Hello everybody ! I just want to share one point with you. I had my srs, two months ago, but for me it's very difficult today to consider myself as a full female. I'm not saying that I regret the surgery or that I did it only for being absolutely a "real" female but beyond the surgery it's like I still think i'm a trans ans not a (cis) female. Maybe I don't want to loose this "label" or I don't know, I'm pretty confused about who i am. My feeling may appears ridiculous but I just wonder how do you feel about this idenfication issue.

Sorry for my english, I hope you'll understand the most.

I completely understand, and feel similarly, and dilating doesn't help on this mindset either    srs unfortunately doesn't fix all our issues or quirks, but it does help our perception a lil

Hello Alexia.  Glad you joined.

I am androgyne, and may never have surgery, but it seems to me that two months in your new body is not enough to have the totality sink in.  We have some wonderful women here who are post-op, and have abandoned the trans label.  I very much admire them.

Let's take Calico (above) for instance.  I never knew her before she joined.  I just know her as a thoughtful and articulate woman.  Not transwoman ... woman.

Thanks for your reply. Glad to see someone else agree with this. It's like we can't escape our mtf identity.

What exactly is wrong with being a trans person? No amount of surgery will ever erase that from your life. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with being a trans person and still being comfortable with ones sense of self.

It takes a while for the whirlwind to finally die down and once it did I had to figure out just what sort of woman was I anyways? It's not like I knew because it was uncharted territory. So I settled into a life that suited me well. Over time I integrated my past since I can never erase it or wish it away, and became a new person, the person I am today. It took me a long time to figure it out and in many ways I am still not done figuring it out.

I just know in my case it was a good solid 6 months before I finally and seriously came out of my shell. I was unencumbered by a physical and social transition, I didn't need to focus my life on my vagina all day long and I could therefore live a normal woman's life. I left all of this (TG world, support groups, forums, etc) behind and instead focused on living a woman's life. It's now only after 10 years that I popped in out of thin air. Now I believe (to me anyways) I finally get it. I understand what it means to be both a woman and a trans person all rolled into one single person.

Jamie, sure, it must be not enough for me, too short to tell, especially regarding to my actual situation. My transition is not over again and at the beginning ,was pretty hard. I'm not done with it.

Zumbagirl, There is nothing wrong about being a transperson, not at all. For me, it was just about: After srs can I still see myself as trans or I must consider myself just female and nothing else (because it is was i'm suppose to be after srs.) But what can you do when you don't feel "real". Or, Can I still consider myself a trans ? I'm my case, i would say yes.

I think you are right, we can be both. We can be trans or not, whatever.

I don't think the surgery can ever fix how you see yourself. If you want to think of yourself as a normal woman your going to have to get past the feeling that your somehow less of a woman than other women. Will we ever stop being trans no but we can still feel like we are complete women. It's not what's between your legs that makes you feel like a woman it's what's between your ears that does that. 

Well say Heather ! I don't feel more a woman after the surgery, than before, This is where is the issue. I know that I always be one, it's between my ears, like you said. 

Quote from: AlexiaFR on August 24, 2013, 08:30:08 AM
Well say Heather ! I don't feel more a woman after the surgery, than before, This is where is the issue. I know that I always be one, it's between my ears, like you said. 

A lot of trans women put too much of their faith into the thought if I just get the surgery I will like myself. And no surgery can do that! I'm pre-op and while I do have moments where I feel like I'm different from other women. I do have my moments where I have forgot I'm trans and feel I'm no different from other women.
And I also think your probably going through some post-op depression I think you should wait a year and see how you feel about yourself. 

Agree with above but will add another thought. Yesterday I was talking with a psychologist at work as part of my TRANSITIONING at work.She was not my regular psychologist but was just representing work.  Her specialty is working with people who loose 80LBS or more.  They have a problem with their minds still thinking they are overweight.  She just said it takes some people time to adjust.  For some it's a long time.  Similar problem.

