Susan's Place Transgender Resources

When I was younger, I don't believe I ever specifically thought:

"I want to be a girl".

My intuition always generally pulled me towards this vague idea of femininity. I assume somehow the conditions in my environment made it salient to me and thus enjoyable. Any issue that arose from it was external. I've never had any strong internalized shame around femininity. It wasn't until my late adolescence that questions of gender and worsening OCD had converged. What was a vaguely enjoyable and secretive thing suddenly became an existential question.

"Do I want to be a girl?"

My answer was ultimately no, after much unnecessary mental self-flagellation and poor health and financial decisions. However, even after having resolved the more debilitating aspects of OCD, my relationship with femininity remained. This told me that my pull to femininity was not just a compulsive thought that arose from anxiety in disorder. There was a genuine need to express my feelings of femininity externally. It wasn't just coping with anxiety. So the question became:

"In order to resolve the question of gender, to what extent should I inhabit femininity?"

This question plagued me for a long time until now because this is a question without an answer. In a largely intuitive and open-ended domain as gender identity and expression, in my personal experience, there are no concrete answers. There is no correct 1:1 solution to this equation. There is no "eureka!" moment for me. It is the constant drive to achieve the resolution of this particular thought that will only increase its importance and keep it alive.

So should I suppress femininity, never engage with it and live a half-lived life? Not quite.

If it is clear that I have this desire to express my feelings in a way that is authentic and that authenticity happens to be feminine, I should express it. Ironically, the suppression of desires, thoughts and questions only makes them more important. I think the healthier way to do this in my own case is to experiment and express myself in such a way that doesn't allow distressing thoughts to proliferate. To make it so that the question doesn't need to be asked in the first place by making it less important.

In my previous post, I discussed a turtleneck that I purchased and really enjoyed wearing. It simply felt right. It's difficult to explain explicitly, but intuitively I felt comfortable; I was having a good time. I think this is a far more healthier way of exploration and expression as opposed to how I approached it in the past. In the past, I was driven by urgency and anxiety in that I must seek resolution of these thoughts. It didn't feel good at all and quite frankly, it wasn't really me.

I think being able to parse through healthy and unhealthy expression and exploration is very important for those who suffer from disordered anxiety. I think the key lies in your intuition and if such exploration and expression feels more grounded, sustainable and non-urgent over time. I don't think in my case, the goal of any of this should be to finally get the answer I've been searching for all along. The one thing that will put this question to bed and give me the peace I've been searching for all along; the final epiphany. I don't think I should be experimenting to eliminate the question of femininity, but rather to expand my lived experience and find out what I can be. From there, I find what is comfortable and live without a sense of repression.

It's here that I compare my experience with those of cisgender people. I think the fundamental difference between them and I in my case is that they are less compelled to chase the question of gender to begin with. The question itself is simply just not as important for them as it is in my own head. I think the reframing of my experience is the step in the right direction in further deemphasizing gender. Not to suppress, but integrate it more naturally into my lived experience just like cisgender people intuitively do.

I always told myself that I'd know my transition would be complete the day I stopped thinking about it and I think by more cleanly parsing what is natural and fun and what is urgent and anxious is a step towards making the question of gender less important.

I think instead of asking "the question", which only results in more chasing, I think the more healthier way to approach things in my case is to ask:

"What feels like a workable way to live?"

If in pursuit of this, the certainty seeking fades just like the rest of my OCD habits have, that's great. If not, I'm okay with that too. I think my life can be great even with that. Whatever is comfortable for me and allows me to live as me whether that entails transition of any kind or not is the ideal for me.

As for the exact details of what that entails, I think I'll need to buy more turtlenecks to find out.

If I were to summarize this, I'd say that by reframing my experience of gender, I remove the conditions that treat my lived experience of gender as a problem to be solved. It becomes less important and thus less of a cognitive load that can appear in my mind. This allows me to be more in congruence with what I'd call the base level of lived experience most people feel instead of unnecessary reflection and metacognition that pulls me out of the present. A more fun life I'd say.

