Hello everyone!
I am new here, although I have lurked for a while just perusing the forums looking for general advice and help. I figured it was about time that I created a profile and tried to get more direct help and talk to people about being trans.
Hmm... I'm never great at this sort of thing so where to start? I guess the easiest thing is to say that I am physically male, aged 33, and am wholly confused about my gender identity. I have been for a very long time, and am constantly wafting between "totally sure I should be female" and "totally ashamed I think that, wtf is wrong with me?"
It's been a little over a decade since I was first enlightened to the possibility of my mental/emotional gender not matching my physical body. And even before then I have always felt wrong in some way. At first I thought that I might simply be gay or bisexual, but even that didn't "feel right" somehow. But growing up and going through school, I quickly found that anything strange or different in any way was immediately ostracized, either in or out of school, so anything LGBTQ+ was always considered highly taboo. I went to elementary, middle, and high schools where anything even remotely considered LGBTQ+ was shunned, bullied, hated on, and so on. So naturally when I started having such thoughts and feelings I immediately bottled them up and kept it all to myself, even trying to forget or push it aside altogether. It wasn't until I was in college that I started to more seriously consider what my feelings meant, rather than trying to bury them.
Add to that a family that's always had a difficult time getting along. In particular my father, who has always--and even now--actively spouted hateful rhetoric about anything LGBTQ+, which always fills me with dread and shame. That said, I know not all of my family is like that, so that's some relief. It's just that my relationship with my dad is complicated. We are very close and we do a lot together--in particular fishing and such--which makes it easy to overlook his incredible biases. But every now and then he will see something in the news or on social media about LGBTQ+ people and immediately go on a tirade about how it's unnatural, "against god", and so on and so forth. (For the record, I am in now way trying to religion bash anyone... though his religion is one of the leading reasons he seems to be so spiteful...). It probably goes without saying, but I have not come out to him or most of my family as of yet. The only one in my immediate family who knows anything is my older brother, and I am grateful to him of being supportive, even if he doesn't understand.
So where does that leave me now? As I said, I've been in a constant battle for a very long time trying to figure out what's going on in my head and heart. I think the most annoying part of this is that I can't even pin down exactly why I feel I should be female most of the time. I can talk about all the so-called "feminine" things that I enjoy, embrace, and think about. But I can just as easily talk about the "masculine" things that I also enjoy too. And the distinction between masculine/feminine thinking is kind of b******t in my opinion anyway, but the way our society still categorizes things in those ways makes my confusion even more intense.
Aaannnddd I am suddenly typing an essay before I knew it. xD Sorry, I did not initially intend for this to be so long-winded. haha... I'm not really expecting any answers that will give me the "oh! that's why! I totally get it now!" feeling (though that'd be great, haha), but I decided to join up here to try and figure out these feelings by talking to others here and try to gain some insights along the way.
To that end, I'm looking forward to spending time here.
