After a fair while reading around this great helpful community's site, it's probably high time I posted to say hello! Writing this has been very hard but at the same time feels liberating.
My story sees me having made it to a point in life where I have an amazing wife and kids, but have started looking back and realising that all is possibly not quite right with life. It has taken me a long time to admit to myself that it's quite likely I am transgender, because unlike many other stories I have read I have actually been pretty happy with almost every part of my life. I've been lucky enough to have made a career, and met my soul mate in my amazing supportive wife in my late teens. We traveled the world before setting up house and creating a family together, settling a little while away from where we grew up.
Because most things in life have been and still are pretty good living life as a male, it is only in the last year or so that I have begun to realise that the little things in life which I have always viewed as the strange quirks of being an individual actually added up to me really feeling more comfortable presenting as, and perhaps one day living full time as a female. I've cross-dressed in secret only a handful of times over the years, but she discovered a few things a year or so ago and asked me directly. We share so much in life and this had always been a guilty secret that I decided to answer honestly, so I drew a big breath and admitted that yes I like to cross-dress. In the year since I'm now working out whether life sees me doing this in private occasionally forever, or biting the bullet and transitioning with all the seemingly impossible to scale social changes that this would bring.
I began seeing a counselor and have been working through these feelings and ideas, with the outcome that last time we met he suggested that in his opinion yes it is quite likely I am female. When my wife said the same thing unprompted a few days later I have started to feel that I'm the only one that I'm 'out' to that doesn't yet feel 100% the same way. A big mental hurdle has been her saying a few months ago that if I transitioned she wouldn't stay married to me, which is not a step I'm prepared to take as we have led so much of life together and are a pretty amazing team IMHO. She is now going through counseling and has attended a partners of trans group, and chats and meets with others in her situation. Neither of us envision our futures without each other, so are hopeful that we can find a way through this pretty large roadblock in life. As she says we are still together and she has known for a year now.
I have been out in public a couple of times with a transwomen's support group, even though I don't yet feel that's the right term for me. I have said barely a word there but felt a sense of 'right'-ness that I struggle to explain, so I keep going along and meeting the amazing supportive women role models there, each time trying to chat a bit more.
Reading thoughts and stories of people here has been an amazing help, so I figured it was high time I finally stopped lurking and said Hello, I'm Alison.
