I wanted to be like my sister so bad that when I was 10 (1964) I asked my mother if she could start calling me Michelle, she was very sweet about it but basically said "don't be silly" so I just stayed hiding in Boy mode forever, our small farming town had zero awareness and even I didn't understand what was going on.
As I grew up I always had more female than male friends as I just seemed to fit into their friend circles better, can't tell you how many times I heard "you're not like the other guys, you understand girls"

Of course things are better now and I still don't have male friends to run around with...doesn't bother me ar all really.

I worked out who and what I was at 12 - thanks Carlotta. But it was 1987 and there was no way I was coming out then.

I spent most of high school trying to fit in and failing miserably. In the last 2 years of HS I just kind of gave up trying to fit in and started being a little more me.. I came out as a gay guy (lol) and lived as a femme gay guy until I was 35 and could no longer lie to the world about who I was.

One of the thing I find interesting/odd is that many of us who are classed as "late transitioners" are often assumed to have had no clue about ourselves, which often isn't the truth.

Hi Kelly,

The party line from my reading of books/websites would be that late transitioners' dysphoria isn't so severe that they can't attempt to cope or overcome their transgender impulses.  I've rarely come across accounts of people who never considered themselves TS but turned out to be so later on, which was why I started this thread.

I have seen a few big threads here wondering why people delay transitioning at all, I'd imagine mostly started up by younger people who don't realize how difficult it was to learn about transgender issues until very recently, never mind do anything about it.  Is that who you had in mind?

Quote from: Lucy Ross on August 02, 2017, 09:04:53 PM
Hi Kelly,

The party line from my reading of books/websites would be that late transitioners' dysphoria isn't so severe that they can't attempt to cope or overcome their transgender impulses.  I've rarely come across accounts of people who never considered themselves TS but turned out to be so later on, which was why I started this thread.

I delayed transition until I was no longer able to - I'd also reached a point in life where I had no real reasons not to.  There are a not insignificant number of us who transition only as an alternative to suicide.

QuoteI have seen a few big threads here wondering why people delay transitioning at all, I'd imagine mostly started up by younger people who don't realize how difficult it was to learn about transgender issues until very recently, never mind do anything about it.  Is that who you had in mind?

The only reason I had any clue about trans people in 1987 was due to a colourful Australian trans woman named Carlotta (Carol Spencer) and while she was a popular person back then, it wasn't the era to be a trans kid. School would have been hell.. Society would have been hell.

QuoteI delayed transition until I was no longer able to - I'd also reached a point in life where I had no real reasons not to.  There are a not insignificant number of us who transition only as an alternative to suicide.

This 😢

I've read a lot of the TG publications of the 80s/90s - Tapestry, Ladylike, etc.  The wholly arbitrary ways people would find out about things is remarkable.

Many had real eye openers by happening across these publications, too.  Later BBS systems bridged gaps, or 1-900 numbers - telephone chat services. 

I was a teen in the late 80s, very much on my own in a not exactly liberal town.  Just dressing a bit androgynous and the macho kids would have pummeled you into a hospital room, I bet.

Quote from: Lucy Ross on August 02, 2017, 09:04:53 PM
I have seen a few big threads here wondering why people delay transitioning at all, I'd imagine mostly started up by younger people who don't realize how difficult it was to learn about transgender issues until very recently, never mind do anything about it.

Okay, I get it that I am an anomaly and somewhat of an outlier but I can't say I'm completely on board with this statement. I had no knowledge or information about any of this and had no clue what I was doing or where I was going when I crossed the line between boy and girl. It was just some sort of organic progression and I did end up in hospital and out of school for nearly a month for simply existing when I was 15 in what was very much a hate crime. Contrary to popular opinion, care and information was available if one was dedicated to finding it. I started hormones in 1972 as a seventeen year old and was able to have SRS in 1977. It gets me when people think this was impossible or didn't happen in the past.

Granted, things are a lot easier today than they were but I have to take the claims that people didn't know about this or that it was just too hard in the 80's and 90's with a grain of salt.

Quote from: Lisa_K on August 03, 2017, 02:30:54 AM
Okay, I get it that I am an anomaly and somewhat of an outlier but I can't say I'm completely on board with this statement. I had no knowledge or information about any of this and had no clue what I was doing or where I was going when I crossed the line between boy and girl. It was just some sort of organic progression and I did end up in hospital and out of school for nearly a month for simply existing when I was 15 in what was very much a hate crime. Contrary to popular opinion, care and information was available if one was dedicated to finding it. I started hormones in 1972 as a seventeen year old and was able to have SRS in 1977. It gets me when people think this was impossible or didn't happen in the past.

