Hi,
I guess its time for me to do the obligatory introduction post. I've been coming to this forum for several years reading the posts, but I've only recently registered with the forum. I'm 30 and I've wanted to live as a woman almost as long as I can remember but I've always been too scared to do anything about it. Several years ago I registered with a forum focused on young transsexuals but I was dropped for posting too infrequently. To be honest I was too scared to act on my feelings back then and I still might be too scared to live my life as I want now.
The truth is my desire to live as a woman has started clouding my life and I can think of little else. I can't say that I've always known that I was a woman or that I'm woman trapped in a man's body. I don't know what other women feel like. All I know is how I feel and I've been uncomfortable with my body as long as I can remember. I've been struggling with weight my whole life and when I was in middle school I developed gynecomastia. Even though I was teased by some of the kids I remember wishing they would keep growing. I don't know how to put into words how much I wanted them to continue growing. They stopped a little over an A cup in size, and I haven't gone topless in public since I was 13. I don't wear tight shirts because there is no mistaking them. For a few years in college I was an exercise fanatic and my breasts became less noticeable. They looked like large pecs, but as my weight has yo-yoed over the past eight years they've gone back to looking like breasts.
There's a great movie with Kieran Caulkin, Jeff Goldblum, and Susan Saradon named "Igby Goes Down." In the movie Bill Pullman plays Kieran's dad and he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. Bill has a line where he says "I feel like there is a great weight pressing down upon me." I'm not schizophrenic, but I understand the feeling because that's how I feel about this secret I've been keeping for my whole life. I just need to talk to other people about these feelings because the stress of living is starting to wear me down. I know I should see a shrink but right now I simply can't afford to go. I'm trying to pay off some debts from college and graduate school. I'm hoping that by getting some of my thoughts off my chest here and talking with other people with similar problems to mine I can figure out what to do with my life.
When I was in high school I thought that I was gay because I really didn't fit in with the other boys. The guys would be talking about how much they wanted to have sex with some girl and I'd be thinking how much I loved her hair. I read my sister's Seventeen and Sassy magazines more than she did. From the time I was in elementary school my friends were always the other outcasts. I was definitely one of the freaks and geeks. I'm not afraid of being an outsider, I've been one my whole life. But I am terrified of my family not understanding what I'm feeling. I'm scared that they will and they'll be angry with me for not trusting them enough to tell them how I felt years ago. But most of all I'm scarred of looking like a man in women's clothes.
Last fall I just got sick of seeing myself with a beard and I began having laser treatments to remove my facial hair. It's been a huge relief to see my beard disappear. I really don't have the money but I just couldn't deal with my beard anymore. What's another year of paying off debt?
I used to dress up and wear makeup when I was kid. One of my first memories is my sister and I playing with her Barbie make-up kit. I think I was around five. When I was in middle school I started wearing makeup in private. I stopped wearing make-up when I was around twenty. I was a late bloomer in the facial hair department. I didn't start shaving until I was twenty. That's the reason I stopped wearing makeup. I have a problem with ingrown hairs. Anytime I tried to get a close shave I would develop hair bumps. It was too depressing to see myself in the mirror with stubble and eyeliner.
I don't know why I'm so terrified of talking to my mom about this. She's asked me three times over the past ten years if I was gay, and each time I've dodged the question with the same answer, "Mom, I like breasts." I didn't say that I'd like to have bigger breasts. I didn't say that I'm attracted to women, because I'm not. I love women. I love hanging out with women. I love talking to women. But I'm not in love with women. It took a while to figure this out. The first couple of years of college I tried dating but it never went anywhere. I had struggled with whether or not I was gay since I realized that other boys were noticing girls for different reasons than I did. It took a long time to accept that I was attracted to men and not women. I don't know why that took me so long to accept. I'm not religious so I didn't have any spiritual hang-ups, but still it was hard for me to deal with. Part of problem is that I'm scared that I'm not really transsexual, but just a femme gay guy. I'm still in the closet, but I'm sure that some of friends have figured out that I'm a closet case.
My father died when I was freshmen in college. It's weird but if my mom had died instead of my dad I'd probably have been out of the closet years ago. My mom is religious but my dad was not. The reason I haven't confessed my attraction towards men to my mother is that I'm too much of a coward to deal with her.
My dad was a scientist by training and he pushed both my sister and I into technical careers. He didn't believe in God and neither do I. As far he was concerned human beings were meat machines driven by electrochemical reactions. He never forced my sister and I to believe what he believed, in fact he encouraged us to read religious texts and think about the ideas for ourselves. By the time I graduated high school I'd read the Bible, the Koran, the Tao Te Ching and the teaching of Buddha along with every mythology I could get my hands on. He also expected us to read about science and go into technical fields. To me science makes more sense than theology. If I had told my dad how I felt he would have passed it off as a biological short circuit, no different than my need to wear glasses. The lenses in my eyes aren't shaped properly to focus light on my retina so I wear glasses to correct the error. My brain doesn't like the body it was given so I should take hormones to correct the body. It should be simple that, but it isn't.
I'm sorry to have ranted on so long. I don't expect anyone to have read this whole thing. But I just needed to say something. I'm hoping to figure out if I should live my life as a woman. I need to know if the benefits of transitioning into a woman is worth the costs.
Thanks for listening.
Bree
