This is the story about how I got here. It's a very long post, because I am 60 years old and non binary took most of that time for me to work out. I've posted it as a new thread because I don't want to push everyone else's stories off the page. Somewhere in here are most of the things I have learned and what the mechanisms are behind the learning and if they are useful to anyone, I'll be glad. Otherwise read it and perhaps it'll help you go to sleep.

I grew up in a mostly rural environment and my parents had a stable relationship. Dad can be serious fun and I get my sense of humour from him, but with him it is either his way or the highway. My mother's side of the bargain was and is to agree with him 😊

It sounds funny put like that and it very often was, but though it was mostly benign, you can imagine what adolescence is like growing up with an uncompromising father and a mother who cannot openly support you if it would go against your father's wishes. As part of my survival kit I gained expertise at some of what I would regard as the worst aspects of machismo, but beyond a lot of shouting, there was never any abuse in my family. Assuming you exclude my father's tendency to sulk, occasional fits of depression and his mercurial temper – the latter I inherited by example and have been suppressing ever since – life was okay to good.

My mother sounds like a complete cypher, but she was and is very liberal and extremely tolerant. Full access to either of these aspects of her personality would have improved my life beyond measure, but she more or less locked me out of them because she was primarily loyal to my father and would always back up his point of view – even as she disagreed with him. If it sounds maddening, I assure you, it was.

The first time I wore a dress was when a bunch of us (the rest were girls) and I swapped clothes and compared notes, so to speak. It was hilarious, we did it a few times without telling anyone and I'm still in touch with some of the women who were involved a lifetime later. For most of them and for me, the event was no more than normal childhood curiosity, but in me it awoke a spark which wouldn't burst into flame for a few years.

What does being brought up as a man or a woman mean? It means that from the moment we are too young to have an opinion on the matter, let alone ask questions, we will be bought clothes that match our sex assigned at birth (SAB) and taught how to behave according to society's rules for our SAB. So, if you are assigned male at birth, you will be brought up with the masculine gender rule set, and if you are assigned female, you will be brought up with the feminine gender rule set.

These sets of rules are known as 'scripts' and after thousands of years during which only two sexes have been assigned at birth, the masculinity and femininity scripts have become concrete and so embedded most people don't have to think about them. Your family won't think about them when they are embedding them in you, your friends don't think about them, and you won't think about them. Until...

...the fateful day when there is an impossible to ignore head on crash between the gendered script you have absorbed and how you would behave if you'd never been exposed to it.

For me, that fateful day came somewhere in my teens, when I began to deal with the issue that while I was comfortable with wearing women's clothes, almost no-one else was. Apart from my one friend from the original group, who used to invite me around, let me have the run of her wardrobe and who introduced me to the idea of wearing bras and knickers and much else which I'll leave out because of site rules. We'll call her Ginny and she acted like my key to Pandora's box and I to hers. We lost touch over our university years but she went on to run an airline.

Ginny was a tomboy right through her teen years and – perhaps because she had the inverse femininity/masculinity gender balance to me – helped me understand I wasn't abnormal or unique. She'd been brought up with feminine scripts and had the wardrobe and the makeup skills to match, but she was happier with many masculine traits, while I was the other way around. There was nothing conscious in our friendship about this, but we both knew it, even if neither of us could put it in words.

For those in search of more detail, the masculinity script encourages agentic traits and behaviours including independence, assertiveness, courage, ambition, leadership, rationality, dominance, emotional control and willingness to take risks.

Femininity, by contrast, is about valuing communal traits and behaviour including dependence, docility, empathy, sensitivity, modesty, humility, unselfishness, supportiveness, cheerfulness, emotional lability and a nurturing, yielding nature.

So unconsciously does this process happen that by the time most of us reach the puberty, we have absorbed masculinity or femininity so well and identify with them so completely they are part of our inner being and define our core concept of normality. The key here is that no halfway states are allowed between having a male body coupled with masculine traits and having a female body and feminine traits.

Which means people's responses to gendered situations become like reflexes, because they only have to look at someone to work out whether they will behave like a man or a woman. Fear, uncertainty and doubt follow if that person does not dress or behave as expected. Why the FUD? Because rules have been broken and reflex emotions are involved.

