Quote from: Lisa_K on June 22, 2018, 01:51:20 AM
Here is where the concept of what this must be like goes off the rails for me because it is just hard to imagine the difficulties of transitioning as an adult already established in life. I don't think I would have been able to do that and don't know how people do? That's got to be incredibly more difficult than anything I've ever been through.
Hey thanks! If we're going to compare to political figures, I guess I'd be Kellyanne Conway (good heavens indeed!). Google tells me we're almost the same height but at 5"7" she's a little taller and we are of similar build. She's 12 years younger but looks older than me so I win! 
Jealous though. I wish my mom was still around and I wish I had half the courage and strength that she did. I lost her at 25 when she was only 48 and one of my biggest disappointments was she never got to meet my husband and she left me with a lot of questions about my childhood and a poor understanding of her perspective what it was like raising a kid as screwed up as I was. Our communication style was argumentative but we were really close. One of the nicest things she tried to do before she died was track down and reconnect me with my biological father that I hadn't seen or heard from for over ten years. He'd last seen me at 13 and you might say I was not quite his cup of tea but that's a whole other story! Would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when she told him he'd had a new daughter for six years he didn't know anything about. 
You're lucky that you got things out of the way at young age. I told my mom when I was 6 that I wished I was a girl (after stating it for the second time in like 2 minutes [because she didn't respond to me]), only to be told to shut up. My sister and I played with her Barbies until I was like 7 or 8, when I was basically told not to do so. My dad was Mr. Macho, forcing my brother and I to have crew cuts (which were not only out of style in the early and mid 70s, but I hated for obvious reasons). I learned early on (in grade school in the early and mid 70s) that if you didn't want grief (like a not very intelligent, and very femme classmate was subjected to), you acted like "one of the guys." Of course I still desperately wanted to be a girl. I also was still having slip ups where the real me showed (it wasn't a nice time when that happened). I started seriously cross dressing at age 12 (my mom told me last year, that despite my efforts to hide that I was doing so, she knew I was cross dressing [I wore her clothes, which fit me better than my sister's clothes did - I also liked them more than my sister's clothes). That, combined with seeing Renee Richards (who in the past 20 or so years has turned out to be a bit of a kook) on TV, made me decide during summer break between 7 & 8th grade in 1977, to do research on changing sex at the local public library (cross dressing didn't do it for me - I did not get turned on by it, I just felt "more right" when I did it, but wasn't enough). Knowing that magazine articles typically contain the most current information, the Readers Guide to Periodic Literature became THE tool for me, to use for finding most of the information - strangely enough, articles about transsexualism were listed in the 'Guide under the heading of "Sex - Determination and Control" (they had no subject headers for Transsexualism until at least the late 80s). Once I found that information during that summer, that voiced to me "yeah!! this is me!!!!", I basically went bonkers trying to find out as much as I could (I remember friends and family asking me why I was spending so much time at the public library).
Once I realized what was going on with me, things became kind of lonely. I kind started to distance myself from people I didn't really know (I had friends, just not a lot of them), so they wouldn't find out about me. I refused to date (yes, I'm a hetero woman, and even knew so back them - I only ever dated one woman for a short time, and only because my best friend at the time [1990] told me that a female bandmate of ours {yes, I'm also a musician} complained to him that I was ignoring her showing interest in me [my friend told me about it, and asked me what my problem was - "was I gay or something?"] so to get him off of my back I dated the female bandmate for a while). I hated having to be butch, and refused to be so, but to avoid harassment, I acted masculine enough (but not enough to hopefully cause emotional distress - though I was still uncomfortable with having to do so), to keep people off of my back. People still knew something was off about me (just not what it was), and walking the emotional/behavioral highwire I was on was difficult at best (I still slipped up once in a while, causing people to wonder why I was acting like a girl), and ended up with a fair amount of people thinking I was a weirdo, or a closeted gay guy. That perception made me a target for bullying and harassment from some people from 7th Grade until 11th Grade.
I was almost caught in 9th grade (late 1978) hiding/trying to keep an article about some Milwaukee area transsexuals I found in a news magazine supplement that was in the Sunday edition of the Milwaukee Journal (which my parents subscribed to) by my mom, so out of desperation I came out to her (hoping she would help me - hey it had worked from one of the transsexuals in the article I just mentioned). It didn't go well at all - in a nutshell, her and dad had a few serious talks with me, stating that "people like that have a lot of problems, and you're not like those people. You're really a boy, you just need to quit thinking about transsexualism, OK?" I said OK, and tried to agree with them (which completely and utterly failed within a month). About 10 months later (in 1979), my parents discovered that I had "not gotten over thinking I was a transsexual", and things got ugly. After the yelling was over with, I was closely monitored (how was I acting, "what's that you're reading - show it to me!!", etc.), until I entered college (in 1982). The time period of 1982, until I started transitioning in late 1998) was a lost period in my life IMO. I couldn't find transitioning help at that left wing school I went to (the so called "progressive" University of Wisconsin [my alma mater IMO, is actually more PC than progressive, and since transsexualism was not PC in the 80s, the UW wanted nothing to do with it]), so out of desperation, since I liked flying and had seen the movie "Top Gun", I tried to get into the military to become a pilot, hoping it would be an "adequate substitute" for transitioning to female. I actually got accepted into floight school, and went to Officers Candidate School (in early 1990). That was a disaster. I thought I could sort of be asexual - wrong!!!! You were expected to be uber butch, which freaked me out and then some. In retrospect it was a good thing that days after I got to OCS, I was medically washed out due to an old injury. I would have gutted things out (I hate quitting), but I probably would have wound up killing myself down the road, over having to be a macho GI Joe (though if I could have been a GI Jane, things would have been OK).
After that fiasco, I realized that do or die, I had to be true to myself, so I started saving my pennies to transition and have SRS. After years of trying to gut things out (I didn't want to wind up broke and stalled out as a permanent pre-op), I was still not close to what I needed financially, but I was at the end of my rope. You didn't want to be around me by the late 90s (as a female coworker told me in 2001 [after I'd went full time] I was either angry, or I was sad, there was nothing else to me behavior-wise), I was getting suicidal enough that I probably wouldn't have been alive much past the year 2000. So, I took a deep breath, got in touch with a Milwaukee area gender program I'd found out about in the early 90s, in Dec. 1998 (I was 35 at the time), and started the first day of really living my life.
Yeah, what can I say, things were kind convoluted for me.
As for the Sarah Huckabee Sunders looks reference - I do kind of look like her doppleganger, but I'm really not a political junkie.
Ellen - who talks too much
I REALLY need to get going to work (it's a good thing I'm salaried, and have semi-flexible work start times).
P.S. - my mom and I were pretty close to each other pre-transition, and after I reconciled with her and dad shortly before my SRS (after being estranged for over 3 years) we became close relationship-wise again. Ditto for my dad to a large extent (he was unhappy to say the least, when he found out in early 1999, that I had "NOT gotten over the little sexual problem, I had back in 1979"). I miss him quite a bit (it was sad to see him dying from cancer [I helped care for him a few days before he died, and he was in agony to say the least]).
Edit , June 22 at 9:33 PM - Ugh!!! Did I ever have to spell correct and clean up my grammar. The way the post read, I looked downright dyslexic!!
