Hey everybody, I just found this forum (finally!). The following post will be very long, but there's so much going around in my head I've got to put it all out here. I'll try to organize it so you can skip to the parts that you feel you can most contribute to. The first half is my personal history, the second half are my thoughts on transexualism/->-bleeped-<- (from my perspective as a self- and institutional-trained cognitive psychologist).
As you're reading, I have the following questions:
1) Do you believe that I will be happy as a 100% female? I ask, because I still have confusion about my sexual fantasies vs. daydream fantasies, and how they relate to wanting to be female (you can get the details from my history).
2) Do I believe I'm transgender because of how I was born (i.e. female brain/mind), because of environmental influences (i.e. Internet and TV "allowing me" to be trans), because I'm just freaking out and crazy, or for some other reason? This whole thing is still a complete mindf$&k for me.
3) Is there any "wisdom" you've learned you'd like to share with me? (A lot of people say, "Be yourself", which doesn't specifically apply to me because I have two completely distinct "personas" that I now recognize as existing within me.)
About Me (Present)I'm a 25 year old graduate student in psychology. I presently consider myself MtF. I started seeing a therapist 3 weeks ago via the campus counseling center. I haven't started HRT or done any permanent changes. Career-wise, I focus 100% on schoolwork right now, and I have a lot of wasted leisure time. I'm a year away from graduating, and I have so many career ambitions I just can't decide! I've never been in a long-term relationship with another person, although I have had sex with 4 genetic women (all longer than 1-night stands).
HistoryChildhoodI was born into a Mormon family. I never liked being touched as a child, and I was very moody growing up. People accurately described me as a perfectionist/anal retentive child. My mental development was extremely rapid, and I was operating at a high IQ from a very early age.
At age 4-5, I vividly recall wanting to wear dresses. Putting on dresses and acting like a girl would cause me to become very relaxed, and this would invariably lead to an erection. I didn't want anybody to know that being a girl felt "awesome", as I didn't really trust anybody in my life. I've always had a very poor relationship with my mother - our personalities are a complete clash. I always thought she was unattractive and I hated how she was an under-achiever and was always depressed and on drugs. I liked spending time with my father doing outdoorsy stuff like sports and scouting, but my mother did most of the child-rearing. I never like playing with girls when I was young, as I thought they were boring an unadventurous. My younger sister never really had female friends, and has always been tomboyish.
AdolescenceWhen I was 12, I had been fantasizing a lot about being a girl, so I got up the courage to get some of my younger sister's underwear (they fit me perfectly). To this day, I can't put into words how good it felt to just be wearing panties and a bra. I felt like a completely different person. I would look in the mirror and try to see myself as a girl, but I felt very ashamed of doing it as I still believed in Mormonism at this time. Sometimes I would have dreams that I was a girl, and I would wake up with the dream replaying in my head all day long. I would hold onto that dream feeling, and go through the day in a kind of warm, fuzzy, female fog, trying to make that imaginary feeling of being a girl real (I never happened to crossdress on any of these days).
My collection of clothing grew to incorporate shirts/skirts, and I would have strong fantasies about going to school as a girl. I would often try to be a girl in my spare time (hiding my penis, acting girly, smiling a lot). I wanted to do makeup SO BADLY, but I just couldn't bring myself to risk it.
Around this same time, I began to play with myself anally. It felt really good, like it was just a natural thing that every boy did, and I thought I would just outgrow it and become a man eventually. Sometimes, i just desperately wanted to be a man so I could stop feeling like a girl all the time (it was REALLY hard feeling like a girl around Mormon parents, who believe God assigns your gender/sex).
When I was 16, I had my first orgasm during a bath in the evening (I was just playing around with my penis, like I always did). It felt uncomfortable and weird, and I felt a bit guilty for causing it. However, I soon acclimated to my functional penis, and began integrating it into my crossdressing. Around this time, I started realizing that I wasn't "normal", and I started fantasizing about running away, taking hormones. I started researching transexualism on the Internet and TV, but felt like I just wasn't in a position to do it (after all, I was conditioned to be a "family man"). I rejected Mormonism at 16. I never made a serious attempt to run away.