Once an input triggers our learned gendered behaviours, we have little control over our response because the scripts are buried so deep they have become innate. As in they are part of what makes us, us. The gotcha is that if we consciously try and go against a gendered response, a part of our mind will instinctively rebel against it as a reflex – however natural the behaviour might have been for us before all the gender learning we were exposed to growing up took root.

The worst thing about this reflex response is that when internal rebellions like this happen, they don't wave a flag to identify what's happening and they happen so fast they can be hard to spot. Often, a rebellion can feel like an intense phobia over something trans associated, or manifest as disgust with yourself or some part of your behaviour.

I couldn't help noticing that when I was with Ginny, with me dressed in her clothes and she in mine, I felt good about it, high even. But afterward, I would sometimes experience waves of disgust at having worn her clothes, despite the fact I'd enjoyed it and she'd done so too. This was my masculine gendered scripting operating the way it was designed to do. My subconscious was shouting, 'How dare you break my rules? I was programmed with these to keep you safe!'

I also knew there was no way I could experience that high dressed in Ginny's clothes walking down the street, or with my parents, because other people's reactions would not be welcoming. They wouldn't think it was normal and to add insult to injury my own masculine script reactions would hair trigger in that situation and beat me up too.

This is what the experience of 'incongruence' feels like – your learned gender says 2+2 is unquestionably 4, but your natural gendering is equally emphatic the answer is 3. Neither side will compromise and outright warfare can be the result, with innocent bystanders including your self-respect and – particularly – your mood getting caught in the crossfire. Your brain fries trying to reconcile the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object and exhaustion and perhaps depression loom.

At any age, the experience of this clash is moderately catastrophic, so it isn't surprising that so many trans people suffer mental health issues. People who discover they are gay when they have been brought up straight go through a similar and equally painful experience.

It isn't just you are at war with yourself, the responses of everyone else and their cat will very likely lie along the spectrum from denial, through visible discomfort, to active hostility. It takes a self-confidence most of us lack to get past that and assert yourself and that too can be exhausting.

Most of us reach this trigger point some years down the line from our birth. If the mismatch between how we naturally would behave and how our learned gendering has taught to behave is big enough, the trigger could happen pre-teens. In many of us it will happen during our teens, and if the incongruence is weaker – or our gendered scripts are particularly strong – it will happen later.

In me, the shock of incongruence was diluted by Ginny being the darling she was. I rationalised if she was fine with it, there must be other people who were fine with it too – I just hadn't met any. She made me realise that being me in her room hadn't caused the earth to stop revolving or the sky to fall in. Being me was fine – it was other people who were the problem.

This one intervention mostly got me off my own case, leaving me only with one less battle to fight, but a whole bunch of unanswered questions.

Working through the cascade of scripting failures that happens after your trigger point is reached is tough enough if you have a binary gender incongruence – as in were assigned female at birth but are more comfortable being male, or vice versa. But what if you aren't comfortable being either? Somewhere in between the two? Or completely off the scale?

Even people within the trans community can be at a loss over this. So many battles have been fought over the concept known today as gender dysphoria (medical-ese for your gender identity being at odds with your sex assigned at birth) that it is easy to end up with the impression that gender and sex are the same thing.

Equating gender and sex works well for people who have resolved a binary dysphoria through sex reassignment surgery, which swaps physical sex to match gendered sex through sexual reassignment surgery (SRS). As challenging a road that SRS can be, following it is about as much use as a chocolate teapot for anyone with a non-binary gender identity because you don't have a 'right' gendered sex to swap to. You don't actually identify as either a woman or a man.

This is a big issue, because some of the most recent research suggests that within the US at least, the most numerous group of trans people identify as having a non-binary gender identity. According to the US Transgender Survey early insights report 2022, 38% of trans people are non-binary, compared to 35% trans women and 25% trans men. Within the non-binary group, the majority were assigned female at birth.

