My name is Amanda. It feels so good to say this. Only our wife, a pastor, and our therapist know I exist.
While we wait on the moderators to post a friendly reminder about the TOS, let me tell you about my/our self.
While we sort ourselves out in therapy, we have penciled ourselves in as bi-gender or some other sort of non-binary identity. Our male self is not so much a false self as an incomplete self. We have been lurking for several years. Our wife has become comfortable with us joining the forum only recently.
There were some traumatic events long ago that we survived by dissociating and hiding away parts of ourself. Maleme is the 50 something male that the world knows. I-Amanda seem to have split off in our teens when our dad was the most abusive(but only verbally and emotionally that we remember). I experience myself as female. LittleOne seems to have split off at around 5 or 6 years old when the most traumatic things happened at the hands of men. He carries the deepest shame and wishes he could be someone else in a different body and not feel the pain or remember what happened.
Growing up, we always felt different than other boys, but had no language to talk about it in the conservative Southern US. Maleme worries a lot about trying to figure out if we were going to be a male with traits considered feminine and the trauma caused me-Amanda to be female or if we were going to be transgender anyways. We started dressing in our sister's and mother's clothes around 13 and never really understood why we needed to do it. We always thought this was because there is something wrong with us. We tried to suppress it over the years, but always started up again when there was an opportunity.
After watching our father slowly slipping away from a degenerative disease, we faced the choice of accepting ourself or stop furtively slipping on our wife's dresses and let the secret die with us. We got a couple of my own dresses from a thrift shop, and then began a long process of self-discovery over the past few years. Eventually, our wife came home early and caught us. After many hard conversations, we have settled into something a little bit more than Don't Ask Don't Tell. She does not want to see us dressed or see overt evidence, but she accepts that we have a need to do it. Of course, we keep our Amanda time private and do not go out in public. She does not want to know the details of everything, but needs us to be let her know generally what we are up to so there are no secrets. This can be hard like on the days the dysphoria hits hard and I feel the urge to shave off all our body hair. She tolerates us letting our hair grow as long as we are in Maleme mode and wear it more masculine in intimate moments.
We need this kind of support while we go through healing the trauma and figure out where we come out if and when we integrate.
