Quote from: Michelle_K on October 13, 2024, 10:42:12 PMDoes any of this really matter, other than the fact that I was sexually abused as a child, while wearing dresses.

It does matter, but only because it helped to form who you are. Understanding that abuse that happened to you as a child was not your fault and nothing to do with anything you did is part of the key to accepting yourself - and looking back as an adult and seeing where some of our more troubling thought processes come from. Which will allow you to disconnect them and free yourself to live your life for you.

It really wasn't much of a joke as real life, by the time I figure out what is being said, the subject is already on something else.
Bringing the subject back to the topless bar, there are a few things I learned after that experience. It was a few years later that my mother said she slapped me while breast feeding. She hoped that was not the reason I have trouble relating to women. But that was just the first, if I get my face slapped just for glancing across the table at my sister, how long does it take to associate breasts with punishment.
I wonder what my dad was thinking, a 10-11 year old sexually active with his own cousin. It was not true, she asked me to massage her breasts, it did not go beyond that. How proud, his feminine acting boy has proved himself a man. He told her father, and I was no longer welcome at his house. I was forbidden to talk to my best friend. Her brother decided I need to be punished, the best way being sexually molested, with the help of three other boy cousins. I was told that if I went near any of the girls, there would be more punishment. Even the fathers watched me like a hawk, keeping me away from their daughters.

My therapist told told me, it was highly unlikely that I would lose my fear of women. As a male I could not get near a woman. My mind came up with a solution. The idea was that if I was a woman, I would lose my fear of women. It was meant to only go far enough to lose my fear, in my mind only. Some where in the process, I lost my armor, my outer shirt ending up on the floor. In jeans and t shirt, my feminine shape was there for all to see. I was a woman, with fear of only one woman, my mother.
Michelle

Quote from: Michelle_K on October 15, 2024, 12:00:45 PMMy mind came up with a solution. The idea was that if I was a woman, I would lose my fear of women. It was meant to only go far enough to lose my fear, in my mind only.

We become the thing we fear the most? Perhaps.

But have you ever thought of turning what your therapist said around? In what you've written so far I'm hearing less of fear of women and more of fear of being a man around women. Those are different things.

I could say that the therapist was not really interested in curing me. That I was a source of income for him.
When I first got to him, I got put on individual and group sessions each week. Maybe the most telling part is he went on vacation and brought back a pair of Disney mouse ears for me.

Because my mother could change to anger at any instant, I had a tendency to stay out of arms reach of any of the women I worked with. Things did get strange after I was no longer hiding things. One woman telling me how she planned on getting breast reduction surgery.

You could say that I was sabotaging myself, trying to act like a male and then unconsciously stuffing my shirt pockets so I look like a female. I think the biggest change was revealing the fact that I had real breasts.

It has been so long, but I think that blue dress with the white stripe is the one I bought in the local clothing store about 20 years ago. I got called sir, but that didn't stop me from buying the dress.

I maybe should have put this elsewhere. My dad was a beer drinking German. According to the DNA it may be more a German Viking (German, Swedish, and Denmark.) Add in Scottish for the Kilt). I wonder if that is why I like plaid material. With enough data I might find out which plaid design or clan.
My mother was the red haired, anti-drinking Irish. My mother would claim English, Irish, French, and Dutch. Although my DNA did not show any Irish, my cousins have Irish.
Michelle

Can I say I have ADHD and autism, even though I have not been diagnosed? I have a tendency to forget things, like forgetting to mention that there seemed to be an argument about his drinking every night. It was very common to see him with a beer in his hand. When we would go to fix fences, the beer case would be in the trailer with the tools needed. The thing was something was always forgotten, there was nothing for me to drink. If we stayed out all day, that would mean I would get dehydrated. I once thought I had just gotten used to going without drinking or eating. It turns out due to autism, I don't get hungry or thirsty. I keep a journal of what I have eaten during the day, and I also have set times to eat. Keeping track of the calories, I know how much I have eaten. Drinking is a bit different, I have a bunch of 8oz mason jars and they get rinsed and put in a rinse rack when they get emptied. At any time I can check the clock and count the bottles in the rinse rack.
Michelle

Quote from: Michelle_K on October 15, 2024, 05:23:41 PMI could say that the therapist was not really interested in curing me. That I was a source of income for him.