I hope I can add to this, being FTM and pre-op. I kind of get how you feel. I've been on hormones for 16 months and a lot has changed. I went from never passing to almost always passing. But I still feel like I look like...a girl. Like the  same old me. It's unsettling as by now, it should sink in that I look different, but those feelings linger and it makes me so uncomfortable.

I read an article about people still feeling fat after weight loss too! It's interesting, how we hang on to those old perceptions even when we go for something we want. Here is the one I read, some of the stuff is applicable to how I feel on hormones, perhaps it will shed some light for you too

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/31489881/ns/health-womens_health/t/phantom-fat-can-linger-after-weight-loss/#.UhjPYxu1FbU

As others have said, feeling like a cis woman/not trans is *one* possible goal for transitioning, but it's not the only one, and you don't have to  let yourself be defined by what other people say you "should" feel now.

I had GRS over a year ago; I feel like a "real" woman now, but I did before I had surgery, too. I don't feel like a cis woman - she wouldn't have grown up thinking she was a boy - and I don't feel like I'm not trans, because transitioning was one of the bravest, most interesting, most exciting things I've done with my life and I don't want to erase that.

The only thing that GRS changed for me is that the physical dysphoria completely disappeared. In other words, for *me,* it was a physical change that fixed a physical issue that was causing me mental distress. It did nothing at all to change whether I think of myself as a woman.

Welcome AlexiaFR!
                Dovetailing on Zumbagirl's comment are the recent posts of a married woman 25 years post-op living totally stealth, not even her husband or doctor knows. She felt the need to check in and touch base with the reality of where she's come from and give others encouragement. So I suppose it's always there, but we can learn to live our new reality successfully and I get it that it does take time to sink in. I'm 10+ years post-orchiectomy and for a long time felt that I was just some stupid dork without balls, (no pun intended) it took some time to get past the curve and see myself as a uniquely different human being.

Thank you all ! Nice to know you right now

Jenna Marie, you reveal what i feel actually. I think it's gonna take a certain time to be really comfortable with myself and with my body. Also, I know that i focus too much about the surgery, like the end of my journey but it doesn't. The main problem is somewhere else. The fact is that I am more an insecure person than a real confident one. Sometimes, I feel i don't have a life to live, i feel alone, depressed, etc. I pay the price of this quite hard transition and it's not enough.
Thanks for the links about weight loose.

To me i believe even if srs doesnt make you feel like a cis-female you shouldnt let it ruin your day as part of our journey is to have others see us for who we are and srs makes that possible. So yea we most probably will all have that feeling sometime post op but should it matter we achieved our goal didnt we?

Quote from: AlexiaFR on August 24, 2013, 04:42:23 AM
Hello everybody ! I just want to share one point with you. I had my srs, two months ago, but for me it's very difficult today to consider myself as a full female. I'm not saying that I regret the surgery or that I did it only for being absolutely a "real" female but beyond the surgery it's like I still think i'm a trans ans not a (cis) female. Maybe I don't want to loose this "label" or I don't know, I'm pretty confused about who i am. My feeling may appears ridiculous but I just wonder how do you feel about this idenfication issue.

I suspect this is quite typical.  I felt the same way myself. 

As an example of how my world changed... soon after SRS when people would talk about whether or not to tell a potential sex partner that she transitioned, I thought telling/not-telling was a huge issue and I really believed in myself as being a trans/woman, heavy on the trans, light on the woman and I felt like any woman who transitioned absolutely had to tell anyone she had sex with that she was a TRANS/woman.  I didn't really believe in myself as a woman, I believed in myself as someone who had been denied the experience of being a woman because that was my real experience, not being a woman.  And the people around me believed in me as being a man who wanted to be a woman, even after SRS.  Not sure which came first, the chicken or the egg, their disbelief or mine.

And I believed my experience was universal.  It was beyond my comprehension that someone else could actually believe in herself as a woman because I hadn't had the experience of being a woman just yet, rather I had the experience of having been denied the experience of being female all my life.  The idea that another trans woman could have had the experience of being a woman was incomprehensible to me so whenever other trans women talked about their experiences of being women I listened to them with the same disbelief I had for myself.

