My story is fairly complicated - aren't they all! But I'll try not to make it too gruelling.
Born male, I didn't have as a kid the tools to be a fully-fledged boy. There was nothing physical to that, it was just that when other lads started playing cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians, or even football, other boys seemed to be almost pre-programmed to know how to go about it, and I didn't have a clue. I had other qualities, like being able to reproduce a piece of music I'd only heard once, or being able to write a decent story or essay. Maybe that was already the first sign that I wasn't a mainstream man in the making.
In my teens I felt I was gay and that was that. By my late twenties I knew I was bisexual, and thought that that was that. I was so wrong!
I also had a fascination with wearing so-called 'feminine' clothes, in other words, ones that are normally forbidden to men (I'll leave aside the way women have a much greater choice in this). So, OK, I was a bi male who wore skirts and panythose occasionally.
Pressures of work and other things really forced these issues on to the back burner for years, but in recent times I have made a lot of effort to discover who and what I reallly am.
I knew I wasn't transsexual. I have no sense that I@m in the wrong body or that becoming a woman via surgery and/or hormones or whatever it takes would be any advantage over being a strange sort of 'different' man.
Was I a crossdresser then? Apparently not. I have no desire to pass myself off as a woman, which seems to be an important part of being a crossdresser. I wasn't interested in wigs, high heels or many of the other accoutrements of crossdressing. I dismissed that idea pretty quickly. Incidentally, I am in no way rejecting those who are taking different paths to mine - I have a great deal of time for other transgender people whether they are anything like me or not.
Was I part of the men's fashion freedom movement than? Well, yes, in many ways that is where I was, and still am up to a point. I don't see why there has to be a binary system of clothing as well as a binary gender system.
Someone I met years ago on an anti-sexism course suggested that for some people androgyny was the way to be more what they want to be if they weren't traditional macho men. In my case, this turned out to be right on the nail.
I came across various butch / femme questionnaires that supposedly gave some sort of answer to the puzzle I was in. I may have tried half a dozen different ones over time, and the answer always comes back - "You're an ANDROGYNE! Get over it!" A pure androgyne, plumb in the middle of the scale. All these tests have had different approaches, although I don't know how 'scientific' any of them are, but in any case, they all shout at me what I now know. Androgyne is what I am, and must be what I've always been. It all fits, and now I can relax and enjoy it!
Thanks to the Internet, I can be part of the family, join this forum, talk to other androgynes, and read plenty of background material, so there's never been a better time to make my discoveries.
I don't expect the broad range of people in the street to have any notion of what an androgyne is, and they might look at me and see nothing unusual, which is fine. What do you expect, three heads and a long, scaly tail? Given that it took me several decades to work it out, I don't expect others to cotton on straight away.
Well, no matter. I'll lookforward to talking to some people here. Have agood day.
