before srs, any time i get romantically involved with somebody in any way (ie. even passing snogs are included), i will take them aside before any of that kind of thing occurs, right from the start, and gently find out, away from earshot of others, if they have a problem with the way i am. even if it's maybe obvious, i think it's still worth making a point of, because otherwise, in one important way, you are lying to them if you're inticing them romantically and there's a chance they're assuming that you've got the genital arrangement you don't have.
after srs, i am a woman. i don't care if my childhood memories or automatically-dropped "hints" are atypical or not. so are lots of other womens'. if they got called a man, they'd slap you in the face, and so would i (well, verbally, anyway). if the subjects of life experience do come up in casual conversation, then i'm not going to start making up lies, or awkwardly avoiding the truth either. i'll just casually say what used to be what. if my friends can't deal with that then that's their problem and they can get over it or get lost.
on the names form, yeah, i'd have to put my old name down. i'd treat it as no big deal, just like it should be treated. luckily for me, though, with my previous name being "james", i can put "jamie" and get away with it without anyone having any reason to call me a liar. after all, that's what my mum called me.
this is awkward for sure, and i could fully understand somebody with a less fortunate starter name considering different. not that my starter name is particularly fortunate; it's just fortunate enough.
after srs, i won't consider myself transgendered in any way, and i will no longer be part of that community. not unless i become a cross-dresser or something; but either way, i will no longer be part of the transsexual community. but i'll still be bisexual, whatever, so i'll probably continue to frequent whatever LGBT group i might frequent leading up to the surge.
of course i would help other people out going through the things i would've gone through back then, but only if such advice-giving cropped up. i would not be embarrassed by it but i would not volunteer the information, not even as an interesting thing to talk about with friends. after i'm all well and good, i want to leave all this behind, just like some overlong bad dream.
people will probably "clock" me because of the size of my feet, whatever "stage" i'm at. but then they'll just learn that some women have unusually big feet. and that's not a lie, not even by the wide (and proper) definition of the word that i use = "a deliberate attempt at deception". it's no deception, it's no excuse - it's true.
to say i was a woman who used to be a man is the thing that would be a lie, whether you talk about gender in terms of genital construction, brain sex, or whatever. because with any of those definitions, i'm not "really a man", which is what stating "i used to be a man" would mean to vastly most people. and that's not twisting meanings either, because whatever anyone says in any situation, it's not what you say that counts, but what it means to those listening. where the twisting meanings occur is with the common misconception where a person would get the information in terms of genital construction, and then interpret it in terms of social gender, or brain sex, or whatever. that's the misconstruition that occurs, and that's why stating that thing which is "paper-true", is lying.
in simpler terms, a person would take my initial genital construction to mean a male gender. then that same person would take my later genital construction and instead of letting it mean, in exactly the same way, a female gender, they would ignore it, applying some kind of "time-stamp rule" that doesn't actually effectively exist. but the illogy lies with the fact that the "masculine information" that they are basing this on is
exactly the same as the "feminine information" that they are ignoring.
it's what i've found to be a basic false human instinct that often occurs, applicable in many situations outside of gender issues also, and that's to deny change, either in insisting it won't occur when it well could, or ignoring that it already has.