Women typically believe in themselves as being women because it's all they know, it's their LIFE experience.  Unfortunately (or whatever), for M2Fs being women is not all we know - in fact whether we like to admit it or not, even in optimal situations we tend to only know the experience of being TRANS/women which tends to be different from the experience of only knowing a life experience of being female and not trans.

My life before I accepted myself as a female was one of self-narrative.  My mind was constantly active trying to deal with all the dissonance in my life.  Having people who accepted me as a trans woman not really accepting me as a woman.  Constantly aware of every interaction looking for tells that someone had either accepted me or clocked me as trans.  My head was a noisy place and all the self-talk and self-narrative, all of the worry and wonder and anticipation prevented me from having the experience of being female.

Now I am not saying this is something everyone should do but my first great Shut the "F" up moment was when I had sex with a guy who I had assumed knew I was trans, but didn't.  He made a big deal about the possibility of my getting pregnant which caused me to begin to realize he assumed I was just female.  That and the way he treated me in and out of the bed was like nothing I had experienced before.  It was wonderful, it was awful but unlike any previous interactions it was real.

The most profound aspect of that experience was that it caused me to begin to realize, to make real, real ize that I was in fact female.  I had nothing concrete to hide, just a lot of self-talk, a lot of negative tapes that were playing over and over in my head.  But in my experience the only experience that allowed me to begin to believe in myself as a woman rather than as a TRANS/woman (heavy on the trans, light on the woman) was an experience.  An experience, not an idea.  And reading about something is not an experience.  For me it had to be a harsh, vivid, experience, one that assailed all of my senses at once.  And then I found myself, staring blankly up at the bare bulb in the ceiling, dumb struck...  No words could begin to describe the feeling with which I was experiencing being female.  It was physical, it was psychological and it was bright whites and deep darks, it was sweat and breath and life and death.

I had plenty of people seem to "accept" me prior to that but it wasn't until after the scales were knocked off my eyes that I began to see things differently.  Left to my own devices my self talk and self-narrative would have kept me firmly locked out of this reality and even worse than my self-talk was how people who had known me prior to transition would keep me in the head-space of being a TRANS/woman.  Honestly the only way I can really experience being female is by avoiding the detractors who continue to relate to me as a male who wants to be female.  Because something they will never understand is that I didn't transition to be female, I transitioned because I always have been female.  But in my experience, the people I have known in this life, they can't grasp that concept because people don't understand us as we are, they understand us as they are and they try to put themselves in our shoes but what they can't comprehend is we aren't our shoes.

I have to give thanks to Dr. Chettawut who fixed my Bower's vagina and to Dr. Pat  of Tokai Clinic who give me a female face and to the lending institutions who have allowed me to trade my financial future for an opportunity to live in the present.  Transition is scary when you think about it, it's liberating when you actually do it.  And one should enjoy transition throughout the journey, just in my experience, best to stay a nomad until you have really gotten onward a bit.  Transition is fear and loathing, transition is scarcity and that rare feast that you can't share with anyone.  Transition is different things to different people and it's what you make of it and most people are average, imagination is a gift, creativity in the hands of the lucky and in the hands of those who know what they have and know what they want.  [Insert something clever or motivational here.]  To thine own self be true.

Quote from: Cherrie on September 07, 2013, 08:59:26 AM

It happened to me yesterday at a clinic where I have been coming for some years. I know most of the people who work there and most know I'm trans. I never saw the nurse who helped me yesterday before though and during a 30 minute consult the ts subject didn't come up once. She may have known anyway, idk. Afterwards we walked to the reception to make a new appointment and the girl at the reception to whom I talked to about transitioning before because my mum couldn't keep her mouth shut asked me 'So you are done now with your transgender surgeries? You also had your 'big' surgery a while ago, right?'. I thought omg and said yes and looked at the nurse who was standing next to me and all I could see on her face was OMG WTF.. Followed by a lot of awkwardness. My next appointment with the nurse is next week..

