That's poignant, Michelle, and I relate in some ways. I was born at the tail end of the post-WWII baby boomer generation, grew up in coal mine and steel mill country where anyone the least bit different was ridiculed, harassed, and frequently beaten, all with the acceptance of parents and teachers so long as no bones were broken. After all, it would "make a man" out of you, right? You learn to hide this, then suppress it, believing all the crap you're given about how anyone who thinks these thoughts is a pervert, a monster, an "abomination" before God... and so quite naturally you try to be who everyone else expects you to be. But you fail and each time you have a difficult gender dysphoria episode, it becomes harder to shove it back under a rock. I used distractions, throwing myself into the military, then into college, into my children's lives and their activities. I counted and at one point I spent 8 years involved with youth sports, 28 out of 30 days a month. I had little time for my gender dysphoria to rear its head and when it did I had an excuse - "My kids need me."

After my kids graduated and moved on with their lives, it became increasingly harder to fight myself. Then in 2010 I started yet another dysphoria episode and I couldn't shake it. I went steadily downhill until by January 2012 I was asking myself why was I even alive, to what purpose, and did I even care? I wasn't yet prepared to harm myself but having those thoughts scared me so I finally, after all these years, sought out a therapist. And the rest, as they say, is herstory. 🙂

I thought that it was a figment of my imagination, with a life of it's own.  It started in dreams, I would find myself talking to this man "Jack".  He was perfect, or at least I thought that was what my brain was trying to tell me "this is what you should look for in a man."  As time went on and I told my best friend, we played the whole "multiple personality" game for a while, switching between "me" and "Jack" even though I had admitted to myself in no uncertain terms that, deep down, he was just me.  However I didn't realize how true that was, just in a different context.

Over about the course of a year "Jack" had taken over more and more to the point where it had been months since I'd "switched" between him and "me".  It was actually my friend (by this point my girlfriend) who suggested that maybe I wasn't crazy, maybe I was just trans.  Everything fell into place after that.  I had always been a "tomboy", more male friends than female friends, I actually lamented over the fact that I was always "one of the guys" and that no one seemed attracted to me.  I remember briefly thinking I might be bi, as I still found men attractive (and still do lol) yet I was more interested in girls.  Looking back farther I remember wishing on stars, even trying to pray that I would wake up as a boy the next morning (this was around first grade). 

Now, looking back; I remember myself in high school almost like a different person, like a friend or a sibling who's gone now.  I honestly can't remember what it was like to be that shy, awkward girl; struggling through everyday social situations, and eventually spending almost the whole of 11th grade in voluntary silence. 

I suppose that it all came down to the first words I said that night when my girlfriend suggested it to me:  "That explains a lot..."

I'm still trying.

i used to study my face in the mirror and hate every unfeminine trait that i found. like the cleft in my chin
since i couldn't want to look manly if i were a cis woman

(Trigger alert: pregnancy etc.)

I got married to a straight man, gave birth to two children and breastfed them for a total of four years. All the while I was desperately hoping that doing each of these things would finally make me feel like a woman so I could just feel 'normal'.

The fact that I am attracted to men was also confusing; it took me a while to figure out that gender and sexuality are separate.

I also tried using make-up and wearing women's clothes whilst at work (although I always felt uncomfortable due to my dysphoria with my chest & hips); growing my hair long (not so bad because I like guys with long hair); and trying to fit into the role of wife and mother as expected of me by society - but those terms have always seemed very jarring as they don't fit me.

So I gave up on desperately trying to pretend I'm a woman and decided to be true to myself. And I have learned from experience that if doing stereotypically female things such as pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding doesn't make you feel like a woman, nothing will. And nothing ever did.

Rotton....exactly the same for me. Where are you now in terms of fighting it?

Quote from: japple on October 11, 2012, 01:53:44 AM
Rotton....exactly the same for me. Where are you now in terms of fighting it?

Oh.. It would mean creating two new threads, xD:


Whad did you do to accept you were trans?

How did you struggle to hide your trans status from people until it was the "right moment"


Starting the general therapy made me more aware of my other issues, who I wanted to be (regardless of gender) and what would improve my life by changing my presentation to others and myself (I discovered that I presented as an irascible monster acting like a insensible caveman because I was afraid of people knowing my real "softy" shelf).

The previous week I had a lifechanging experience (kind of) where I questioned my current situation and my future. Accepting that I wanted to change my life made easier to counter the GID fears, even if I can't make a true transition in all aspects.