Very early on – in the bits of my relationship with Ginny I will draw a veil over – I realised I like a lot of what goes with being a man and that I was comfortable with a slice of the masculinity scrips. It helped she was more or less the reverse of me and we used to joke about getting married. In our shared dream, she would buy my clothes and I would buy hers and we would be whoever we wanted when we were alone with each other.

But it did end and we didn't get married.

No-one had entertained the idea of non-binary gender identity then, but the more I think of that relationship, the more I realise that's what we both were. Sheer chance had made us next door neighbours. It was one of my luckiest breaks, looking back and I hope it was for her too.

If you experience the binary incongruence of being trapped in a female body and and would find life 100% more liveable if your body was that of a man – or vice versa - there's a whole medical pipeline set up to help, difficult though it may be to find the portal and tough though it may be to transit.

But some of us aren't comfortable with the body and gendered behaviour package we've been handed and have imagined what it would be like to be the 'other' sex – only for it to offer us no clear answer and even introduce complications.

That's me and that was Ginny. But I had one other experience that pushed the door further open to realising I have a non-binary gender identity and that was with someone I had an intense relationship with. She had complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS).

This time it wasn't chance, because by then I had gone to medical school – I met her wandering around a corridor trying to find outpatients. To cut this relationship very short, she was male genetically and had testes internally, but because her body was insensitive to testosterone she had a female body. This is complex and I can go further if anyone wants, but when she told me she had AIS I replied I didn't care and to make us even, shared my 'secret'.

We had a relationship which was as fun as all got out, dominated by mutual crossdressing and a realisation that for the first time in her case and the second in mine, we'd met someone who was supportive of how we were and got it that sex and gender aren't synonymous and can be completely disconnected.

So how can you tell if you have a non-binary gender identity?

At one end of the scale, if you could be magically transformed into a man, assuming you were assigned female at birth; or could be transformed into a woman if you were assigned male at birth – and the transformation would resolve every single one of your problems (bar the intractable social ones, like fixing relationships, work and responses of cis-people) you likely have a binary incongruence.

If, however, the snap of a finger transform leaves you thinking, 'Hold on, I'm gaining much here, but there's a bunch of things I'm gonna miss and would love to hang onto, but I can't do that if I have the body of a different sex!', or 'I feel this way one day and that way another, help, because I can't have a woman's body Tuesday and a man's Wednesday!', or 'I don't feel comfortable in the girls' room or the boys' room,' then you should consider the possibility you have a non-binary gender identity.

What have I learned from this mess and what can you learn from my journey?

I've had the occasional, 'I'm trapped in the body of the wrong sex!' moments, but they've been inconsistent and fleeting compared to how dominant they can be in people I know with binary gender incongruence.

If like me, you have a non-binary gender identity, your balance point may not lie exactly in the middle ground, but may instead have a tendency in one direction or the other, or even play hard to get and drift around. Just as some people are mostly attracted to their own sex, but are attracted to some members of another sex, so may your gender identity work.

Again, if your gender identity is non-binary, full sex reassignment surgery is quite likely not be a solution for you in the same way it would not be a solution for me. Yet I've had abstract discussions about this scenario with professional colleagues over the years and the majority have come up with the SRS route, despite it being unlikely to fix my issue. They equate sex with gender and their solution to any mismatch between the two is to swap the physical side as if it was as simple as the terminals on a battery. In me, all that would happen there is I would end up looking at the same problems, but from another sex.

I've not gone through therapy myself, but my past professional experience and talking to others has also taught me you risk ending up with a slew of different labels if you don't raise the question of having non-binary gender incongruence. If that is you, then getting that understanding in place within yourself and your team will have benefits all round.

What is the future if I am non-binary?

The end of the line is learning to love yourself for the unique person you are and helping those who love you to love you for being that person. That will be a big step for the people who love you (though nowhere as big as the leap you made) because they will have to throw out all the certainties of gender binaries they've taken for granted all their lives. And which – crucially – work for them.

They will make mistakes along the way, but their journey will be the reward for everyone, so be sympathetic, though firm. Accept a compromise if they learn to love you for being gender different, even if they don't fully understand the difference, which about half of them will not. Regrettably, some will refuse even to start on the journey and you'll have to reconcile yourself to the possibility they will have to be left behind.