Granted, things are a lot easier today than they were but I have to take the claims that people didn't know about this or that it was just too hard in the 80's and 90's with a grain of salt.

I am a bit similar, but different, if that makes sense. Yes, I grew up a complete anomaly in my family simply because of my "strange" body shape and manner of thinking and seeing the world. I simply could never understand anything that was happening around me or to me. Unfortunately I had a father who was terribly embarrassed by his girly boy and was determined to "make a man out of him -- even if it killed him." I was forced to keep my hair very, very short and military-like throughout my youth and to wear very baggy clothes to hide my slender, girly shape. He worked very hard to change my attitude, manners and personality, if that makes sense.

For some odd genetic reason, my legs were/are very long in proportion to my whole body which gave me a really "leggy" and feminine stature. The unwanted nicknames and insults never stopped. You can guess. I did have low-grade hate crimes (of a sort) committed against me in school which I never understood. With my short scrubby hair and long legs I NEVER fit in any group. I guess I never got over the experience. I no longer talk to many family members who seemed to enjoy the torture those long years ago. Now as an older adult I look back and wonder with the same questions. Could I have found help with my situation? A counselor? A teacher? Certainly not in my cultic, hateful church.

After my divorce, I started wearing skinny jeans and colorful shirts and letting my hair grow a bit which angered my father (and church "friends"). I quit giving damns around this time and left the church. Now I am "going to hell" and everyone is "praying for me." Soon enough my father died and I felt free. Now after HRT, my appearance is markedly more feminine, so I guess he failed to make me a man. But I feel so much more whole, and calm. What the future holds I can't say. So many of my relatives and old friends have not seen me in years, so what they might think of me now.......I don't care any more.....

I guess I gave up trying to figure out life. It just never seemed to work for me. I am mentally much tougher now. I do have a small number of friends who accept me. That's good. I am thankful for that and a few other things. There are things to be thankful for....

I did not realize that I was TS.. Growing up I felt like I did not fit and i was a little shy and I never really had friends. In my teenage years I experimented with cross dressing, i would wear pantyhose and later a little skirt in private.. I never connected the two until much later.

I began cross dressing seriously at the age of 19, that means dressing fully up, including breast forms, makeup etc. Then I embraced my girly side, I just wanted to improve my girl self.. I grew my hair (I did not want to wear a wig), I started shaving my legs, got my ears pierced.. When I embraced the girl inside me, everything changed, the shy boy became an outgoing woman that fitted in and actually had friends. I was finally me.. so therapy quickly determined HRT was the best cause for me. Now almost 10 years later... I am a well adjusted woman, with a close circle of friends, who just loves life.

I'm another one. 

Short summary of the story... 

I didn't really have any perception of a problem as a young child until getting to about 2nd grade.  As soon as I was immersed in the usual playground culture, I realized I had far greater affinity for and personality similarity to the girls.  Moreover, I was not particularly athletic and had no interest in competition or sports.  To my advantage given this situation, I was substantially physically larger and taller than my peers so I was able to avoid the taunting if not outright abuse that  is common in this setting.  Around this time, I began to realize my interest in things feminine and female clothing.  Like many, I discovered that the clothing of the opposite sex was really nice, prettier and more fun than boy clothing leading to a lifelong cycle of secretive. cross
dressing. 

Puberty was difficult and I did not date much until college.  In college my one intense relationship was with a wonderful woman whom in retrospect I am fairly certain was a yet to be self
discovered lesbian while I was a yet to be self discovered MTF TG.  Northern of us reallynew why but there was ever increasing strife between us and we separated not to ever speak again.  I wonder if she ever figured out the nature of the problem. 

I went on to graduate education, met my wife of over 30 years, had 2 kids, lived the standard cis heterosexual family life.  Through this, the cross dressing was intermittent but persisted through the years.  Since college, I've been wearing bikini style Jockey  "man parties" but over the past few years quietly switched to the nearly identical womens' version of the same style, unnoticed by my wife.  I've gradually tended to use several generally thought of as womens' cosmetic items but again below the threshold of being obvious. I don't dress androgenously but have no problem wearing pink and pastel colors. 

The cross dressing has persisted and over the last 3 years or so went into an accelerated phase of frequent episodes when my wife was been out of town on business or family duties.  Surprisingly, I did not really consciously consider that I might be TG despite all this history and in retrospect obvious signs and overt evidence.  I found myself reading everything I could about cross dressing and transgender phenomena in an attempt to convince myself this was just some odd fetish.  I found it rapidly more and more difficult to deny that this was not a fetish, that I had all the features of what Anne Virale, author of "The Gendered Self" describes as a "group 3" TG .  In fact, the example she offers in the book could almost literally describe me.  I was shocked; frantic I search for and found a very competent therapist who has helped me immensely. 