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These are all of course my own interpretations of my own lived experience. I try not to generalize. I'm curious to hear if any of this resonates with you! :)

@blueberry pastry you're post resonates sooo much with me. I felt the same feelings. The draw towards femininity is something I felt early in my teenage years, and couldn't figure out why, and was ashamed of it. It was something I suppressed until it came out one night at work. Once I embraced those feelings, I felt so much happier.

I can certainly relate. Although I did not have a conscious lifelong question or even desire toward femininity, I realized while in therapy that it was there. In hindsight, I can now see how it affected my thinking and behavior.

That put me in a similar situation. I thought that if this is who I am, then I must pursue it and be myself. How that looks to anyone outside my brain is irrelevant because no one lives my life for me. My decision took two years of therapy to make.

When I started HRT, my mind was made up. This is who I am. So be it.

Thank you for sharing this.

I want to start by saying something about what you're actually describing here, because I think it's more significant than you might realize.

You came to femininity naturally. It wasn't forced, it wasn't shameful, it wasn't something you had to talk yourself into. It was just there — a pull, an intuition, something that felt like yours. And then your OCD got hold of it and did what OCD does: it took something that was simply part of you and turned it into an emergency. Suddenly it wasn't enough to just feel it. You had to explain it, categorize it, resolve it. And the harder you chased that resolution, the more it hurt.

That's what I want you to sit with for a moment, because I think it matters. The femininity never caused you pain. The interrogation of it did. Those are not the same thing, and the fact that you've learned to tell the difference puts you ahead of where a lot of people ever get.

I've been running this community for over 30 years now, and I've watched a lot of people stand where you're standing. Some transitioned fully. Some found a place somewhere in between. Some found that expression without transition was what they needed. The ones who found peace — regardless of where they landed — had something in common: they stopped demanding that their identity justify itself before they'd let themselves live in it. That's exactly what you're describing.

Your turtleneck moment is more important than you're giving it credit for. You didn't buy it to prove something. You didn't buy it to test a hypothesis. You bought it, put it on, and something quiet inside you said "yes." No crisis, no analysis, no spiraling — just a person wearing something that felt right. That's not a small thing. That's what authentic self-knowledge actually feels like. It's not the thunderclap people expect. It's the absence of friction.

Here's what I want to say about the question you've been carrying — "Do I want to be a girl?" That question, framed that way, is almost designed to be unanswerable for someone with OCD. It demands binary certainty about something that doesn't operate in binaries. You figured that out. You stopped asking a question that couldn't be answered and started asking one that could actually be lived: "What feels workable? What feels like me?" That's not giving up on the question. That's outgrowing it.

The comparison you drew with cisgender people is sharper than you might think. Most cis people don't experience gender as a question because it was never made into one for them. They just live in it. What you're doing — this deliberate, conscious work of letting gender become something you inhabit rather than something you solve — is building for yourself what they got by default. That takes more courage and more self-awareness than most people will ever need to summon.

I also want to acknowledge something you said that I don't want to get lost: you said you're okay even if the certainty-seeking never fully fades. That's not resignation. That's maturity. You're telling yourself that your life can be full and good and yours even with some unresolved questions in the background. Most people spend their whole lives waiting for the uncertainty to clear before they start living. You've decided not to wait. That's a profound choice.

So keep going. Keep buying turtlenecks. Keep noticing what feels right without demanding that it explain itself. You don't owe anyone — including yourself — a tidy narrative. What you owe yourself is the life that fits.

@blueberry pastry thank you for posting this.

While I did have some sort of eureka moment, like Alana Ashleigh it suddenly happened at work a month ago, the clues were always there but buried.

I have lots of questions now and I have no clue what I am or where I am going but I have also realized that none of that actually matters to me. Why? because for me that fact that I know what the cause of all the uncomfortable feelings and shame is, I don't have to hide any more. And that has been life changing.

Just last Monday I was in the car going to my regular long term support group and I was suddenly aware that I was singing. I thought to myself "When did that happen". I was spontaneously singing which hasn't happened for about 20 years.
FYI it was the Neil Sedaka version of Amarillo, he wrote it for Tony Christie. I was very sad at his passing last month.

I don't know if I need to become more feminine or if I can live with it as I am but what I do know is that I am a lot happier than I have been for a very very long time.