This is so much easier said than done, but if you have a non-binary gender identity, then whatever the sex you were assigned at birth, you will never feel quite right until you can adapt what you were taught about living that sex to your new lived equilibrium. That will involve learning to accept who you are, trashing some old gender scripts and adopting new ones, but every win along the way makes the next hurdle easier to jump. Reaching your destination may even involve some hormones or surgery, but hold off on them until you understand what non-binary means for you.

One final thought. I've escaped some of my worst moments by thinking through what my life would be like if I was the only person living on a planet where I could get off my case and live (as in dress and behave) as I would like to do. Then I add the people back in – but only the ones who are comfortable with me living like that. In neither of those two worlds do I experience any problems with not having particularly male or particularly female gender expression or behaviours.

My current relationship, which is decades old now, works along those lines and I do everything I can to make my partner feel valued, supported and understood in return for her doing the same for me. I've still got more male scripts than female ones and I do a great act as a man, but I've discovered I prefer swimming in the middle of the pool. Or near the middle. Somewhere that isn't at one end or the other, anyway.

It took me a lot of years to get there, but if I can do it, so can you.

@TanyaG
TanyaG:
I think it is wonderful that you started your own personal Blog Thread.  Just writing details out like you have is not only a good recap for your readers and followers but it also can be good personal therapy for you as well. 

As you might already be aware, I have my personal Blog Thread here on the Forum but I also keep an "old-school" pen & paper journal at home complete with colorful doodling and appropriate snapshot photos.  I have kept a personal journal since I was in Junior High School... we called them "Diaries" back then.
I find that when I have difficult issues that I am working through that writing down my thoughts helps me to ponder and to formulate positive solutions.    When things are going well, I certainly write about those things as well.

As your Blog thread develops more regular readers and followers you can expect joyful and congratulatory responses to your good news and when your news is not-so-good, you will find your readers and followers offering their ears to listen and their shoulders for you to lean on.

On cold and rainy nights when I am staying in, I often find myself in my comfy chair in front of my fireplace thumbing through and reviewing my journals, that is when I can gain insights as to what I need to do to overcome future difficulties and to see how to avoid future problems....  I can spend hours just reminiscing about my past life events.... sometimes with tears in my eyes.

I will be eagerly following your new Blog Thread, and please, if you will, continue to keep it updated as you feel comfortable doing. 
Your new Blog Thread will be in essence your HOME here on the Forum where your readers and followers can find you and leave their comments and thoughts.
Here on the forums you will certainly come across many like-minded members here, some can become very good friends as you share your thoughts with one-another on the various threads around the Forums but also in Personal Message exchanges.

Thank you for starting and posting your new personal Blog thread....
...you will find it quite beneficial to yourself and perhaps it will provide help and encouragement to others that read it.

HUGS and well wishes,
Danielle [Northern Star Girl]
The Forum Administrator  (Email: alaskandanielle@yahoo.com)

Thanks Danielle, you know, I have never kept a diary? It is one of those things I am always going to start but it never quite gets to the top of my list...

  @TanyaG
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I'm glad you're here, TanyaG. Everything in a strict of a patriarchal society is a product for sale, including feminity - the more highly ranked male, the more beautiful woman he can buy. Right-winges are slaves to their delusions and will never understand if you will swim into the middle of the pool. They don't understand why you're suddenly living for yourself and not for the good of the store, you're destroying a century-old commercial infrastructure.

Some systems are built so everything is stacked against you and the people doing the stacking won't give anyome else a break because if they do, they fear losing their priveleges. Masculinity and femininity are like that, a system which makes women second class citizens and which has evolved for the benefit of men. Anything that threatens that balance is going to be resisted and if the concept of gender is unbound - set free - then the foundations of the system collapse.

We both have experience of systems which work against us and the ones we love, you more than me, I think. But the more of us who live for ourselves, the less power the people keeping the systems in place will have. So keep at it and don't lose hope - just by existing, you are proving them wrong.

I had a soft intro into being trans, helped by two relationships at the very beginning. Some of the rest of my journey was made in a world which was less friendly. So, like all of us, I developed coping mechanisms.