I started therapy just under a year ago at age 59.  Also, I joined Susans.org almost one year ago to the day. 

Am l TG?  Yes.  How long did it take me to figure it all out given decades of denial and rationalization? Nearly 60 years.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Quote from: Lisa_K on August 01, 2017, 05:49:57 PM

Emotionally, I can empathize as I've had my own share of trials and tribulations from being this way but I simply have a hard time imagining what a complete and total flustercluck dealing with this later in life must be.

It certainly can be that.  I do envy the extent to which you have never seemed to have to figure out your gender identity, but I think we are all variants of the same thing, whether that thing is defined so narrowly as "transwomen" or as broadly as "human".

You mentioned that," I've rarely come across accounts of people who never considered themselves TS but turned out to be so later on". Well, I guess that I fall into that realm of rarity. While I never really fit into either gender, I just thought that it was me being a broken person. I had always prided myself of being observant and critically knowledgeable of the world around me (became an engineer for my career), I never had a clue about why I never fit in. I just became very good at coping and surviving. There was never a trace of cross dressing experimentation or any awareness of gender disconnect until a random playtime experience with my wife of 33 years when I was 67.......and the lights came on. All those days of surviving turned into actual joy. Since that day it has been a steady and fairly rapid pursuit of becoming fully me. GCS is 27 days out.

I knew I had been born wrong when I was 4. When I was old enough to know what transgender was and that they could do surgery to fix it I knew I wanted it. I never even tried to act male. That's beyond my ability and I would have totally failed at it even if I had tried.
Julia

Quote from: Julia1996 on August 16, 2017, 01:21:44 PM
I knew I had been born wrong when I was 4. When I was old enough to know what transgender was and that they could do surgery to fix it I knew I wanted it. I never even tried to act male. That's beyond my ability and I would have totally failed at it even if I had tried.
Julia

Some of this might be generational.  "Back in my day" (Oh God, I said it), one could reliably expect to be beat up or worse for crossing the boundaries of gender.  Today, not so much.

Quote from: rmaddy on August 16, 2017, 03:22:35 PM
Some of this might be generational.  "Back in my day" (Oh God, I said it), one could reliably expect to be beat up or worse for crossing the boundaries of gender.  Today, not so much.

Uhm, this sounds more like denial. Julia is like 19, right? I am 20. I was beaten up as a kid. I didn't try to hide my femininity, it's just who I am. How can onde hide natural mannerisms to the point of no one ever have a clue you're different and proceed to live as an adult male. Even if I tried, I wouldn't be able to do "convincingly".

Quote from: rmaddy on August 16, 2017, 03:22:35 PM
Some of this might be generational.  "Back in my day" (Oh God, I said it), one could reliably expect to be beat up or worse for crossing the boundaries of gender.  Today, not so much.

I know. I've heard how boys who were "different" were treated in the 50s-90s. Way back in the 50s and 60s I heard that you could get arrested for wearing women's clothes or even be thrown in the nut house. That's so sad and so messed up!  I'm very thankful my family was accepting and never tried to force male behavior on me. Life would have been quite horrible for me if they had.
Julia

Quote from: rmaddy on August 16, 2017, 03:22:35 PM
Some of this might be generational.  "Back in my day" (Oh God, I said it), one could reliably expect to be beat up or worse for crossing the boundaries of gender.

I can personally attest to the fact that this was all too true. "Back in my day" for me started in 1960 when kindergarten came as a very rude awakening. Seen as gender atypical from the very start, being mocked, ridiculed, ostracized and physically bullied seemed like just a natural part of life and these things only became more prevalent and more serious as I got older to the point I was nearly killed in high school.

I had no real concept of "crossing the boundaries of gender" except by the negative and hostile feedback received from others. I didn't really get it. I was just was who I was and didn't really understand why it was such a big deal to the other kids in school. My parents made suggestions of things I could do to try and fit in better but I was incapable of faking it and not just being myself and the way I naturally was. I was shuffled from school to school and from therapist to therapist trying to help with the social problems that seemed to follow me wherever I went. I didn't have any problems being me, who else could I have been but others certainly did. Alluding to my earlier post, the notion that trans kids didn't exist "back in the day" or that we all hid until we got older is simply not true. Granted, we suffered the consequences of the ignorance of the day but for some of us, there was no other choice.

Quote from: Aurorasky on August 16, 2017, 03:27:12 PM
Uhm, this sounds more like denial. Julia is like 19, right? I am 20. I was beaten up as a kid. I didn't try to hide my femininity, it's just who I am. How can one hide natural mannerisms to the point of no one ever have a clue you're different and proceed to live as an adult male. Even if I tried, I wouldn't be able to do "convincingly".