Cripes! What a moronic bit*h! It's hard to believe that a cis female who most certainly would die if someone said anything as insipid and thoughtless as that about her in front of others, would blurt that out in front of the nurse and perhaps others within earshot in the waiting room. I would be constrained to confront her about it the second the words left her lips! By that time it's out there anyway, so you may as well rip her head off!

Quote from: Cherrie on September 07, 2013, 08:59:26 AM
Personally I don't really care if people know that I'm trans. It's just not something I want to talk about to strangers, because all of a sudden I am being treated as a male wanting to be female..

My goal is to move to another city this year. Things will never be perfect, but they will be better.

Moving and reestablishing in a new city has always been the best option! Sorry you have had to endure this sort of defamatory crap Cherrie!

Quote from: AlexiaFR on August 24, 2013, 04:42:23 AM
Hello everybody ! I just want to share one point with you. I had my srs, two months ago, but for me it's very difficult today to consider myself as a full female. I'm not saying that I regret the surgery or that I did it only for being absolutely a "real" female but beyond the surgery it's like I still think i'm a trans ans not a (cis) female. Maybe I don't want to loose this "label" or I don't know, I'm pretty confused about who i am. My feeling may appears ridiculous but I just wonder how do you feel about this idenfication issue.

Sorry for my english, I hope you'll understand the most.

Sorry if my first post in reply to your post seemed a little off-topic.  I read this thread again a few times and I imagine that to someone who recently had SRS it probably seems a little off topic, but it isn't.

Imagine if you just started playing football.  You never played football before and you don't even know the rules or how football is played.  But suddenly you are wearing the gear and everyone is lined up and you are expected to perform like a well oiled machine, in perfect synchronization with all of the other players.

You see the thing is we don't exist unto ourselves.  We are not private islands.  As human beings and as males and as females we exist as part of a team called the human race and how we fit in with the rest of Society, with other human beings, with men and with women drastically effects us in ways that we tend to completely take for granted and not realize.  How we fit in with other people gives us our perception of ourselves.

All SRS typically does is get rid of the testosterone factories and reconfigure our sexual anatomy which is a pretty big deal but by it self it isn't going to change how we feel about who we are.  Many awful people have made plenty of disparaging remarks about SRS, describing SRS as essentially penis mutilation.  And the fact is that if the wrong person had SRS, for that wrong person SRS would essentially be nothing more than penis mutilation.  So perhaps you can begin to see that it isn't "the surgery" that changes us.  It isn't what is between our legs that changes how we feel about ourselves.

What SRS does is it creates a platform for experiences and it is our 'experiences' that change how we feel about ourselves.

I mentioned how I had sex with a guy who I had just assumed knew I transitioned and how it changed my life.  It changed my life because SRS allowed me to have an experience I otherwise never would have been able to have.  And I had that experience with another human being and it is our relationships with other humans that help us to understand who and what we are.  That other human being was not "accepting" me as a woman, he was experiencing me as a woman.  We were having a very genuine interaction, not one influenced by my being trans.  And the truth was that at the beginning I felt like I was playing a pretend woman but I quickly realized I was in the game and it was for real.  I also realized that if this man realized I had transitioned that my body parts might have ended up in various dumpsters around the city.

The point is I had an experience of being female, with another person.  And this experience of being female with another person changed my perception of myself.  It changed my self belief and it was a change that has lasted till this day because the truth is I have always been female but I had to manifest the female body and the female life to go along with being female inside.  The truth will set you free.  None of the people who knew me from before transition believe in me as being female, they all consider me trans.  One of my best friends and a lesbian told me I could never be female, she said I would always be trans and she was right.  As long as I remained around people like her I would always be reduced and limited in my experiences.

