The short part:I'll be 37 in a few months.
I've been married since 2003.
I've worked in IT since 1997.
I live far Northern WI.
I have many tattoos, but fewer piercings than I used to (got tired of the upkeep of facial piercings).
My spouse and I have a lot of pets; 6 snakes, 2 tarantulas, a scorpion, a big centipede, a grouchy old parrot, 3 cats, 2 dogs, and a couple aquariums.
I could never grow a proper, non-patchy beard (massive hormone imbalance, detailed below) so I ended up having full face electrolysis so I didn't have to deal with weird, patchy stubble random places on my face and neck.
For the most part, I'm not fussed about pronouns because nobody ever made me be fussed about them while growing up.
I usually go with whatever people read me as, and my name is a unisex name so it doesn't give any 'clues'.
Sometimes, I just like to answer with, "Guess," if someone asks just to see what they think.
Online, I primarily stick with he/him, however.
In all honesty though, since nobody ever made gender identity a big required thing for me while I was growing up, it never became a big part of my identity overall; I just am who I am, and if you read me as male that's great, if you read me as female that's also great. If you can't tell, I'll be tickled as that's my favorite place to be, but I'll either tell you or you can just pick one.
Most people who can't guess or aren't comfortable guessing, I suppose they figure I'll be offended if they get it wrong, default to they.
The longer part, for those interested:While growing up, my parents were great about letting me explore and all of that; if I wanted to wear dresses and play make up while outside playing in the dirt with toy trucks, that was all just good and well.
If I wanted to dress like GI Joe and play with Barbie dolls, also cool.
If I'd tell them one day I was a girl and their daughter, I was a girl and their daughter until I told them otherwise.
After a few times of guessing wrong, they just learned to ask me if I didn't announce it, because frequently I'd be in a play dress but still be a boy and their son--then get kind of small child angry if they just assumed I was a girl that day because I was wearing a dress.
The only person to ever really complain (once) was my paternal grandmother and she was sternly told that she was not the one raising me and could keep her opinions to herself or just not visit if it was a problem for her.
She kept her mouth shut from then on save for one other time when she told my parents she thought it was 'a little strange' that I'd switch the heads on the Barbie and Ken dolls.
When she asked me why I did that, my answer was, "Ken wants to wear Barbie's peach dress, but it doesn't fit the Ken body so I had to move his head over." PERFECTLY REASONABLE if you ask me.
My mom worked at the local wing of the statewide AIDS organization, and she used to have my brother and I come down there after school so she didn't have to deal with a babysitter; since we were well behaved kids, they didn't mind.
I spent a lot of time, growing up, around gay men, lesbians, bi people, pan people, transgender people, drag queens, and anything in between so it was all normal to me.
I don't understand at ALL why people think it's difficult to explain these things to their kids, basically because when I was 6 and met the first trans person I'd ever met (MtF, pre-everything) I asked my mom why "that man was wearing a dress and a wig" and she explained to me that she wasn't a man, and was a woman. She went on to explain that this lady was working with her doctors and the people at the organization so they could help make her outside look like how she felt inside.
As a 6 year old my response to that was, "Oh, okay!"
No confusion, not hard to explain. That was in 1985.
Same thing with explaining same sex couples: "They're a couple like your dad and I are a couple." Oh, okay, easily explained!
By the time I was 8, I knew all about safe sex and how to properly use things like condoms and dental dams and didn't think that was strange or even necessarily inherently sexual; it was just a health thing.
None of the kids, or other adults in the neighborhood seemed to take issue with how I'd dress or act, to the other kids I was just their playmate, and to the adults they figured it wasn't hurting anyone by being a little odd, and it was up to my parents as to how I was raised. I was a good, quiet, polite, and respectful kid so most other parents thought it would be ridiculous to complain about something as minor of how I dressed or what I wanted to play with the other kids.
Then again, back in the 80s, there was a lot less policing about how other moms were raising their kids; as long as the kid was well behaved, friendly, and not a destructive jerk, the assumption was that kid's parents were doing just fine.
In elementary school, nobody really said anything and the few times a teacher or another student asked why I was wearing a dress or a skirt if I was a boy, my answer was always, "Because I want to!/Because I like it!" and nobody ever seemed to question it further.
As I got older, I wanted to learn to put on makeup but my mother never wears it so she asked around at work.
The consequence of that is that I have no idea how to do subtle/natural eye or lip makeup, because it was a pair of drag queens that taught me how to do my makeup.
When it came to clothes and makeup in general, my parents let me experiment as much as I wanted to and, since my mom is decent with a sewing machine, she'd make a lot of clothes for me if I found patterns that I liked. On occasion, one of the church choir ladies would make some snide comment about me 'dressing inappropriately' to my mom and she'd just smile at them and say, "Oh, I made him that dress/skirt/shirt, do you like it?" then kind of laugh when they tried to backtrack.
Around the time I hit puberty, my parents explained to me that I had to 'pick one' to use in day to day life in terms of gender because that's what most people would expect, but that picking one or the other didn't mean I couldn't still dress how I wanted to dress or have hobbies that I wanted to have.
TL;DR: I have amazing parents that never made me feel weird or awkward or wrong for experimenting with clothing, gender expression, makeup, etc...
I can't say school was perfect, other kids can be pretty mean, especially in middle and high school, but since I had a good support structure with my family and with friends it didn't bother me all that much; it left me with a bit of anxiety in social situations where I don't know anyone else in the room, but over time that's lessened as well.
I do still get a pang of, "...oh no..." when I see school busses or have to be on one for some reason. Smells and memory triggers, I guess.