Let's face it, some of us are different from birth and we seem to be in the minority in places like this. Like Julia and Aurora, I couldn't and never did hide who I was. How could I? Why should I have had to and even if I could have, no one that knew me would have bought it anyway. All I can say is thank goodness that my folks were intuitive and perceptive enough to let me be who I was and did everything they could to help and support me in an era when such things were completely unheard of.

I agree with Lisa. I think for some of us it's more like a biological force rather than just a desire or longing. My dad was not all surprised to find out I was trans. In fact he outed me rather than me coming out. He just asked me if I wanted to be a girl. He said it was ok if I did but that I needed to get started and get it out of the way. My older brother wasn't surprised either. My dad told me even when I was very young I was very feminine.  He said at first he did try to "correct" me and would tell me boys didn't do this or boys didn't do that. He said not only would I not listen to him but that after he said something like that I would totally ignore him and not speak to him for a while after. He said he just gave up. My grandpa was a lot more vocal about my feminine behavior and telling me to act like a boy. Because of that I couldn't stand him and wanted absolutely nothing to do with him. My grandma and my other set of grandparents were fine with me so I liked them. At the holidays and family get togethers I totally ignored my one grandpa. His presents were always very "boy" things and my dad said I would put them in the trash can. And once my grandparents gave me this Christmas suit when I was 6. It was a little boys suit for sure. I threw it in the fireplace, and yes there was a fire going. I didn't find out until years later that the way I acted towards my grandpa really hurt him. My dad told him why I didn't like him and to stop it. I guess he listened because I really don't remember not liking him. I do know when I was older that I got spiteful and mean if someone criticized me for being feminine or tried to tell me I should act like a boy. I would make sure to be even more feminine just out of spite.

I would pitch such a fit when my dad took me to get my hair cut that he gave up when I was about 8 years old. I also had a fit if someone tried to dress me in boy clothes.  I would only wear clothes that could be for either a boy or girl and in colors I liked. Everyone knew to only give me gender neutral gifts for Christmas and my birthday. My childhood was full of stuff like that. I have never been able to relate to male behavior or activities. I am very lucky to have a accepting family. But even so it was not easy growing up. I have albinism and I was very small for a boy so I already had 2 strikes against me. From the time I started middle school all the way to the end of high school I was the school "->-bleeped-<-". I was teased and called all kinds of ugly names. I was never actually beaten thank god but I was assaulted.  I was tripped and constantly having my books knocked out of my arms.  I had a boy tell me I was the size of a Smurf so I should look like one and he threw a cup of blue food color in my face. And once I had 2 boys hold me down and spray something like liquid plastic in my hair which was like wax when it dried. My dad had to cut it out along with all my hair. And twice I had boys pull down my pants. Once to see if I really had a dick and once to see if my pubes were as white as my hair.

I was actually a very mean person at that time. I was extremely jealous of not just girls, but pretty much everyone because they were normal. Even my own brother. I still feel bad about how mean I was to him at times. My brother is very loving and accepting of me but I was jealous that he had normal skin and eyecolor and because he was cis and was popular and had lots of friends. I think a lot of us get jealous of cis people at times.

I had planned for transition like a year before I did it. I was afraid my dad might throw me out for being trans. It seems silly now but I didn't know what would happen. My dad is a exmarine and now a cop. Not the type of guy you would think would be accepting of this. So I took cosmetology while I was still in high school. I wanted to be able to support myself in case things with my family did go bad. Plus transitioning wouldn't be much of an issue in that industry.

Yes my transition was easier than it is for some people but even when you transition young it's still hard and painful emotionally.  For me there was no choice but to transition. I have never known how to be male. If I had been born in like the 60s I would have found a way to transition because that's all I could do except for suicide. For some of us I think transitioning young is the only choice.
Julia

Yeah, not until I was about 34. I knew something was up but I had never been exposed to transgender things before, or cared to look into it - I had no frame of reference. To be honest, I used to think it was all a joke.

The penny dropped when I started cross dressing compulsively after work - then on my doc's insistence - began to talk things through with therapists. A lot of other people spotted me long before I did!

Yeah....there were signs when I was little.  It wasn't very well known at the time.  I have pictures of me, in positions that are more often associated with little girls.  My mom told me about my potty training and my absolute refusal to stand.  I carried my school books like the girls did for a long time.  For me, I repressed all of this, and tried to be the boy I was told I was.  Then I never told anyone my thoughts, and dreams.  I just tried to fit in, well as much as an introverted bookworm gamer geek can fit in.