Being born a "proper CIS male"? Ugh!! No way!!! Born CIS female? Absolutly!! It would negated having to miss some experiences, and dealing with a lot of hassles.
Missed experience-wise, I still resent the fact that I never had children, and (no offense is intended to those of us who had children in the biologically male fashion) I found the the thought of fathering children (even as a sperm donor post-op) repulsive, so that was a no-go for me. Adopting children would have been great, but at my age, being single, and with my past history, it's problematic at best to do so. I also hate that I missed prom (nope, I refused to even consider going in guy mode), possibly joining a sorority while in college, etc.
With regards to hassles, there were the 20 lost years of my life - 1978 (when I came out to my parents as a 15 year old seeking help, and was thoroughly rebuffed by them - it became much worse the following year, when they found it the "problem hadn't gone away") to 1998 (when I started to transition - despite not having enough money to see things through to SRS [which didn't matter, because I had become downright suicidal]). Not only did I have to deal with resistance and hostility from those who knew about my situation (and even those who didn't but bullied me because it was obvious that "something was off about me", which is always a magnet for bullies), but there was the distinct lack of resources for help in that time (I had no idea where to turn for help in the upper Midwest - even my "progressive" [it's always been more PC that progressive] alma mater the University of Wisconsin, had zero for transition resources). Throw into the mix running out of money, and taking a huge cut in pay due to corporate downsizing in 2002 (with job prospects being few and far between due to a recession going on at the time), which threw me into a deep depression, and on the verge of a nervous breakdown, due to the fact that my worst fear seemed to be coming to fruition - that I was going to be permanently stalled out as a pre-op, due to being flat broke.
Then throw in that (due to the above circumstances) I wasn't able to have my SRS until late 2003, when I was 40 years old (I had no desire to have romantic relationships with a man as a pre-op). Ask any hetero woman, and they will tell you that it is difficult at best to have romantic relationships when you're 40 or older. There is the common problem that people older than 40 have, of having less social opportunities to meet other people your age (not many 40-plus people go clubbing, and or go to mixers). Single, 40-plus year old guys are all too often either confirmed bachelors, gay, or creeps who are divorcees for damn good reasons. There also seem to be a lot fewer men from my generation (I'm an early Gen Xer), who are willing to have serious relationships with a woman who is a post-op TS (yeah, sooner or later, if you're in a serious long term relationship with the guy, he has a right to know that little tidbit of information IMO), than from the following generations. Also, when you hit middle age, long work hours and a general lack of energy (even if you exercise like I do), really curtail socializing. Yep, it seems that what they say is true - romance is for the young. Most long term relationships with a significant other start when you are younger (20s and 30s age-wise), but as I mentioned earlier, when I was younger (especially when I was in college and had some serious crushes on some of my male classmates), things were a mess for me, with regards to transitioning. To add insult to injury, I was told by my SRS surgeon that I was microphallic, and therefore the surgical results would been a disaster (can you say no depth?) by the standard penile inversion technique, that was the state of the art when I was in college in the 1980s, due to me not even not even having enough tissue to surgically relocate things to the proper anatomical location. In a nutshell, SRS would have more than likely been a No Go for me when I was in college.
Do I regret transitioning, and having SRS - not for a microsecond, EVER. Still, it would have been nice to avoid all of the hassles I had to go through transition-wise, and it would have been nice to have the opportunities a CIS-woman has available to her, available to me.