You will be a better judge of that than I, but I think it's worth you taking another tour around the idea that you might have a fear of women. Do you believe that?

Quote from: Michelle_K on October 16, 2024, 12:34:54 AMCan I say I have ADHD and autism, even though I have not been diagnosed? I have a tendency to forget things, like forgetting to mention that there seemed to be an argument about his drinking every night.

Again, you could be right and it would be worth you being formally assessed for ADHD for sure, because if you are, there are treatments available.

Every story you have told about your childhood is of situations where however hard you tried, your family reacted as if it wasn't good enough. Yet, unlike many faced with the same situation, you kept on trying. There's a strength there in your character that many just don't have. You must have some stories about times when that part of you helped you win. Perhaps after you left home, though?

Quite literally, over her dead body. This is what I wrote in the online therapy, Dear mother, you have died, you no longer have any power over me.
She lived to the age of 91. The weather was bad and I never got to her funeral. The truth is I did not want to go to her funeral. I found me a suit and started out, I drove about a mile and then turned around. The icy roads caused some slipping. I did not need to see her body in a casket to know that she had died. She had been cremated so there was no casket. In the end, I did not wear a man's suit to her funeral.

I heard the quote you can never go home again. A few years ago, I moved off the family farm, and the farm was sold. Within a week after the paper work was finished, several photos were sent to me. Smoke was arising from the pit where the house used to sit. Not one of the buildings was left standing.

I think that in the process of telling our problems, we fail to tell the good stuff. I may not remember the 36 inch tall doll, but there is a photo of me at 3 years old holding the doll. I do remember the doll house, and there is a photo. It was a quarter mile walk to the local garbage dump, where I found the doll house.

I grew up with 3 younger sisters. My younger brothers would be later. It would not have been unusual for us to sit at the kitchen table playing with our paper dolls. Perhaps, me being older, I would cut out the doll clothes we would make. At some point that would end.
I would go play in the basement. In the rafters I had tucked my paper dolls. One day I went to play with my paper dolls and they were gone. I thought my dad had found them and threw them in the stove. After my dad died, I found my paper dolls in a drawer in my dad's workshop. I could only speculate as to why he kept my paper dolls.

You could say I have all these memories growing up as a girl, even though my birth certificate says male.
Michelle

Quote from: Michelle_K on October 16, 2024, 01:19:22 PMAfter my dad died, I found my paper dolls in a drawer in my dad's workshop. I could only speculate as to why he kept my paper dolls. You could say I have all these memories growing up as a girl.

Or you could say there are memories of who you are and who you've always been? You write that you wonder why your dad kept your dolls. What were you feelings when you found them again?

Given the fact that I find my paper dolls 20 years after they disappeared, about all I could feel about it was surprise.

What I was getting at was the fact that even though I was AMAB, I was allowed to have a doll house and a large doll. I was allowed to have paper dolls and sleepovers with a girl. Then to realize that the photo of me at age 3 with the doll, I am wearing a skirt. The photo of me at age 2 1/2 sitting, I am also wearing a skirt. I can even add the dress up where I wore my mothers shoes and some memory of my mother putting lipstick on me. For some reason, as a child, I was treated as a girl.
Doing laundry at that time may have been women's work, so I doubt that any guy can say they got their fingers in the wringer like I did.
The idea that I would remember my parents argument when I was 3-4 years old seems odd. Maybe it was about me, and was a recurring argument. In fact it was about my mother putting dresses on me. And her response was that I should been given the choice of being a girl or a boy. That only makes sense if I am an intersex.
While growing up my dad said something about I should reimburse him for the money spent at the hospital when I was born. None of that makes any sense since I know I was born in the house on the farm. Maybe it has something to do with what looks like a scar between my legs.
I don't know what was going on at the time, but for some reason my dad called me a morphodite. That happens to be a slur for hermaphrodite, now called intersex.