Now the problem is that I still need to build more confidence, specially to face my family, which I still carry like a ball and chain. They are the only ones I keep acting though around, but they also are the cruellest ones. I have less problems in being accepted by the outside world and my workplace than at home. Luckily, now I have a chance of leaving the home, which was my biggest chain leading to denial. I keep saying that if I had been living on my own earlier, I'd have done something earlier instead of just waiting to break down.

I hid it all my life because I was afraid of being sent to psychologists, being treated as a failure, "straightened".... My father said "If it was true we would have seen "something". The real truth is that they don't know me at all. Can't they see that I never shared I single thought or emotion with them or the rest of the world for years? I thought "This is wrong, I must avoid thinking I want to be female, nobody can know this, other kids will beat me down even more than now. I am an only an ugly monster with delusions". Although the more I check my past, the earlier the thoughts appear.

It took me a long time to gather up the bravery to post this because it can be interpreted badly by some, perhaps wishy-washy.

To start, I constantly was reminded how attractive people thought I was as a male.  They would drone on and on about it being a waste, predominantly female friends, losing my toned body and specific anatomy.  It sounds like I am tooting my horn but it was really restrictive and agonizing process.  Like I was being warned not to go through with it or I'd destroy my future.  I'd think, "If I take the steps I want to become female will I be happy being a (possibly) not-so-cute girl and am I going to be fine with it being this way?"  Incredibly vain as it is, it was a really tough to work through.  Despite a childhood of gender variance and self-abuse, it still hadn't sunken in for me clearly.  Despite visiting a gender specialist regularly, not even then!  Yet I knew that I had the feeling that my gender wasn't congruent with my physical body.

Basically, I tried my best to convince myself that I was and would be far more attractive and successful and desirable as a male than if I were to be a female.  Incredibly.  Freakin'.  Vain.  Young people, sigh.

This went on and off through the years, resulting in stretches of girlmode and boymode, until I found some sort of safe and temporary in-between.  Stagnant I sat like this for what seemed like eons before I finally broke down and basically said, "To hell with it.  The worst mistake anyone can make is being too afraid to make one."  I stopped caring and feeling scared about possibly not looking passably female and just pushed forward.  And that's worked for me then and is working for me now.  Some days I dress/present as feminine female, others as a boyish tomboy (been asked if I was a lesbian before, gah!)  I really wish I could explain this properly, but I am not exactly clever.

On an odd and random note, my variance has had the side effect of me becoming almost exclusively attracted to other transfolk.  Male, female, or any combination.  I think there is a label for this, but I really like to avoid them because you can't sum a person up with restrictive little categories.  To me I just feel more attached and contiguous with people that share this similar struggle, relate to them more, and appreciate them more.  That isn't to say I think less of any cisgendered person!

Being comfortable in my own skin has been so very, very hard to attain and it's something that I still work on daily.

Bradley, it is not unusual to be attracted to someone who can understand you.

i knew from being young that i felt odd but i was a shy kid and from a family that just didnt talk abut such things so i became andro type teenager and avoiding any situation that demanded me to be the alpha male. i decided i must have been gay as i had a desire for the male form but that was almost right as i accepted to my self in the last couple of years that the feelings were as a woman wants a man. from being a teenager through my life i tried always to settle as a male. got tattoos.all the stuff said on here but i have realized that all the time i was spending more time trying not to slip out as a female and play act being a male. ive never had a girlfriend or been married and that makes people suspicious. untill the internet came on the scene i didnt have the real opportunities to explore my feelings with any real effort and by then i had got into a cycle of bury head in work, get depressed, no real direction in life really hiding away. i now know that that feeling of inner peace and acceptance was missing but i didnt know why.its amazing how u can drift through life knowing u arnt right but not really doing anything about it. when the internet opened up the accessibility to things i opened up my experiences expecting i was just a closet gay to be honest. well over the past 5/7 years i have realized that im not gay im transgender. i dont want to be a man and have a man, after a while i realized that i was letting my female side take over to allow me to express my feminine desires and have a man as a woman. even through those times i kept deigning it was anything more than some sort of sexual thrill i just couldnt accept it. i would be ok with it for weeks then suddenly abandon it completely when it scared the hell out of me. one trans woman i talked to said it does that but if its in you it always comes back and how right she was. funny as well a gay guy i know told me he could sense i wasnt "gay" and some others had noticed it by the way i acted.i slept  with guys but some did joke are u sure ur not a woman the way u crave a man. anyway ive denighed it too long it nearly killed me and had  made me a unstable person. im slowly learning how have confidence in who i am and not hiding it anymore. maybe ive had a hint of the inner calmness that i think has always been missing. i know id rather have a female gender than a male the male bits dont do it for me and i have tried to accept them.