And most people like to think of themselves as being "realistic" as being "sensible" and as not being "delusional".  So they couch themselves as always trans.  They consider themselves trans people.  And I am not talking about someone who is transitioning.  I am not talking about someone who wants to transition but who hasn't really begun.  I am not talking about someone who hasn't finished all of the physical work required to do a physical sexual transition.  I am talking about people like myself, someone who has done everything she could, hormones, SRS, BAS, FFS... liposuction and body sculpting...  Paperwork... Birth Certificate, license, registration...  Point being my body isn't holding me back.  The only things that can hold me back at this point are

1. My self belief.  My ideas about myself.
2. My interactions with other people.

These two things, 1. and 2. are critical and they are related.  Because it is our experiences with other people who cause us to perceive ourselves this way or that.  If we remain around people who accept us as trans then we will continue to think of ourselves as trans.

As important is SRS might be, transition isn't simply a physical experience, it's a psychological experience or at the very least it can be.  SRS simply creates the platform for that experience to occur and it is up to us to make it happen.  And the fact is that life is not fair.  Transition is easier for some of us than it is for others but essentially it's all psychological and to really be successful you have to learn things that no one is ever going to teach you.  For instance most people tend to be insecure and those of us who seem the most confident of all, tend to be the most insecure.  We are all human (as far as I know).  We don't exist alone in this life, though typically someone who is locked away in a body that lies about who they are, someone who desperately needs to transition, that person comes closer than anyone else to living in a vacuum (in my own experience).

And here is a little gem for you.  As trans women we are taught that we have a 'Secret'.  What we are never taught is that whatever you think about you will get more of.  And what you treasure, you will hoard.  If the past, if past accomplishments are your treasure then you will take your treasure with you wherever you go and it will always be there with you.  If being male or female after transition is your treasure then you will take that with you wherever you go.  Because it isn't about secrets or going from one closet to another...  It's about being who you are.

Perhaps you remember when you were little, there was a little girl who insisted on always telling the truth.  Whenever someone did something "wrong" she had to tell on them.  Because she was taught that you always have to tell the truth.  The truth is she wasn't telling the truth, she was tattling on others but that little girl felt a sense of REWARD by telling on others.  She felt good for a brief moment when she told on someone else for doing something "wrong".  Really she was getting off on creating suffering for her brothers and sisters, the pain and misery of others and the limitations she forced upon others gave her a sense of personal well-being.  She wasn't the bad girl because she made sure that others were punished and therefore "bad", and it was always punishment she wasn't suffering herself (so she could assume she was "good").  She could watch while someone else suffered and thrill to the fact that it wasn't her and she believed she was righteous because 'She always told the truth'.

Well that little girl never completely grew up and the truth is she can exist in all of us.  But she is a very little girl who has only learned black & white thinking.  Everything is binary to her, on or off, light or darkness.  Solid or hollow.  She never came to realize that we create our own consciousness, that we create our own suffering, that we co-create our feelings about ourselves.  Or did she?  She did manipulate an idea in order to cause others to suffer while avoiding suffering for herself so that she could feel good about herself.  Oh..  So in fact even at a very early age she had realized that we create our own reality.  She created a reality where she was the ambassador of not lying, where she was good and where bad people who were not her often suffered for their sins when in fact she entertained a certain amount of evil by relishing in and co-creating the suffering of others.

Perhaps this is what they talk about when they talk about going over to the Dark side.  You see we all have the power to create our own lives, worlds...

Before I transitioned my world was so tiny.  Transition for me was an experience that got me outside of a tiny little horrible life and allowed me to begin to realize that the world is huge and it isn't anything like I ever thought it was.  And transition was awesome.  When I was out as trans I felt more alive than I ever felt at any time previous in my life.  But being out as trans, being trans, being accepted as trans... for me it was part of my journey.  It was New Mexico on the way to Wyoming.  When I was in the middle of it, it was awesome and I celebrated it but to everything thing there is a season and after a while it was time for me to move on.  Kind of like being twelve years old.  Being twelve years old is great, or at least it can be. But being twelve years old was good for a season and then I moved onto being 13 years old.  I didn't run from one closet into another.  I had an experience and that experience lasted for a season and then it was time for a new year.