I started mixing my female and male personality at this time. People have ALWAYS described me as "weird". In a nutshell, I developed an inner logic that said, "Be genuine, be happy, live life in the moment like a free human being." So I'm outgoing, caring, funny, make up a lot of games and stuff but at the same time have low self-esteem, dislike my looks, and often suffer from depression.
Throughout this time, my mother kept trying to hook me on drugs, but I refused to take them. I just wanted to be alone a lot (was never suicidal, often depressed), and I wanted to feel "love" but didn't know how. My depression really sprang from 1) hating my Mormon parents and trying to get away from them a lot (they FORCED me to pray out loud at night, I conformed), 2) being alone, 3) being in a ->-bleeped-<-ty messy house (made me not want to have any friends), and 4) being stressed about school and my future (I felt I was an independent adult at age 16, and wanted to leave the house right then and there but didn't know how).
To deal with my depression, I learned how to dissociate.
Dissociation is the act of "leaving one's body" in order to no longer feel negative emotions or physical pain. Runners will often do this due to extreme pain from lactic acid. I began dissociating from myself at this time, and I have been dissociating almost 24/7 until this year. Not being able to explore my gender identity was a big part of my dissociation, as I desperately wanted to be in a place where I could just be free from all the guilt/shame/pain.
Young AdulthoodI went to college 40 minutes from home. In college, I crossdressed for Halloween and it just felt amazing. My hair was really long and a hot girl curled it up and make me look AWESOME! But I played it off like, "ha ha being a girl sucks." I continued to research being transgender, but I was just mortified at the thought of being a social outcast, so I just started looking at ->-bleeped-<- porn a lot and admiring them from afar. I couldn't believe they were born as men, I just couldn't understand how they did it.
I convinced myself I'd never "pass" (you just had to be born looking female and take hormones early?). So I delved into more masculine activities (paintball, sports), and just drowned myself in schoolwork. I partied a lot too. I had sex with 2 girls in college; it felt good, but it didn't feel "right" (I felt like i was conforming rather doing it of my own free will).
At age 19, I got arrested for a crime I didn't commit, dodged a 10 year prison sentence with a plea bargain, and ended up going to grad school after college. My life was utter HELL for 2 years. During this time, I wasn't able to crossdress, but I would often fantasize about being female.
At 21, I went to grad school. Like most 1st year graduate student, I tried to conform to some kind of neoprofessional model. I cut my medium length hair to standard male length, started wearing polo shirts, etc. I HATED my look, and started growing my hair again. My first 2 years, I had a verbally abusive advisor. My life went to hell AGAIN. I just felt like a zombie person going through the motions with no happiness, no sadness...just a dead person walking around. I got my hands on a pair of panties at one point, and would sometimes gratify myself while wearing them. I had convinced myself that being female was just some stupid sexual fetish, and that there's nothing more to it.
I started playing MMORPGs. I only played female characters. I liked playing the healing types of characters, but I got frustrated and aggressive toward other people. I ended up playing World of Warcraft as a solo player, spending most of my time killing other players with my powerful female characters. (Analyze that one....I still don't understand it yet)
Precursors to Renewed CrossdressingFast forward to the most recent year: Stuck in graduate school for the next 3 years, I stopped playing MMOs and turned to marijuana. I liked the mind-expanding properties it gave me, but hated the fact that it dulled everybody else's mind. I smoked every 2-3 days for a year. I was having a lot of social problems with other people (exaggerated by the "be true to youself" feelings from psychedelics like weed), just really really disliking other people, but at the same time conforming to what they wanted from me (I have always tried to please other people, but get angry when there's no reciprocation or emotional connection).