I never tried to convince myself that I wasn't trans, because I always knew that I would be much happier as female and....that was that. But I did things to convince other people that I was a "normal male." Let's see:

- at 13 I covered my walls with nudie posters (little did my friends & family know that I actually wanted to BE those girls, not screw them lol)

- Wore a baseball hat (I thought I looked very tough with it on)

- Listened to hardcore punk rock

- Spoke disparagingly of gay people when I was a kid, although other kids were speaking disparagingly of ME, percieving me as gay.

I just wanted to be accepted so much, and for the harrassment and bullying to stop. But I always knew that I felt female and accepted that about myself.

Quote from: Zoey on October 30, 2012, 06:56:58 AM

- at 13 I covered my walls with nudie posters (little did my friends & family know that I actually wanted to BE those girls, not screw them lol)

Oh yeah, THe Pamela Anderson poster... I ended doing it because it was "customary". When I visited somebody's home they places were filled with al sort of hot posters... I never had that interest, I'd stick with videogame or cool cars posters.

I had posters of male movie stars & pop stars all over my bedroom walls, which helped keep me stealth because it's hardly unusual for a teenage girl to have posters of cute guys. George Michael featured quite heavily, and I was even more interested in him after he came out.

Of course, that's because I'm actually a gay transguy - but my parents didn't know that at the time! 😉

I guess my things were for myself is that I would deny doing anything feminine or reject any interest I would have in such things. I was already socially embarrassed, and I was in fear of any kind of action that would look feminine or "girly". Ranging from picking the female trainer in Pokemon to just using a purple piece of construction paper for a class project. I would reject talking to other people, especially other girls due to my own fear of society. I felt the same way out of society, when I was in my home I would try to hide the subject of girlish interests.

Eventually I came out to start experimenting with stuff when I moved to a new area where there were other feminine guys there, something my old school never had. It was more accepting there to do all of the "strange" stuff, so I decided that I would be safe if I tried some things out, and over the summer of 2011, I had started experimenting with all sorts of things from "crossdressing" to identifying myself as a girl on internet forums. I thought it ->-bleeped-<- at the time was as fake, and just considered "drag" at the time, so I felt silly doing it. I however learned the terms I needed to know in Febuary of 2012, and I was able to understand myself so much better.....even if I'm still on that journey to figure out who I am today.

i'm gonna be honest here. Being trans scared me like nothing else in my life, i think feeling like i was an incomplete person freaked me out. i denied it for probably about 5 years. i tried really hard to be a femme lesbian for a long time. lots of sex and drugs. i came out about a year and a half ago and it was the hardest, best decision of my life.

Tristan - I am still scared sh*$less.

I tried out for most of the sports in High School but flopped at all of them.
Got married and had two sons, ended in divorce after 8 years.
Got a Norton motorcycle and rode extensively.
Played drums in Rock bands and even in a Heavy Metal Punk band.
Got religion. Prayed to God to take it away.
Read the Bible, led Bible study groups.
Got married again. Another son.
Took on a career in a field that is still 98% male dominated - HVAC Service.
Became obsessed with fishing. Took up fly fishing for trout.
Took up saltwater fishing from a kayak and competed in tournaments.

I still do some of these things but when I finally slowed down recently I remembered that I always felt like I was female. Always loved the female body and the clothes that the girls could wear.

Got into bad relationships with damaged people, fell madly in love with a violent shoplifting alcoholic and lived with her for 3 years.I only loved 2 women and Claire was both of them!

Married a few times, drank a lot, had masculine jobs. I failed at it for the most part, I was pretty much broken by the time I was thirty, had to spend some time in the hospital after some self injury and then just sort of checked out of mainstream life for about 10 years before I decided I had nothing to lose anymore so I may as well give transition a shot. It couldn't be any worse than the hell I was already in. Luckily, it turned out to be the best decision I made, a shame I didn't do it decades earlier.

You name it I've tried it. I still do to this day. I'm emotionally killing myself with it.

I was diagnosed as low t and actually took testosterone cyponate for a year because I wasnt male enough. I cry to think about it. I damaged my perfectly fine androgous bod with because of listening to someone elses else's perception of who I should be.

Listen to yourself.