It's like standing on a mountain and that mountain is sedimentary rock.  Someone could some along and say, "Oh great mountain, you are but a lie, I have examined your sedimentary rock, your very foundation and I have found fossils of fish and reptiles, why do you hide these facts and purposely exist as a mountain where trees grow and birds make their nests!  How can you look at your reflection in that lake and not be ashamed of the fact that you are built on a heap of lies?  But the Mountain does not punish herself like that, the mountain exists in the moment and we can too, and the fact is that each moment we exist in creates the past so not only can we create the present but by doing so we create the past.  So which do you choose for yourself?  A past life of a cup half empty or a past life of a cup half full?  Are you going to spend each waking day after transition making excuses for your past or are you going to be like the mountain and exist in the present?  Are you a man or a woman half empty, living life as a living, breathing excuse for the genitals you were born with or do you want to exist as other men and women do, by not living their lives as a monument to the past?  If you are a woman, if you have somehow always been female (or male) then why not be fully female (or male) now?  Why live each moment out of respect or fear for the past?  Why limit yourself because some little tattle tale told you that your new life was just another closet? 

If anyone believes that life after transition is living in another closet...  Well  Pfffft!  How nuts is that?  The problem is that people don't understand other people as they are because they can't do that.  Instead of understanding other people for who they are people understand themselves.  As an example, "I perceive women who transition who go on to live female lives as running from one closet to another because that is what I know, therefore when I try to imagine what it is like for them I imagine a closet."

If as many like to say,  if as a trans woman you have always been female then why not be female now?  Why instead do you seek this strange thing called "acceptance" if you don't require it?  Is it because that little girl who always had to tattle on her brother's and sisters set up house inside of your head?

Anyway... none of this is directed at anyone.  I am just trying to inspire some creativity because like it or not we each create our lives.  Sometimes we co-create and sometimes we need to get away from the influence of those who think they have us all figured out.  And if you think you have yourself all figured out then unfortunately you probably have but that tends to be a case of treasuring the past and taking it into the future with you each and every day and for some of us that is too much work and too much of a burden.

Sorry I made this post so long.

Quote from: Kate G on September 07, 2013, 05:27:11 PM
Because it is our experiences with other people who cause us to perceive ourselves this way or that.  If we remain around people who accept us as trans then we will continue to think of ourselves as trans.

I think that's incredibly true. And I wish there were more people who could have my experience. I never really thought it was possible when I had my surgery. But I have people in my life to whom "trans" has come to mean roughly as much as "tall." To them it's just a fragment of my life, a piece of my experience, and through them that is slowly how I've come to see it myself. That I am as much trans as I am queer or an editor or Jewish or whatever. That my best friend who I've known since I was 5 can tell me with not a trace of irony in his voice that "You wouldn't understand because you're a girl" and I feel no reaction beyond a desire to punch him for being an obnoxious little prick.

The majority of people I meet don't know I'm trans, not because I'm keeping it quiet, but because it just isn't something that comes up, it isn't something I really think about that much outside of trans-related contexts. And that's because I have my family, my girlfriend, my friends who all know about my transition, and yet... to them I'm just Sarah and have always been Sarah, regardless of prior errors in perception. And trust me, I know the difference between how they look at me, and how the other kind of person looks at me, the ones who are accepting. My people, they aren't accepting, they are past the point where they really consider there anything to accept. It would be like wondering if they accept me for liking fantasy books.

And if you can find those kinds of people or if you can help your people become that. If you can have those kinds of people in your life. Then you get a whole different kind of experience. One where trans is neither overwhelming nor blotted out. It becomes, impossibly, strangely... ordinary.

So, ya. I guess the only advice I got for getting past the whole trans woman thing is... surround yourself with awesome people. Awesome people are the best.