I actually found this site from a link in someone else's blog where someone copied his response to me from his Blog.... so I started posting in that thread. Now I guess I should come back and do the intro thing.
My name is currently Dan. I suspect I'll probably continue to go by Dan/Danny(i) after transition. Flutter is actually my World of Warcraft charachter, which has been my ongoing pre-occupation for most of the last 3 years.
I'm 32, I live in Buffalo, NY, and I just recently started to explore gender identity. It started a few months back, in typical me fashion it began with a lot of research, so I've been through Bornstein, My Husband Betty, Middlesex, ton's of websites, lots of psychiatry and webmd type stuff, research on numerous intersex conditions.
I actually just went back to my journal to find the point where I actually first mentioned it, it was november 11th of last year where I admitted to myself and a large chunk of my friends that I need to transition. Wow, I guess it's gone beyond a few months...time flies.
I had bottled this up a long way back, and I was functioning robotically as a man for a long time. In January of '07 I quit smoking, and tried Chantix to reduce the cravings. That part worked, but it also broke apart alot of the walls I had built inside myself, and I spiralled into a deep depression.
Blah blah blah.... 11 months of me being emo is horribly boring. In November, I finally admitted to myself that I am not, have never been, and will never be a Man. I don't think that makes me a woman automatically, it opens the door to new possibilities, discovering who I am, and whether or not one can exist without gender in a gendered world... And exploring my feminine side, who knows, I might try on femininity and find it fits like a glove, and that it's what was missing this entire time.
From posts on these forums, I'm questioning another element of myself now as well. I've believed for a long time that I was on the autism spectrum, mild asperger's most likely, because of my general social akwardness, my constant and consuming obsessions, my inability to understand the nuances of social behavior.. etc....etc..etc.. But coming here has raised more questions then it answered. GID can manifest itself in many of the same mannerisms and indicators as asperger's. I'm not sure if I actually have both any more, I might just have GID, and the walls I built up included the same responses as Aspergers/ADHD. I'm undiagnosed with any of them atm, I didn't see how diagnosis with something on the autism spectrum would provide a tangible benefit to my life, so I never bothered.
Well, I suppose that's me in a nutshell as of this moment.
I told my boss I was having gender issues last week, I have an appointment with a psychiatrist a week from Friday to start going down the path, and we'll see where things go from there.
