When I was in grad school one of my teachers was fond of using the phrase "That's just the poverty of your imagination" meaning - if you think about it long enough, you will find different answers. Or that, at the very least, a clever person can find more than one way, more than one reason. So while the nature of this has changed much over the years this is just 'this years answer' I guess.
Being TG is an 'all bets are off' kind of deal. In the same way that I make sure at work that the first and only things everyone knows about me is that I'm really, really crazy and really, really good at what I do. It lets you off the hook for a lot of 'reasonable expectations' that other people want to constantly dump on you. It becomes "your preconceived ideas are not going to work, so lets just start without them" deal right off.
So I think that it had been key in allowing me the ability to define my own world to a much higher degree than other people seem to do.
And sex rocks as a ->-bleeped-<-. That's always been important to me. Since the conventional notions are pretty much gone, everything in the background moves forward a bit. Given my ability to almost shape-shift feelings, attitudes, and roles, my partners find more freedom to play and explore.
I don't think it has changed the direction of my life much, but it has shaped the contours of my world, while not ruling or demanding. It informs, suggests, and reacts with my life. All good things of my life seem to shape and suggest, its only the bad things in my life that seek to rule.