Some of those mechanisms were good, some were not so good and a few were broken from the start. What I learned from the broken ones is that once you start using a coping strategy to disguise your gender or your uncertainty about your gender, it is almost impossible to change the strategy later without causing distress.

This is especially the case in close relationships, which – even if they are platonic – often involve gendered roles. In very close relationships sexual roles will be coupled with the gendered ones, leveraging something which once was simple into a monster of a problem.

What sort of coping mechanisms did I use?

In my experience, if you are not fully out as trans, it is easy to fall into the habit of denial and concealment. Don't ask, don't tell (DADT) is such a tempting path. Why is it so attractive? Because the early reward of DADT is it is nonconfrontational. The catch is it may involve a lot of stress to someone else and you later on if you rely on DADT within an intimate relationship.

In many cases DADT is justifiable on the grounds that say, the cashier at the supermarket has no right to know of your gender non-conformity unless you wish it so, nor has your next-door neighbour. Any more than either has a right to know your sexual preferences.

If you are an adult, you have a choice and it is your right to disclose or not, but you also have responsibilities. If you aren't out, you could decide, 'I'm not going to tell this person I'm trans, because the relationship hasn't gone far enough to justify it.' Which leaves the onus on you to identify the point where a relationship has gone far enough. That point won't be easy to judge and it is all too tempting to keep kicking the decision further down the tracks.

The catch is that when you take down a DADT strategy by coming clean, from the other party's point of view you are whipping away the curtain behind the stage and saying, 'Everything I showed you till now was an illusion.'

To put in another way, in many respects, changing or abandoning a coping strategy which disguises your gender is like announcing you've had an affair – all of your partner's certainties vanish, leaving them adrift and without a key confidante in a world where all their trusted certainties have become meaningless.

What happens next will depend on the duration of the relationship and how much gendered scaffolding has built up around it, but at some level it has to involve a loss of trust in you by the other person. In a relationship which is recently established and isn't sexual, then the fall out will hard enough to deal with, but if the relationship is long term and it is sexual...

Look at it from their point of view – how can they possibly believe anything else you say if you could conceal something as big as this?

Some will take it okay at first, only to have doubts when they work through all the changes to relationship labels and scripts – the easy end being a feminine sister becoming a masculine brother. Did I say easy? Only by comparison, because it gets much, much worse. With partners there's a whole new dimension because of changes to sexual relationships, especially if hormones and or surgery are involved.

Friends and family will struggle because of beliefs, be they political, religious, moonshine or madness. There will be a substantial group who suffer emotional distress similar to grief because of the sense of relationship loss. How much insight you get into what they are going through – and what they are thinking – will depend on their character but realistically, you should prepare for some people to say little for a long while and then split. Others will be openly hostile and some may whip up campaigns against you.

Knowing this, why did I use coping strategies instead of being open, honest and transparent? In the beginning, the motivation was I wasn't totally sure I was trans and that was complicated by my lying on the non-binary gender spectrum, a concept which pretty much did not exist in the 1970s and 80s. I didn't understand it myself.

So when many of my lasting relationships were formed, I couldn't totally work out whether what I was experiencing was some kind of phase, or even what was going on in my head.

Or so I told myself.

I've got lots of excuses and here are some. If they sound lame, that's because they are lame.

Back in the seventies, if you'd begun to say the word 'trans...' everyone in the room would have completed it with '...vestite' and a series of pictures would have formed in their heads that didn't apply to me, but there would have been no convincing them of that. That one was uppermost in my mind.

In those days, very few sexual reassignment (SRS) procedures had taken place in the UK and the only ones anyone knew about were sensational and had been male to female. As far as most cis people were concerned, transgender only affected men, all drag queens were trans and everyone involved was gay.

It didn't help that in the early seventies a legal case had been splashed across the tabloids about a marriage involving a partner who had had male to female SRS. In a flood of approving news reports that marriage had been annulled on the grounds that in the eyes of the UK law as it stood, the couple were both men.

It was another world.

