For lack of a better way to begin: hi!
I'm 28, and genetically male. What I am otherwise has been an issue since I was about 12, I guess. So the better part of my life has been plagued by being, as my username suggests, somehow non-congruent with the rest of the world. I'm trying not to beat around the bush, but as a lit major, aspiring writer, and confused human who is more than a little unnerved by the psychomachia being constantly waged inside, I can't promise not to hare off into tl;dr territory. Sorry.
My da (the title stands, as that's where the Y chromosome came from) was transgender, and it wreaked significant havoc in the lives of all of my family members. He struggled with prejudice, alcoholism and a divorce with my mum, who (now has? had then?) grew up in a very traditional family and despite being a lovely person, wasn't (isn't) always the most open-minded lady out there. I woke up on a Saturday morning once, to watch cartoons, and heard someone cooking. Not to be denied tasty om noms to eat while enjoying classic cartoons like Thundercats, I quickly scurried into the kitchen and came upon me da cooking some triangular hash browns in heels. Now, the prospect of imminent foodstuffs far outweighed any other response I might have considered, so I was quite confused when I was groused at and told to vacate, which I did rather sheepishly. It was never discussed again, other than my mother indirectly condemning that sort of "aberrant" behavior. There were apparently affairs involved somehow, and fiscal irresponsibility, which undoubtedly made the trans/CD aspect stand out more and the whole mess sear its way into her memory.
My own first CD experience was oddly subtle, just waltzing (not in the literal sense) about in some flat 'church shoes' when I was perhaps 10 or 11. I was too young for it to be sexual, it just felt... strange, in a very good way. My family was absent, so there was no risk of being caught. I was so caught up in this new feeling, though, that disaster struck: my dog scared my sister's rat literally to death. I couldn't very well tell my family why, and it didn't occur to me to confide in my dad. I cried then, and only really now, writing this, do I understand why I cried so hard and why after that day I did not shed another tear for over a decade.
Once puberty hit, years of reading fantasy and science fiction novels caught up to me. I wanted to be a good guy, but being small and not particularly muscled, I was definitely not in the running for alpha male. Also, life being what it was, other males were cruel to me and even my own dad had severe anger problems. So not only did women seem more attractive, but more "good" or nicer at least in my perception. I know this seems peurile, but well, to be blunt it was. Teachers, people at church, my sister's friends and the female characters in books like Anne McAffrey's Dragonriders of Pern--good models to base my perception of the feminine on, I should think. So I started to dress up, the melange of the titillation of the forbidden and being able to, at least temporarily, detach from the harsh demands of the male gender and feel comfortable. But years of hearing how bad people who did that were did take their toll.
As I got older and started high school, the long smoldering hormones took off of their own volition. My family was divorced, and I lived with my Dad and stepmother and two stepbrothers. My stepmother was both not evil (although her brand of cooking was healthier and therefore less acceptable to my teenage palette!) and more girly than my mother. Which meant there were things like stockings and heels around, and dresses which fit me properly. Cross dressing became more a part of my life even if it was hidden. It was an intensely sexual thing, and once I masturbated I would try to put everything back where it had been and always feared being discovered. Why I should feel this way when I knew my dad CD'd as well I don't actually know.
At one point during the peak of the Columbine High School hysteria, I was targeted as a "malcontent" (no, I did not wear or even own a trench coat, black or any other color) and thrown in a mental institution illegally for awhile. I did get out, and tested out of high school. Life fell apart and my depression, which my poor mother had been advocating treatment for (I was adamant about not taking pills) got worse and worse. Eventually my family moved again and I started to think that I was somehow corrupted and dirty and wrong for doing what I had been doing, so even though the urge was strong enough that I couldn't resist it, I would punish myself. I still have scars from then. Amazing what a knife and some lemon juice can do I guess.
