It's actually quite hard to write this, despite lurking for the past few days and seeing how lovely you all are, putting my head above the parapet is quite nerve racking.
I've struggled with my gender identity for a long time really...I really became consciously aware of it when I hit puberty when instead being interested in girls the way a 12 year old male is expected I suddenly found myself with a deep seated need to be a girl. Given that this was nearly 18 years ago I had no way of finding things out and was to embarrassed to even try and start understanding these feelings, let alone vocalise them...I'd always been an introverted and very intense child who preferred their own company and the worlds inside their head (I guess with hind sight I've felt this sense of not being right all my life, but i just dealt with it in other ways), in the end I spent most of my adolescent years rationalising that i was some kind of deviant freak. I was always uncomfortable with masculine roles and found it hard to make male friends (still find it hard to understand men now). I love sci-fi, comics and all sorts of geeky stuff anyway, so was able to hide behind the geek persona and never really reveal myself to anyone.
At uni I finally started to get a handle on things, after joking with friends that I was "secretly a girl" (humour...it's a great tactic to hide what we are), one friend turned round and said that i was actually incredibly feminine but without being effeminate. It wasn't until a past girl friend was discussing the pros and cons of lesbian relationships with a female friend and coming to the conclusion that they were good, but not the same as being with a man, when Amy stated that she had the best of both worlds because she was going out with a woman with a penis that I really understood who I was. I've spent the last 9 years trying to make the fact that I am a woman who is attracted to women, living in a man's body work. Suffice to say the need to be other than what I am has never left me and really it was little more than a fools errand trying to hide from myself.
Fast forward to last Saturday, and I ended up having a slightly teary, quite emotional girly one to one with my house mate Heidi. It kind of came out of nowhere but now I've done it I'm so glad I did, she's been beyond awesome and so understanding, she's even said I can borrow her heels if I want and will ome shopping with me. After all this time it feel amazing to have told someone who I am without hiding it behind self depreciating humour. Right now I feel great that I've taken this first step, though still quite scared at the thought of all the others yet to come. I know it's going to be hard but I know I can't hide from this any more.
Anyway, this is me, sorry for the essay length first post, but it feels good to get this all out of me...can't believe how nervous I was when I started.
Jaime