I raise this stuff because although things are way off being ideal in the UK today, they are light years ahead of where they once were. Yet in many countries attitudes haven't got to where we were fifty years ago and in some jurisdictions, being trans still carries the risk of imprisonment or death. Other countries are going backwards as vocal conservative and religious groups have raised trans as an avenging spectre threatening everything from the destruction of family life as we know it, down to but not including (as far as I know, but we only have to wait and they'll come up with it) original sin.

In the days of LGBTQ+ dating apps, you can declare yourself to be trans on your profile and be better assured of finding a sympathetic audience, but what happens when you are not out and discover yourself in a developing relationship where you didn't expect things to go as far as they did?

This has happened and will happen to many of us and it happened to me. One relationship developed so fast that if work related issues hadn't got in the way, we'd have been married in a month. We're still married and besotted with each other decades later. I didn't tell her I was trans when we met because it didn't cross my mind because we were so into each other. Our relationship rapidly strengthened to the point where my trans issues faded into the background.

'Great!' I thought.

Not great. My issues came back about 18 months later, by which time we were married. I still wasn't out of the stage where I was sure my gender identity was settled, facing me with introducing her to a subject I couldn't name and for which there was then no terminology.

So for a few years my coping strategy was closet crossdressing. It wasn't difficult because of our jobs and because I can play tunes on the masculine scripts deeply embedded within me. In those times, hormones and surgery were out of the picture, but my non-gender conforming inner nature eased that by sending signals that I shouldn't rush to SRS.

The more time passed, the more I knew I had to come clean and the less I could justify not having done so. Came a point when I realised I owed it to her because if she said no, at least she could start again before we had the complications of a family and too many more years of history to ramp up the hurt.

Call me a coward, but I just kind of let it slip out. Forgive me because I was stuck between the Scylla of knowing I couldn't carry on pretending I'm someone I'm not and the Charybdis of losing the best relationship – and friend – I have ever had.

In my dreams, we had a heart to heart in which I told her straight out. I chickened out of that. Why? I judged it had too much risk attached. It would have been so much easier if we had had some of the streaming boxed sets we have around now, but they lay in the future. I could have used one to raise a discussion point and busked it from there.

I opted instead for curating a slow realisation in her that my enjoyment of her wearing nice clothes and lingerie might have more dimensions to it than met the eye. The whole thing is hilarious in retrospect. Which is good – it shows I've learned to laugh at things that once made me uncomfortable.

One day she picked up on a comment, edging the conversation close to a point where I knew I could act, so after a deep breath I went for it, 'You know, I would enjoy those against my skin, too.' Her response? 'You poor thing!' Then lots of kisses etc, but I do remember her gut reaction was, 'This is trouble for you.'

Inevitably, the road to follow was not smooth, but at no stage was our relationship under serious threat. An elephant did not lurk in every room any more, but it did take a while for her to work through what amounted to a grieving process for who she believed I had been.

There followed a period where we lived a modified DADT coping strategy by mutual consent. She knew I crossdressed and that it made me feel better (Good? Right? I can't think of an apt word) but while she was processing it, I didn't do it in front of her. If she came home early and found me it was no biggie, but I did my best to avoid it happening. Which as it happened was fine because our jobs and lifestyles allowed it.

That part of our journey took a few years to traverse, during which time I took care not to overcook things and was always prepared to compromise (as I am now.) It was one of the reasons why I didn't come out to all the people I could have done, because I didn't want to leave her in the position of explaining our relationship to anyone else until she knew exactly what it meant to her.

How are things now? I've learned a lot and her adjustment is complete, together with a realisation that all the key things that matter to her about me have not changed. I'm still funny, supportive, do my share round the house, fight on her side no matter what, and we're still best friends and lovers. She's fine with me being as female or as male as I want around the house and has embraced the idea of my rather complex and shifting non-binary gender nature.

It could have gone so wrong, but thankfully, it did not.

A part of why it has worked is she knows I'm not going for SRS, including why I won't – which makes a big difference. What our situation would be if I'd opted for SRS I can only imagine, but I have to look at it from her point of view because I let our relationship become very deep before I dropped my DADT strategy. Which means that if I had gone for SRS, she would have had every right to end the relationship.