I'm almost willing to bet that being intersex is so rare that most doctors have never heard the term, so as far as they are concerned, it never happens. Then there may be others that perform the surgery, and list it as some other medical condition. It can be denied because there is no proof. In my case, it was pre-computers, so all the medical records are lost. Inactive for so many years that the file got tossed into the paper recycle.

Even without any of this, I believed I was a girl, with boy parts. I did read a medical record about my appendectomy. I was told that my appendix ruptured on the operating table. there was no mention of any rupture in my records, and it was no surprise to me that the doctor wrote about observing a healthy ovary. I did some checking on the internet, and I did find it was possible to observe an ovary. Another thing I did was to determine the chances of the doctor doing another appendectomy on the same day in a military hospital.

Regardless of how it happened, It did happen. Wearing boy clothes, no nail polish, no makeup, etc., and I would get gendered as female. In fact, the last time I used a men's rest room, the cashier thought I was entering the wrong rest room. I think I wrote someplace that I don't even smell like a male.
Michelle
 

Quote from: Michelle_K on October 17, 2024, 02:36:07 PMI'm almost willing to bet that being intersex is so rare that most doctors have never heard the term, so as far as they are concerned, it never happens.

Interesex is more common than most people think and we were taught extensively enough about it at medical school forty years ago I can still name all the conditions which result in it. I had a relationship with someone who had complete androgen insensitivity too, but unless US medical education is very different to the UK, I'd guess most doctors in America would have a similar level of knowledge.

Quote from: Michelle_K on October 17, 2024, 02:36:07 PMWhat I was getting at was the fact that even though I was AMAB, I was allowed to have a doll house and a large doll. I was allowed to have paper dolls and sleepovers with a girl. Then to realize that the photo of me at age 3 with the doll, I am wearing a skirt. The photo of me at age 2 1/2 sitting, I am also wearing a skirt. I can even add the dress up where I wore my mothers shoes and some memory of my mother putting lipstick on me. For some reason, as a child, I was treated as a girl.

All this makes it sound like somewhere along the line there was a change of attitude by your parents, because you've written that to begin with they were fine with you in girl's clothes and then suddenly they were completely the other way. The trouble with memories from the age you would have been then is all you really have are a few snapshots and it can be hard to work out what the context was, but I gain the feeling something significant must have happened after you were three? What?

It that's so, it would square with your dad keeping the paper dolls. If they hadn't had a meaning for him, he wouldn't have done that. What could the meaning had been?

I must have wrote it, but somehow it never got posted.
back to the travels of my parents out west. I would have been about 3, and I was dropped off at my uncle's house while my parents went out west. I'm guessing that my uncle would not put up with me being feminine. I'm not sure how many months I was there.

June 12, 2023
Why do men sexually abuse children?
8:44am
I wrote this yesterday in a text file

The Pedophile:
There was a guy that helped my dad work on car when I was about 2 or three years old. When my sister was born she had a cleft lip and missing palate. she got pneumonia with her first breath. She died less then 24 hours. My dad went looking for answers, perhaps straighten his head out. My grandpa chased the partner off the farm and he was not seen for years. (insert out west vacation rumor here.)
After my dad died. It was within a few years that he returned. I started getting headaches. Later, after my mother had married him, my brother-in-law decided I needed some therapy. He was saying I was angry at the guy for taking my mother away from me, and that my mother had the right to marry him. Because of my brother-in-law, I went into full mode panic. In my panic I had driven to a counseling service. I had an identity crisis.
Sorry, I can't finish the story. My extreme hatred for the guy that married my mother was because he used my mouth for his sexual pleasure when I was about 3 years old.
(The memory was recovered after I left therapy)