Sometimes when I would get really messed up on drugs/booze, I would desperately want to be alone. I was paranoid that somebody would find out my secret, so I had to stalk around in the shadows. But when I got to be alone, something CRAZY happened! It was like a switch got flipped in my brain, and that fantasy I had about being female was suddenly real! I actually FELT female. Because I was doped up, it gave me an excuse to feel okay feeling this way. I would usually pleasure myself, and then try to feel female as long as possible, often staying up really late. When the drugs wore off, I just went back to dissociation mode.
I recently discover LSD, and I treated it with great respect. The 2nd time I used it, I got some alone time, my inhibitions went away again and I felt COMPLETELY female for bursts of like 10-20 minutes throughout the trip. I wanted to cry, but I just couldn't bring myself to cry. The "male" side of me was overpowering the female urge to exist as the entire person (i.e. stifling the emotional experience). In other words, more dissociation.
During this era, I learned about "Mystery Method" and "The Game". I tried to seduce women, but I quickly learned that I just didn't care about seducing women. My "friends" liked the fact that I had the balls to approach women so that they could swarm in and get a chance to get laid. I never tried to get sex from any women this way, as I was just extremely turned off by how the social burden was always on me (the guy). I wanted to be "alpha", but at the same time, i didn't care about women enough to be alpha. (Looking back on it, this was my last-ditch effort to grasp onto my heterosexual identity).
I Want to Transition NowFast forward to December 27th of 2008. I was slowly recovering from being mentally beaten to death by graduate school. The roommates (2 grad students) were out of the house for a week over the Christmas break. I bought $650 worth of female sex toys, lingerie, makeup, normal girl clothes, a wig, a corset...LOL, you name it. I had basically prepared to "lay this thing to rest", meaning, I would find out I'm a crossdresser, and then I'd just make plans to live alone and have sex with guys a lot and this would make me happy (yes, I'm sexually frustrated up to this point).
I did my own makeup for the first time (badly), put on all of my stuff, and of course, I got really turned on. I was having a wonderful crossdresser party. I took a hit of LSD, and now I was having a REALLY good time alone in the house by myself. About 2 hours after being dressed this way, I started to actually relax and become really comfortable. (I didn't even KNOW how uncomfortable I was up to this point, part of being a numb-to-the-world guy). And then BAM! I looked in the mirror, and I saw a girl. It's like I was looking into the mirror and seeing ME for the first time since I was like 13 years old. Oh God, Oh crap....I started crying. I threw off the stupid hooker wig, took off the ridiculous corset (I had put on a few lbs. as a guy), and put on more of my normal female clothes. I cried for like 2 more hours. "Oh ->-bleeped-<-!" I say to myself. "I've crossed a line, how the <not allowed> am I supposed to tell my parents! What will everybody think. OH GOD!" "It's like there are 2 different people inside of me, and I've just been ignoring the female part and I can't do it anymore. I JUST CAN"T."
During this time, my eyes just seemed to open up wider, my face became more expressive, my body just naturally moved differently. It felt just like instinct, like I was shaking the rust off of neural circuity that had been there my whole life.
A pattern then ensues over the coming 2 months: I would go back to being a guy and live my normal life, and it would feel like the 8 hours I spent as female were just far too little. It CRUSHED me to have to go back to the "real world". I would go to school, get stressed out, spend 5-6 days as a male, and then I just couldn't handle it anymore. I would seclude myself in my room for like 1-2 days and work on my hair/makeup, talk to the mirror, wear clothing, etc. The sexual arousal subsided over the last 2 months, and now I don't experience erections from being in female clothing. However, I try to BE female (dress out, female voice, makeup) every spare chance I can get. It's hard for me to feel female without makeup, as I have masculine facial features (although they really aren't bad...)
