now I'm somebody else.
I'm still ME ! ! ! Always have been. Only now I'm a heap more relaxed, at ease. Big "out of the closet" moment is being entirely comfortable, unaffected, relaxed un-self-conscious about shopping for clothes. I even I'm able to examine, consider fabric/color/design, even discuss w/ nearby Cis-Women. No more pretending "It's for my wife!"
Been around fashion all my life, understand it. Women I talk to are amazed that I know what I'm looking at, can name design features like darts, gathers, hems, sleeve/shoulder treatments, pockets . . . Mom was partner in a hand-made fashion boutique, seamstress, tailor.
Finasteride and Spiro are going to take care of the androgens. I get to step off the testosterone bucking horse. I get vellus hair rather than the coarse stuff I need to shave -- toes to nose -- every 12 hours.
Wishing the genitals would just drop off, wishing I'd get a visit from the "gender faerie" -- Not gonna happen.
Looking here like the dreaded "man in a dress" -- But I have dear cis-women friends who can't/don't wear dresses.
"Mahu" is the Hawaiian native cultural term for "Middle People" -- those who embrace both ends of the heterosexual dyad. Considered shamans -- and this is very much broadly cross cultural -- Mahu and similar are viewed as having the magical power to inhabit both realms.
Not happy here as male.
Not able here as female.
Working on being "less androgen crazed" and developing the somewhat increasingly militant position that --
"My orientation and presentation is not an issue for me. If it's an issue for you, then that's your issue, not my issue."
