Quote from: Janae on October 17, 2013, 12:37:25 AM
Thanks for the reply Kathy.
I think you summed up what I wanted to know, and I liked your response the best. I was thinking it had to be some generational factors at play and you just confirmed this. Being younger and growing up in the 80's 90's to early 2000's things were a lot different for me and girls my age. My first experience of transwomen was from shows like Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones and Ricki Lake. Even though they are all bad examples of transwomen, they were my only reference point. I started wearing girls clothes at 14. By the time I was 16 I was going out as a girl regularly with friends. Early on I used to go out with my mom as a girl and she was in shock that people couldn't tell. I naturally don't have strong male features so I passed the majority of the time. Even at 30 I look pretty much they same as I did as a teen and in my 20's.
I always knew I wanted to change I just wasn't aware of how. Puberty didn't help my efforts and was a major reason for my delay. One day I very fortunate run in with a trans girl in high school. She was cute and passable and my age we did everything together. This was only in 1999. She had the life I wanted. She was living as a girl, going to school and dating as a girl seamlessly. She helped me to realize that there was a way to change. I also got to know a lot of girls in their teens, 20's and 30's who were already living as women in my city, which only made me want to transition even more. In my city growing up it was nothing to be out at the clubs or over at a friends or just out and see young transgirls everywhere. Most of us grew up together so everyone knew everyone.
Most of us didn't have the same pressures & obstacles, So it was a lot easier transitioning in the past 20yrs compared to earlier times. After reading your post in a way I better understand the paths older transwomen felt they had to take before realizing their true selves. Thanks again for your post.
Thanks for telling your story, Janae. It really highlights that there's another issue to take into account in all this, and that's the way that a particular individual experiences their dysphoria/transsexuality. From what you say, you were more comfortable and natural presenting as a girl from your early teens, so I'm guessing you never really lived as an adult man. So from your perspective, transition was essentially seamless with how you were anyway. Not to diminish your experience or the difficulty of transition for anyone, of course, but from high school onwards you were on that path ... and in many ways I envy that.
You see, for me, and a lot of late-transitioners, the experience is less clear cut. There's a therapist called Dr Anne Vitale who's written some very interesting stuff about this. She's a strong believer in the idea that transsexuality arises from a pre-natal issue in which the brains of male babies don't receive any, or enough of the hormones required to masculinise them. So they stay totally or partially female. She therefore divides transsexuals into three groups, as follows ...
Group One (G1) is best described as those natal males who have a high degree of cross-sexed gender identity. In these individuals, we can hypothesize that the prenatal androgenization process--if there was any at all--was minimal, leaving the default female identity intact. Furthermore, the expression of female identity of those individuals appears impossible or very difficult for them to conceal.
Group Two (G2) is composed of natal females [I've cut the rest of this since it's not relevant to us here]
Group Three (G3) is composed of natal males who identify as female but who act and appear normally male. We can hypothesize that prenatal androgenization was sufficient to allow these individuals to appear and act normally as males but insufficient to establish a firm male gender identity. For these female-identified males, the result is a more complicated and insidious sex/gender discontinuity. Typically, from earliest childhood these individuals suffer increasingly painful and chronic gender dysphoria. They tend to live secretive lives, often making increasingly stronger attempts to convince themselves and others that they are male.
Here's the link to the full piece:
http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htmAnyway, I very much belong to Group 3. So I suspect my whole life has been much more ambiguous than yours, because although I had an incredibly strong pull towards the female side of life, I was able to function satisfactorily - at least so far as the outside world was concerned - as a man. So I did what guys are supposed to do and became a husband and father. And I don't regret that, because I love my wife and my kids.
But damn it's made things complicated. And now, many years on, it's causing a tremendous amount of pain to everyone.