Sometimes I will SNAP and then I'm right back to being female, like opening a book right back to where you were reading. If I'm really stressed or depressed, I'll try for hours and hours and hours to relax, and then eventually I will see myself as female. It's hard, because my room is tiny and I have all this makeup and stuff and it just makes a huge mess. And I have to clear it ALL up EVERY time. Being ME is A HUGE GIGANTIC PAIN IN THE ASS. It's frustrating and sad, and I just want to be a female 100% of the time and I wish I could just magically jump into a machine and come out female. I'm so used to dissociating that I'll be able to make it to June, at which time I can move into my own apartment and dress female 100% of the time at home.
Transgender TheoryHow to Be a GirlBeing a girl is something INSIDE you. That's clear to me. If you don't believe you're female, nobody else will believe you're female. I have no problems acting effeminate, and I'm working on my voice. BEHAVIOR is the most important part of transition, NOT APPEARANCE. So many of us have spent our lives thinking that female = be a hot girl, and a lot of people focus on the external changes without wanting to be FEMALE (which is really just a specific social construct that prescribes behaviors, such as voice and movement). I LIKE being effeminate and submissive. It makes me feel really comfortable and good, and it reduces my stress a lot.
That being said, I have to make my other feelings clear: I WILL NOT transition to full time until I have FFS. I want to start HRT ASAP, so I can have enough time for my facial features to soften before getting FFS. FFS is the most important step for me, and it causes me a lot of anxiety now even though it's at least a year off, probably 1.5 years off. I HATE doctors, because I don't like blindly following authority. I'm strongly consider Dr. Suporn. I will need very minor corrections to my entire face (small bone shaving here and there) and will end up looking very female, as testosterone did not ravage my face as badly as it could have. I have a naturally heart-shaped face with a good side profile, so I anticipate looking very "normal female".
How can somebody who understands the internal part of transitioning be so focused on the external? Because I want to socially integrate as female. Effeminate female-moving males in dresses are cool and people will respect them (Comments like, "Damn, you look good. Don't let anybody change you" are not what I want). I want to integrate 100% into society as a female. A lot of transgender people (just do a cursory search of Youtube, look up Nuclearswan) feel this way. People are stupid and will judge you based on your looks. I don't have to be beautiful, but I can't feel like a female if people don't perceive me as female (I'm hyper-perceptive of other peoples' thoughts, call it female intuition...I was born this way).
Theories of Gender Identity (OR Trying To Understand Being Female Using My Male Mind)If you've done any research on transexualism, you're going to end up with a lot of mush for brains because NOBODY has a coherent approach to the problem.
I have studied cognitive psychology for 8 years as a researcher, so I'd like to make a straight-forward suggestion: Let's focus on what can be objectively established, and work from there. What do we KNOW with a scientific certainty? Only this: some proportion of the population does not behave in ways that are congruent with the male/female dynamic laid out by society. We can look at this from 2 perspectives:
a) these individuals are mentally deficient and they need treatment by a professional psychologists, or
b) being forced into the male/female dynamic makes these individuals uncomfortable, and rather than abdicating their decisions to society, some proportion of the population will take active control of their gender life and assign it as they see fit (male, female, or genderqueer, or whatever you choose). I 100% feel that the former model is WRONG, IMMORAL, AND EVIL. Silence of the Lambs, etc. etc. portrays transpeople as psycho murderers. Psychiatrists reinforce this notion with BS psychoanalysis (see the transkids website,
http://www.tsroadmap.com/info/transkids/ ). To argue that transexualism is "caused" by one thing is to fail to appreciate the fact that causality is multi-directional, and that trans-people have MANY reasons to want to live as a different sex/gender.
So staying in my "assigned" gender or transitioning to a target gender is a CHOICE, right? Yes, I can choose to be male and I can choose to be female, given what modern medical procedures. But can I choose to be happy? Let's look at an example: I can also choose to crap on my floor, or I can choose to have a clean room (LOL, bear with the example). Living in crap will make me unhappy, and no matter how hard I try to like crap, I'm only deluding myself into thinking I like it. I may have to put up with so much crap that I forget what it's like to not live in crap. Sometimes, the crap will bother me so much I just can't stand it anymore, but those feelings will only lead to frustration if I don't know how to clean up the crap. In other words, WE CANNOT change how we feel: it's hard-wired.