A lot of the problems in high school stopped when we got a principal who didn't subscribe to 'boys will be boys' mentality (once the kids doing the bullying started actually getting in trouble, suspended, and in one case an expulsion hearing, they started leaving me alone) and after my brother got to high school and almost immediately made the varsity football team. One time of holding a teammate to the wall by his neck with, "That's my big brother, if you have a problem with him you have a problem with me. Is there a problem?" when said teammate yelled some nasty stuff at me as I walked by.
Evidently, he no longer "had a problem" after that incident.
Fast forward to about 3 years ago and I finally found the underlying reason why I have so many feminine looking features and shapes to me.
I had an abdominal cyst removed as it was starting to cause issues (tenderness, pain, swelling, etc....) and the pathology labs came back saying inside the cyst was ovarian tissue!
So, I grew up with standard issue male genitalia and...an ovary, which not only explained why I had such high estrogen on my hormone panel (it was 'on the low end for a woman, and way too high for a man') and why I ended up with fairly soft features, shorter stature than my much taller brother (he's 6'3", I'm 5'6"), wider hips than are usually seen on men, very little body/face hair, a narrower waist—so a more traditionally 'feminine' body shape, why my voice is higher than one would expect for a man (but still considered pretty low for a woman), and why I didn't /don't collect fat in ways similar to what one sees on male bodies.
A lot of my excess weight went to my hips, thighs, butt, and lower abdomen when I was significantly overweight.
I like to joke that I had a WPIB, which is shorthand for 'wrong part in box'.
The high estrogen kind of 'canceled out' a lot of the effects I should have seen from testosterone during puberty, and my testosterone levels are fairly low; I can't say I mind the latter as male pattern baldness runs in my family and my brother started going bald at 17!
My endocrinologist has told me if I ever decide I want to correct that, she's willing to help but—I grew up with a body that had slightly messed up hormone levels and the body is used to that so I'm not too keen on messing with it.
I haven't had my levels re-tested since the cyst removal, but I'd imagine my estrogen levels have slipped a bit unless there's a second ovary still hiding out somewhere inside of me. If there is a second one, it can just stay there and hopefully not die like the one that was removed.
It also explains why I grew breasts during puberty; it's common for men to temporarily grow small breasts during puberty but they usually shrink and go away as testosterone levels ramp up and all of that.
Mine never did, and they never really bothered me too much because I was a chubby teenager and it was socially 'acceptable' for fat men to have moobs. That's what I assumed it was until I lost a good amount of weight in my early 20s and they didn't get any smaller.
I wasn't really bothered by them, though, as I'd always had them, and they made presenting as female when I felt like it to be super easy as I didn't have to do too much more than just put a bra on, especially if my hair was long at the time.
I did, however, purposely put enough weight back on so that they became socially acceptable 'fat guy moobs' again as I was concerned about being teased otherwise (which was unfounded, nobody really noticed, and they weren't that big; maybe a small B cup). I can't say they caused me major anxiety, but they caused a bit as most of what one hears in regards to male breast growth comes in the form of jokes, especially 'fat guy' jokes. So, for years, I just kind of played along with the, "Yep, those are fat guy boobs!" thing.
Around the same time as the cyst removal (2015, when I was 35), I also found out that breast cancer is super common on both sides of my family, and is usually the estrogen sensitive type; given my nearly lifelong hormonal imbalance with high estrogen and the fact that I had actual breasts, I elected to have them removed to lower my chances of developing breast cancer.
That was done on June 30th this year.
From a health perspective, I'm glad they're gone, and the plastic surgeon (and general surgeon) were all great about the whole process. Everything is healing nicely and the plan is to tattoo over it all next year after the scars have all settled.
That's actually how I found this site; when I found out they'd have to do free nipple grafts, I knew that was commonly done in FtM top surgery and wanted to do some reading up on the healing process so I knew what to expect. It was super helpful and, when my bandages came off, I knew exactly what to expect and even made the plastic surgeon laugh by immediately saying, "They look like bacon!"
The upside is, because of the life long high estrogen, I still have relatively feminine looking features and can still pass for female easily if I choose to.
Currently, I'm still kind of like I was as a kid.
If I want to wear makeup, skirts, heels, dresses, I will.
If I want to wear a suit, I will. If I want to wear that suit with a full face of makeup, well, it's going to take me a little longer to get ready to go out.
Mostly, because I'm lazy and work in IT, I live in cargo shorts and t-shirts though and end up looking pretty androgynous if my hair is short.
When it's long, I tend to get read as female more often; it'd be interesting to grow it out again and see if I'm still read that way now that the breasts are gone but, for not, it's just too dang hot to consider growing it out.
When it's not ridiculously, face melting hot out, I frequently wear foundation to even out my skin and haven't had many people notice and even fewer people care. No good reason that only women should be 'allowed' to even their skin tone out with foundation, after all.
I think a lot of it comes from innate confidence that I can thank my parents and family for as they never once made me think there was anything wrong or odd about me for just doing what made me comfortable; that tends to translate pretty well into adult life too. My spouse only knew me as I am now, and takes the, "It's your body, you can do what you want with it" route, even if they don't sometimes understand some of what I do (namely the tattoos).
"I want to." "It's comfortable." "I like it." are the most common answers I give when someone questions why I'm wearing something or have makeup on, and so far—fingers crossed—that's always been enough of an answer even for people who were initially kind of hostile about asking.
"Fair enough" tends to be the response I get in return.
While I might legally have to be one gender, socially I can (and often do) do whatever I'm most comfortable with day to day.
Just as a fun aside, my younger brother is exactly NOT like me, and he grew up in the same home with the same parenting style; he was very clearly only ever male/masculine, typical jock type guy without the typical jerk jock attitude.