I met a girl who was amazingly wonderful--it was literally love at first sight, bizarrely. A relationship was a first for us both, there were both good times and bad but the good vastly outweighed the bad. I sometimes slept at her house secretly, and sometimes after she had gone to school borrowed her clothes. I felt horrible--I thought being with a real girl would cure me. I confessed my perversion to her and she did not care, a message which penetrated thoroughly only years later after my black depression and reliance on her destroyed the relationship. After that, I stopped for awhile. Joined the Army, did a lot of manly-man things. People don't pick on me now, and if they did I have every confidence I could hand them their head on a platter and then go for drinks. When I was in Germany, I met a girl through a mutual friend in the states, and we talked online a lot.
Finally I went on leave, after being away from home for almost 3 years. My (female) dad had finally overcome her alcoholism, anger issues, was on good meds, had started HRT and was openly living as a woman. I was really proud of the courage it took to accomplish all that. The girl I'd chatted with and I met in person that night and really hit it off. We watched the second Lord of the Rings movie with my friends and went home, had a lovely night together, and I passed out with massive jet lag. I woke up woozily that night. Someone had been trying to wake me up, I realized. Something was wrong. Shannon had had a heart attack and had been taken to the hospital. I drove there, stone faced with a leaden foot, ready to yell at her for eating such rich food.
I never got the chance to scold, or to tell her how much I loved her and was proud of the terrible times she'd gone through. She was dead, and the best the doctors could offer was that it had been quick. I walked into a darkened room with my stepmother and the now-soulless form which had only hours before been my parent. I called the Red Cross, helped plan the funeral, delivered what I hope was a stirring eulogy (certainly nobody denigrated it) and wrote the obituary. Ready to fly back to Germany, I packed my bags and forced my emotions to a halt as I realized I had to leave my girl and my family--and then there was a thunk from the shower. My parents got there before me, being closer, but neither had the main strength to lift my blue, shuddering sister from the shower stall. I powered them out of the way and scooped my sis up, performed first aid, and yelled blistering parade ground oaths at anyone in the vicinity to call 911.
I missed my flight. My unit thought I'd deserted. They openly told me so when I got back. My sister's first seizure, the first of many. That was Christmas 2003. Then I deployed to Iraq. I was fine, but for some reason my hands started to shake. I thought nothing of it and did my job, until I was cajoled into going into sick call for it by a concerned friend. (No soldier wants to be weak and go on sick call, and nobody would ever tell someone to unless they thought it was serious.) Some antianxiety meds later, I was ok. I still take the stuff, oddly enough. But that year changed me. I don't really want to talk about it, not right now at least, but when I got back I started dressing up again and it got to a point where I didn't enjoy sex much without it. PTSD smashed my life into tiny pieces--fast forward again.
So now, in the present, I'm a lot more jaded, but finally starting to come to understand that while I am ok with being male, I would also be ok with being female, and I just feel a lot more comfortable dressed as a girl. I don't really understand why, and after 17 or so years of paralyzed terror, I'm realizing that there ARE other people out there who feel, if not like I do, at least similarly enough that they might understand. As I get healthier mentally, CD becomes a lot less about sex than about comfort. If it helps sex it's because I like how it feels, both literally and figuratively in the sense that the constraints of being male drop away a little and I feel like I don't have to stuff my square-peg self into a round hole.
Life isn't bad, but increasingly I find myself wanting to be, or at least appear to be, a girl. While I do still sometimes dress up for sexual reasons, it's how I feel after the hormones calm down that I am most concerned with. As the shame and guilt lessens, I feel more like it's just how I'd like to be and less like it's a costume. The whole feeling of tightness and urgency that seems to characterize male sexuality just isn't in line with how the rest of my personality and brain operates and I'm not really sure what to do about it. It just seems... incongruous. You know?
So that's where I am. Thanks for listening, only one person in the world other than you guys has ever heard any of this. Cheers.
Edit: P.S. I have perused all of the rules posts, to save you some trouble!