Being female makes me feel good. Being female makes me feel sexy, just like being in shape does. I cannot change this about myself - all i can do is repress being female and continue to drown myself in videogames, career, drugs, distractions, meaningless sex with girls I don't care about (I am not attracted to men when I'm male).
So it then becomes a RATIONAL choice for the individual: as an independent and free adult, do you CHOOSE to be female, or do you CHOOSE to be male? The risk of being male is that you'll continue to be unhappy, lonely, etc. You can crossdress from time to time to get some relief from the fact that you can't always be a female, and you might even find an open-minded partner out there. How badly will being male all day long interfere with your happiness? Is it worth it to flip/flop and lead a double life?
The risk of transitioning is that you could end up worse than you currently are. Your career can slide, you could end up with an unsatisfactory appearance, you could suffer from unforeseen emotional problems if you're not really transgender (i.e. you fell in love with the fantasy, but didn't integrate reality into your future projections), and it COSTS A LOT OF MONEY!!!! You have to weight this against the rewards, which are the possibility of being happy, comfortable, content, in love for the first time (you can love others because you feel okay to love yourself).
Something that REALLY REALLY REALLY helps is a process I call "integration". In my head, there's a 10-year old girl and a 25-year old man. Integration is the process by which the girl is exposed to the man's thoughts, feelings, needs, and expectations. In other words, it's simply a maturation process designed to allow my FEMALE side to become mature and rational enough to make decisions for herself. When I "flip" to female mode, I can't have sex all the time, I can't buy whatever clothes and makeup I want, and I'll have to work and support myself as an adult. In addition, I'll have to go through a 2nd puberty, which will be painful and awkward at times. I'll have to figure out HOW TO BE FEMALE from scratch, with the trusty Internet as my guide. To the extent that I can integrate my 2 personas, the more emotional "ammunition" I will have at my exposure to tackle this difficult problem.
Let's take a small problem I'm having and apply the integration model: When I stop being female and spend a week as a male, my thinking becomes muddy. I "over-analyze" everything, I tend to get depressed, anxious, my breathing gets very shallow and I get panicky. I get "stuck" acting in male mode (just like Heath Ledger got "stuck" as the Joker after filming all day). I begin to doubt that I can go through with it, that transitioning will just be too hard, that there's no way I'll pass, that the "female mode" is just some sexual fetish i have. It's all the stuff I told myself for the past 13 years. If I then snap into female mode, look at MYSELF (I only see me as myself when I'm looking at my female self), I can calmly and rationally meet all of these concerns: 1) Yes, you can actually orgasm as a female, and sex is an important biological need that every human should take care of. And you no longer associate female clothing with sexual gratification, so why do you still crossdress? 2) You'll pass just fine. If you're confident in yourself and you work on your appearance, you'll end up more attractive than many genetic women. 3) Happiness takes hard work. The majority of adults are unhappy because they aren't willing to fulfill their dreams, they just coast along in life. This is what YOU did for 25 years, and now you see that coasting won't make you happy.
Spending a lot of time as a female is absolutely critical to working out these issues that come up, because it's the FEMALE that is going to be living as the FEMALE full-time in the future.
Therapists can help, but many of them are trained in cognitive-behavioral methods that are designed to solve depression. They have no idea how to guide people toward HAPPINESS. Finding HAPPINESS is the point of transitioning. If your therapist doesn't have a decent idea of what will and will not make a transgender person happy in the long run, then they are just helping put a bandaid on your depression. Many therapists just challenge your belief that you're transgender. We KNOW FOR A FACT that some % of transgender people who have this adversarial process applied to them will go back in the closet and never be happy. (They're called the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association standards of care).
In a nutshell: when it comes to your own happiness, you'll have to find a way to achieve it, or you'll be damned to a life of unhappiness.