I wrote this later
I might be too dehydrated to have actual tears. I had to go out and think a bit about what this all means. This is the first time I've told anyone about this.
I think there was a Minnesota warrant for his arrest. I learned from his son, he had sexually assaulted his own daughter.
In high school I might have met another son. I couldn't understand the anger, but I knew it wasn't directed towards the son. It was directed towards the name.
I don't want to push it I don't know where it come from but the was another piece of memory that had popped up before "You want to be a girl, I'll teach you what it's like to be a girl." (I'm aware that I am now using contractions.) I don't know if my mother put dresses on me at that time.

I was not angry at him for marring my mother. In fact I was glad my mother had left. Did I know what would happen to him? Perhaps.
Before they were married, she was all sweet and kind, and would join him at the bar. After they married everything changed. Her true feeling about alcohol showed through. Any drop of alcohol raised her Irish temper. It got so bad that a minister had to intervene. I hope he realized this was the mother of the child he abused.
Karma can be a bitch.
Miss Michael


Michelle

I had a bit of a problem with my home electrolysis. I had to take apart the probe and repair the connection. I think it is working properly now. around my lips it is difficult to see any hairs. running my fingers around I can feel a few hairs. Under my lower lip it looks very smooth. I might be able to do all my facial hair.
I found a couple of photos of me with a beard. Only thing was they showed that no hair grew on my cheeks. My body really doesn't have that much hair. Despite eating the crust on my bread, I never did get any chest hair. I even hear about men having hair on their backs, which I have none. I do have some hair on my belly, below my ribs.
I had an uncle that I guess could be called a furry, he had hair sticking out the neck of his shirts. He was married to my mother's sister.
Michelle

Quote from: Michelle_K on October 17, 2024, 05:54:21 PM...my brother-in-law decided I needed some therapy. He was saying I was angry at the guy for taking my mother away from me, and that my mother had the right to marry him... I had to go out and think a bit about what this all means.

It's common for other members of a family to 'rationalise' situations where they know something is off and protect themselves from stress by convincing the victim they are the one that needs help instead of telling the abuser and anyone complicit with them they are the ones who need straightening out. As a defense mechanism, it sucks.

Doing that leaves the abused person feeling more isolated and it's common for people to start repressing (trying to bury) memories from times like that, so it's good you've been able to process it. The trouble with repressed memories is you can never bury them deep enough they can't reactivate under stress - so processing them is important.

Quote from: Michelle_K on October 17, 2024, 05:54:21 PMBefore they were married, she was all sweet and kind, and would join him at the bar. After they married everything changed. Her true feeling about alcohol showed through. Any drop of alcohol raised her Irish temper.

That suggests your mother had as many problems dealing with your stepfather as you did, tried to drown them out with alcohol, but failed and let them spill over onto you. As a child you found yourself being told all the problems were with you, though clearly they were not.

Quote from: Michelle_K on October 17, 2024, 05:54:21 PM"You want to be a girl, I'll teach you what it's like to be a girl."

If someone had said that kindly, with an intent to help and not to weaponise it against you, how would you have reacted to that?

That suggests your mother had as many problems dealing with your stepfather as you did, tried to drown them out with alcohol, but failed and let them spill over onto you. As a child you found yourself being told all the problems were with you, though clearly they were not.


I may not have been clear enough. She would join him at the bar, but would not drink. After they were married, if he touched a drop of alcohol, it would raise her Irish temper. The arguments about his drinking got so bad that that the minister from the church had to intervene and told her to go back to Minnesota.

My mother told me about the minister. Living in town, the neighbors would have been closer. Living on the farm, when my parents got into an argument about my dad drinking, the neighbors didn't hear it.

I was raised in a way of do as I say or feel my wrath. After I moved out, my mother insisted I move back home. After I moved back home she insisted that my friends weren't really friends and that driving to see them was a waste of time.


