Hi, This is my first post here... To be honest, I just want a chat and get things off my chest and wasn't quite sure where to go.
I am at terms with my identity... that is not to say I am happy with it, but for the most part I can live with it. I've known I should've been born female from the age of 2... I can remember clearly the exact moment that it dawned on me. I was at playgroup playing cars with another boy and we were kind of arguing because I was playing with the purple and pink car and he just wanted it because he thought all the cars belonged to him. I was a bright kid, still am. I looked across the room for the adult and saw a beautiful girl with her hair tied back, wearing a beautiful dress, and playing with the toys that I wanted to play with... and I just wanted to be just like her and thought it was unfair that I couldn't.
I don't have many memories from when I was 2, so I don't know if I said anything to my parents or grandparents but it was reinforced throughout my childhood that boys were boys and anyone showing any kind of femininity were sissy puffters. So that was that... I spent my entire childhood wishing I could be a girl but had to keep it all hidden because that was what was expected of me.
Once I allowed myself out of the cage, and pretended to go to a football match but instead went to transformations... I was so nervous and terrified that someone would spot me. But I put on a brave face and went in and asked to be transformed for a few hours at an extortionate cost. I was just far too nervous and shy, and deeply paranoid afterwards. As a teenager I would sneak on my mothers and sisters clothes when they were not home. When watching porn with my friends, I was always wishing I was the woman in the scenes and eventually found that it was acceptable with my friends to fantasize over lesbian porn. But really, I didn't care what they were doing, I just wanted to be good looking. Shallow? I guess I am.
Transgender issues were still more or less in the dark. I was aware of them... enough to visit transformations... but it was still before the internet really took off like it is today. One of the things I got from transformations was that even with the professional make up artists, I still looked like a 6'2" well built bloke with huge feet in drag. If I cross dressed on my own, I was careful to avoid mirrors and allowed the fantasy to live in my head for an hour or two. But part of the transformation experience is that you get a photograph of yourself and I didn't like what I saw. It was the nail in the coffin about any ideas of transitioning. I want to be a beautiful woman not a man in drag. As I said this was before the internet and I had no idea about hormones or what plastic surgery can do, but for me, the killer was my feet. If I couldn't reduce my foot size from 11 to 5-6 then transitioning wasn't going to happen. I am shallow. So I learned to live with being who society expects me to be.
Eventually, came MMORPG (online computer gaming). My god, that was a godsend. I could finally let myself out of the cage. Obviously I played a female character but I could interact with other people as a woman and they were none the wiser. It felt great while it lasted. But eventually, teamspeak/ventrillo speech software became requirements to continue playing at the level we were playing at and I lost the magic. To be fair it was very funny because it turned out half the people we thought were men, were women, but I was the only person in the group who everyone assumed was a woman but had the voice of a man. The illusion was shattered, and I think I broke a few hearts that day. A couple of people quit the game and refused to talk to me again calling me lots of nasty names. But it was such a release that I had become addicted to playing the game. Spending hours of my life playing a computer game and expressing my real self through pixels. With the illusion shattered, I began to become bored of the game and eventually quit playing.
In the meanwhile, I had a great girlfriend. I never revealed myself to her but she suspected. She was bisexual and she introduced me to pegging which I loved because it wasn't just a sexual act with her, she would make the effort to treat me as though as I was a woman but she continued to use masculine pronouns that spoiled the illusion. Eventually we split up because she was non-white and was getting a lot of grief from her father about marrying someone of her own ethnicity and to satisfy him, she agreed to date people of her own race and met someone she had a lot more in common with than me. Dated him behind my back and then eventually left me for dry in the middle of Rome. That was that. In fact looking back on my love interests... all of my past girlfriends were bisexual and the thing that attracted me to them was that they treated me like one of the girls and as a man. Most of them left me for women.
But I soon met another woman and I decided this time to be upfront with her before things started getting too serious. After 2 weeks I revealed my history of wanting to be a woman and she was like, 'omg, that makes so much sense... I was wondering why sometimes you were acting so masculine and other times so feminine... it was so confusing' While I was thinking, it is confusing for you? Imagine for me. At first she was great. She bought me make up and feminine clothes... we really explored my feminine side. Eventually, we got married. That is when things changed. Up to now, we had only really experimented with a bit of make up during sex or wearing some nice undergarments, or occasionally wearing a skirt around the flat. But one evening, we decided to go full fem mode with wig and everything. She refused to kiss me, hold me, and afterwards she said that she wasn't a lesbian and she was fine if I dressed in private but from now on she wanted me to be a man. Sex continued until she was pregnant with my daughter and then sex stopped completely... almost 8 years now. The last time we had sex something was said to the effect that I wasn't a real man... but it wasn't just the sex stopping... no more cuddles or kissing. She avoided my touch. I can live without the sex but the lack of love makes things hard. To be honest, I think we are only still married because of my wonderful daughter. She has learning difficulties and abandonment issues, for me and my wife to split would be a disaster for her and that is not a price I am willing to pay. I doubt our marriage will last after my daughter leaves the home. But until that time we will support her.
2 weeks ago I was given my notice, so I am trying to find new work and most of the applications have the equality boxes to fill in. And most of the time, I can unhappily keep myself in the mental cage but when you are faced with those boxes every day, it gets you down. I tick the male, heterosexual boxes because that is how I am living my life... but the reality, is that I should be ticking the woman/transgender, bisexual boxes instead. As a 46 year old, I am looking at 12-15 years before my daughter moves away from us with her own life, I am going to be around 60 years old... perhaps my wife will stay with me, perhaps she will leave... who knows. But I am going to be too old to think about transitioning and I am going to struggle to find a new partner at that age. That boat has sailed. Had I still been in my teens and still a size 5-6 shoe with the information I have now, perhaps, just perhaps, I would've stood up to my family and society and made the change and be free to be who I should be, who I am. But now, it is just simply not worth it. I wouldn't be who I really want to be even if I changed. I suggested to my wife that I try and find a way of having the surgery below but keep taking the male hormones, so that I would at least feel a little bit like me but she wouldn't entertain the idea... and to be honest it was little more than a fantasy.
I am normally not a person for labels... in fact I absolutely detest them... and hate the equality form with a vengeance but when you have to tick those boxes daily or have them wonder why you didn't tick them... it makes you think about what label do people think I am? Would I be transgender? or wouldn't I? Because I decided not to do anything about who I should be in the world. The clues are there for anyone who actually bothers to look closely. My academic work reveals who I am if you read between the lines. My use of they/them/their instead of she/he/his/her etc. My choice of topics, seeking to bring down perceived notions of identity and pull down the barriers and restraints imposed by societal norms. It is amazing how nobody sees ME.
Most of the time I can put up with the person I present to the world. It is just at the moment, I am feeling a bit lonely and down... There are only two people in the world who know the real me, my wife, and a pen pal from my early 20s who stopped writing after I revealed my true self. I just wanted to say, 'hello, this is me, the real me' before I have to put myself back in my cage and continue living the lie so that everyone around me can be happy again.
Thank you for listening... and thank you for allowing me a moment.
