From puberty onwards I build the walls of denial so high that it was only a couple of months ago that I was able to recognize that I'm transgender. Despite childhood dreams of falling into a puddle into a room of ballerina's costumes, a long addiction to female-focussed sissy/femdom material, and a profound inability to function as a man, I just couldn't acknowledge to myself that I'm trans.
Even now, I feel more pain over the absence of sex/relationships in my life than over gender. I have always been alone, I have never spent the night in bed with a partner, never "made a move" on anyone, never dated, but often in love or infatuation. Beyond some drunken kisses at university, I have had just one 'unpaid' sexual experience, a one-night stand eleven years ago where the woman made all the moves, but I couldn't finish. I have always masturbated anally, every day or two, for two decades, though I never imagined it to be a penis, and I am exclusively attracted to women. But I never had any male sexual drive or manner towards women. In my mid-20s I used to visit escorts, and had what I now see to be 'transex' kind of experiences in which my penis would not be involved. But for the past six years I disappeared from the physical world, and lost myself in poppers and femdom clip oblivion. Now I want to leave all that behind, and I see the way forward is to acknowledge this long-hidden gender issue.
Still, foremost in my thoughts is that my inability to form relationships with women, despite falling deeply in love with them, has caused me enormous pain throughout my life. I have long had a pattern of getting obsessed with any beautiful women I managed to become friends with (in recent years it was female housemates). I see now that I both wanted to be them, and to be with them (whether that might be as either a male or female partner). I would disappear in my perception of them; I would not have to think of my life, if I could exist one-dimensionally, no more than a viewer observing theirs. But I could not stop my emotions building up - the pain that they didn't love me (sexless as I was), and I couldn't be intimate with them, and that more years of my life were being wasted on these recurrent, entirely futile fixations. My unhappiness would boil over into a fatal falling-out, whether after three months or five years, usually at the pain of seeing them with their boyfriends, and realizing they would never love me; or that I could never be them, or their partner.
I feel such a tangling of different grief. I mourn not being male, of not being the man who I see in the mirror, of not being able to have the life the man I appear to be would have been able to have. I mourn not being able to be intimate with women, and to have missed out on physical intimacy and companionship all these years. I see how women light up when they are with heterosexual men, and I regret that I can never create this reaction in them.
Do I also mourn not being born the woman that, on some level, I am beginning to feel like I am (at least to some extent) inside? Yes, yes I do. But it feels distant. I don't currently have a strong sense of being a woman, and yet if I look back over the course of my life, I must see that the failure to recognize this essential fact, while being so miserably dependent on unavailable straight women, is what has stopped my life from developing beyond its atrophied or embryonic state.
As a result of my realization earlier this year, I have just come out to my parents as transgendered, and to my most important friends. They were all fine. I also told my GP, and he is writing to see if I can get psychosexual counselling. I do not feel like wanting to go onto any transition pathway, so soon after the realisation; and anyway, I have fatty liver so I could not currently consider hormones. But I would certainly like the chance to talk to a gender therapist. I also finally read Jan Morris's Conundrum, which has been ignored on my shelf for ten years.
I am terrified of navigating the city as visibly trans. But if I don't 'inhabit' my female brain, it seems the only option is oblivion; an early death from obesity; and increasing unhappiness. I have binged on food from puberty onwards, and my weight is currently not far off 290 lbs at 5"9.
I am terrified that accepting that this is about gender, not sex, will result in me having to give up my sex-drive, and any chance of a future sex-life. But as I cause myself enormous pain in all my dealings with attractive women, and live life without ever touching another human being, things could hardly get any worse! It would be nice if I might be able to feel for the first time like an active protagonist in my own life.
Thanks for reading. Any feedback gratefully received!