I can wonder if my dad's drinking caused him to lose touch with reality. I wonder if he truly believed that he won the skates in a raffle. I can only speculate because of the way he told the story about how his mother gave him the telephone.(It was really given to me.) The big doll was also found in his workshop. It is possible he made up stories about his mother giving him the paper dolls, but I never heard him tell them.

If I'm going down a rabbit hole, I might as well see if I can find Alice. It seems Alice might not be totally responsible. Her hug is too tight, and her perfume is overpowering. Might by my perspective due to the autism.

While growing up, things would disappear. I would get told that nobody was there, therefore nobody took it. I just imagined that I had that item. Could the same thing happen with a 36 inch tall doll. It disappears, and my dad convinces us that it was never there. At some point I ask about the doll and my mother tells me I never had the doll. The photo shows me holding the doll, and I believe it is the same doll that is in the storage trailer.
Just speculation, he then makes up some story about how his mother gave him the doll(my mother gave me the doll.), and then believes his own story. The doll is in his possession, therefore the doll is his.
Michelle

Unknown to my dad, he is creating another problem. My brother is way younger than me. He believes the story my dad told about the telephone. He thinks he should inherent the telephone to remember his dad by.
Michelle

I sit down to write and I may get writers block, I intend to write about one thing and I end up writing about something else.
It has been a while since I last played any video games. I was playing Disney's Infinity. I was having trouble doing tight maneuvers through the death star. I was playing on a PlayStation 3, and thinking the problem might be that the controller doesn't fit my hand properly, I bought a Xbox. That didn't help much as the controller was about the same, and one joystick changed positions.
When I was in the hospital, there was a remark made about my long fingers. I guess that confirms that my hands are longer. I think I found a larger controller, but does not work with my game consoles.

For some reason you tube will suggest a lot of transgender videos, and I think one of them may have suggested that trans females tend to play more female characters in video games. I did play the Tomb Raider games but then I also played the Super Mario games. I guess in Disney Infinity I have a tendency to play female characters.
Then again I haven't played any video games since before my cataract surgery.

I mentioned my you tube feed. I have watched a lot of videos about narcissism, and learned about the scapegoat, and other types of symptoms.
Other videos have been about autism and how to set up to make life easier. I had mentioned once to my therapist about role playing. That would mean dress up as a mechanic to work on my vehicles, or wear a maids outfit to clean the house. Interesting that wearing Harley earrings I had more ambition to work on a car. In some of the videos it is suggested that headphones could be worn to reduce the noise from the vacuum, or even noise canceling headphones.

I guess I haven't said it yet, if I was not transgender, I would be gay. In other words I find men attractive.
Maybe granny from the Playboy magazine put it best, "Maybe she doesn't do any exercises, but that handsome exercise coach still gets her heart rate up.
Another one from granny, "I don't know much about football, but I know a tight end."
Maybe that's why I liked the strongman competition.

I was wondering if I could find a decent video game controller and adapt a board from a PlayStation or Xbox controller.
Michelle

Yesterday, on my walk, I saw a box of weights and barbells. The box said free. I thought of some female that was living at our house. Some stuff had been put at the end of our driveway, and a piece of cardboard had the word free on it. Later the sign was gone, but everything else was there. It seemed odd that she would take the cardboard because it said free.
My sister-in-law must have thought that if it was free, then it is a great deal. In cleaning up the farm, I think we had to pay for the disposal of over 100 TVs that she got for free. And we had refrigerators in almost every shed.