The Act of Self-DeterminationWhy are some people transgender, and other people aren't? Can a person take some test and "know" that they're "transgender"? This is not a question that is meaningful for the individual to ask, because the term "transgender" is a loaded construct. GENDER ITSELF IS A CONSTRUCT FORCED UPON INDIVIDUALS BY SOCIETY. The implication of asking such questions is that the INDIVIDUAL, rather than society, is the cause of a condition. A better question: "Do you believe in the false male/female paradigm?" Those of us who do not have been scorned, damaged, controlled, and beaten by society. We're told that we cannot exist as a 3rd gender, that we must be 1 or the other, and that our genitalia dictate how we must act.
If you're reading this, you're probably one of those people who rebelled.
I believe that self-determination is a cornerstone of being transgender. In the same way that a person will be politically self-determining (ie. you don't believe in either republicans or democrats, that you believe in the Constitution which restricts the size of the government, something both parties refuse to do), an individual can be self-determining about their gender (in the long run). Autonomous, free adults can be self-determining about their own belief systems, regardless of what those belief systems are.
In this sense, "transgender people" (a utilitarian label I use only for clarity and not for meaning) are simply those people who are more conscious of the fact that gender does not define a person, that they are more than a label. In other words, we see that OUR OWN GENES have created secondary sex characteristics so that it's easy for people to classify is for the purposes of reproduction. We choose to disconnect our identities, at some level, from M/F and from out genes, and often try to be the opposite of what we were coerced/forced to become.
After writing this encyclopedia, let me remark that I wouldn't trade my desire to be female for anything. It's probably the reason I'm a unique hyperintellectual person. I had to develop mentally in a way that would help me not only survive, but thrive in a world that would be antagonistic toward me for being myself (a FREE human being).
The end. I hope that somebody out there reads this and this helps them. And if you've got any advice or comments, I'd love to hear them.
P.S. Here's some reflections on the questions I asked at the beginning.
1) Do I believe I'll be happy as a female? To me, the answer is simple (I'm afraid it's a little too simple). If God could wave a magic wand and I could do whatever I wanted, I'd absolutely be female and never look back. Additionally, I feel that my emotional and physical needs will be better taken care of as female. Those two things are what make me want to start on Hormones and get electrolysis right now...
The thing that scares me the most is that I'm making a decision based on my WHOLE life that involves a part of my SEX life. It's a lot like finding the love of your life and moving to a completely different country to be with that person: what if things go wrong and you get stuck in an unknown territory? What if its just lust and not love?
I like to think of the sexual parts of crossdressing in the EXACT SAME way that we think of love between two people: if our brains didn't respond with arousal, people would never connect to have sex and therefore make babies. In the same way, if I never became aroused when wearing female clothing, I would never have discovered my underlying female neurology (thank god for my younger sister and her panties). Also, we have to understand that successful replication is NOT JUST SEX!!! Humans must raise their young to be self-sustaining so they can do the same, and so on and so on. Women have sexual arousal when breastfeeding their babies, etc. etc. Physical pleasure is simply a compass that guides us to the proper behaviors. Fighting how you feel (repression) leads to depression.
2) I believe that I'm transgender because it's self-evident. Trying to find some kind of external explanation is pointless, because we cannot objectively determine "who is transgender". Scientists don't get paid enough to get to the bottom of it. And the pharmaceutical industry just wants to profit from junk science. So science is out. What's left? Philosophy. Again, no accountability from reality there. What I like to do is something the scientists hate: INTROSPECTION. I know that I feel really good when I'm female (my "energy pattern" is warmer, whiter, more stable, and my energy actually "flows" rather than sits bottled up inside my male container). And when I'm male, my underlying desire is to just be female - it's the cure for my depression. I felt guilty for thinking this way, but why? If being female makes me feel less depressed and anxious, it's because there's something RIGHT about being female, for once in my goddamn life.
3) I like my take on the locus of transexualism, and how it's SOCIETY not the label put on the person that is all F&$ED up.