Back to the barbells. Since I was walking, it would have been difficult to carry that much weight several blocks. It was raining today, and the weight set is gone. It may be that the weights were put inside, out of the rain.
 I already have a barbell, but the plastic weights have deteriorated. They were plastic covered cement.
I do have a couple of metal weight plates. I did a bit of thinking, that the free set had mismatched weight plates, and for me would not be ideal. My weights are on the hand sized bars, and were too heavy when I had a weight restriction. Besides, I just plain forget to do the weight lifting. I got to thinking, wondering if I would do my weight lifting if the weights were painted pink, or maybe lavender. To me it would be important that the style of the weight plates matched, and the collar that held the weights on the bar, matched the other bars.
Michelle

Consider, yes, the deck is stacked against you. There is no way you can win, Unless, you know the secret.
An example is in the spring, cleaning up the manure pile behind grandpa's barn. My dad goes through the gate and goes around the pole in the yard. My uncle goes through the gate and takes the shortcut by not going around the pole. Grandpa tells my uncle he is doing it wrong and he must go around the pole. Grandpa tells my dad he is doing it wrong and is not to go around the pole.

Have a favorite food, don't let mom know. If she knows it is your favorite, you might get lucky if it is served once a month. If mom thinks you don't like it, it might get served several time a week. Of course, if it my sister's favorite, then it gets served more often.
Maybe there is something else going on here, and my sister insists that we eat what she likes, and she doesn't like what I like. And my sister's voice is irritating when my mother has her migraines, and she gets her favorite just to shut her up.

My mother once told me that when she got married, she traded one barn of cows for another barn of cows. My dad was no help if he was using the smashed fingers as an excuse to not milk cows. I think they were still milking by hand.

Now thinking about the older child taking the toys of the younger child. My uncle would have been the baby of the family until my dad was born. My uncle was 7 years older than my dad. It is kind of strange that there was a room in my uncle's house that had all kinds of toys he played with as a child, and my dad had no toys he played with as a child. Makes me wonder if my uncle was taking toys away from my dad. It would seem that my uncle was favored.
After my dad died, maybe years later, my uncle tried to tell me that some of the machinery that I remember we had when I was a child, was borrowed from him, and now he wanted it back. I still think that when he helped my dad tow the truck out of the river, he borrowed tow chains from my dad, and the chains got put on his tractor when he went home. I could go on with the stories.

In anticipation of starting estrogen, I decided to get a jar of pickles in case I would get any cravings. Interesting that I am craving pickles even before starting estrogen. That leads to another problem. I was having problems getting the pickle jars open even before I broke both wrists. Living at home we did have a solution, one person held the jar with both hands and the other twisted the cover with both hands.
Speaking of using two hands, do you know how difficult it is to push the call button on the hospital bed with two broken wrists? Sometimes I used fingers on both hands, and other times I used my elbow.
Michelle

I don't know why it was so difficult to remember the word dumbbell. That is the one handed bar with weights. The empty bar weighs 4 pounds. Add 4 2.5 pound weight plates and it now weighs 14 pounds. The ends of the bars are threaded, so the collars are threaded. I found my long twisted bar and the ends are also threaded, so three of my bars are threaded. I have no idea where my long straight bar is, but the one I had used slide on collars. I have a triceps bar and it is a bit rusty, and again uses the slide on collars.
I don't recall if it was me or somebody else that had the incident with the straight bar. It seems the weight and collars were put on the straight bar and the collars were not tightened. During the lift, the bar tilted and the weights slid off one end. The bar then went the other way, and the other weights slid off.
Since breaking my wrists, and having plates put in my wrists, I may not have full rotation of my wrists. I don't know if I could grab the long straight bar properly. Palm down seems to look ok, but palm up, my wrists don't rotate enough. The twisted bar would be fine, but I may want the straight bar to force rotation of my wrists. In that case I want a bar with the threaded ends, and I should replace the triceps bar, so it also has threaded ends.
The amount of weight does not matter, since I'm not going to build up any muscle. I would like cast iron plates of the same design. currently I have 4 cast iron and 4 plastic covered. I don't know about painting the plastic covered weights, but I could paint the cast iron plates. I might have to wait until next summer to paint them. At the moment I am thinking 2 plastic covered weights on each dumbbell. That would make each one 9 pounds. And the 4 cast iron plates on the twisted bar. That would be 10 pounds plus the weight of the empty bar.
Michelle