In retrospect it is important that the one coping strategy I've been able to use all the way through is I've been able to crossdress for at least some part of most days, so I've had a safety valve to stop me going crazy. Without that valve, I would have had some dark and challenging times, as other trans people here have experienced. If you lack any outlet for incongruent (maybe discordant would be a better word) gender then the friction between your sex assigned at birth gender and the gender you feel most comfortable will slowly barbecue your brain.

I'd hazard that the reason we don't read so much about women crossdressing as men is not that it doesn't go on and not that it isn't also used just as much as a safety valve, but that if you are FTM, the gender police aren't on your case as keenly as they are if you are assigned male at birth. If you wear a shirt over a chest binder and use a packer, you can go under the radar to a much greater extent. Clearly that would break down as badly as any type of crossdressing usually does within a close relationship, so if this describes you, maybe some of my experience will help.

If I could do everything over I would set my birth forward by forty years and reach my teens in the 2010s. If that happened I would be forming my relationships at a time when it would be easier for the 40 year younger me to identify as trans right at the start and for the people I met to be more accepting of it.

Sigh. But it still wouldn't be easy, and...

... if I could do set my birthdate forward, it would delete the best relationship I've ever had and deny me the chance to sit through the last couple of seasons of Sex Education as they dropped with the woman by my side jumping up and down saying, 'This should be compulsory viewing!' Not to mention I wouldn't have been able to watch her defending her view about the box set at a party where most everyone else was saying it was too made up to believe. Or be there all the times she has backed me up when the subject of trans and toilets comes up where I've been, 'What? I can't believe we are even talking about this!' and she's been, 'C'mon, guys, its 2024, not 1824!' Or having her nick my heels because she likes wearing them and feeling me on her feet.

It has to be faced – I was lucky. I should have been honest about my gender non-conformity right at the beginning of our relationship, because it would have been better to risk blowing my chances right there, than to risk trapping the love of my life into a doomed relationship through my failure of honesty. There are extenuating factors, but looking back, they aren't extenuating enough.

All of us have gone through dark times when there are no solutions in sight and the future looks bleak. We've also gone through times when we've had feelings ranging from shame through intense self-loathing about being different. This blog is about how I learned to understand where those feelings come from and how to stop them chewing me up and spitting me out.

If you've read my earlier posts, I used crossdressing as a coping strategy and safety valve for my gender dysphoria, but it was never entirely successful as a solution on its own. I felt better crossdressed, but as often felt bad about doing it.

Several times I threw away everything associated with my crossdressing as the self-loathing kicked in, only to experience acute despair at what I had done, quickly followed by the financial and social agony of rebuilding my 'coping kit'. In those days the social agony came from braving the quizzical looks of shop assistants because mail order in the UK wasn't well established.

After a while, I began to wonder why I found crossdressing so helpful as far as my mood went, while at the same time experiencing nearly equal and opposite 'this is disgusting' brain flips when I did it. I wanted to do this, it was benefitting me, so WTF was I on my own case for?

The knights in shining armour that rode up and dug me out of the hole were William Simon and John Gagnon. In 1986 they suggested many complex thought patterns and behaviours we take for granted as being 'natural' are no such thing. Instead, they are learned.

Hello to scripts and how they run your life without you ever having heard of them

In their paper Simon and Gagnon called these learned – and very deeply integrated – thought patterns 'scripts'. One way of thinking of a script is as a dormant computer program in your brain waiting for the correct input. When the input comes along, the program wakes and executes, causing you to think or do a thing so instinctively you have no idea why you responded that way. That's why scripts feel natural.

Scripts dominate our lives to the extent that if you come from many western cultures, if one man holds out a hand to another man in greeting, the second man will have trouble suppressing the urge to shake it, even if they dislike the first man.

Scripts are gendered

But it's more complex than that – there's a second script hiding there, which is 'men who don't know each other don't hug and men don't kiss each other'. If two women meet in the same scenario, they activate a different script and will embrace or air kiss, but will be very unlikely to shake hands. It's a trivial example, but greeting scripts are widespread and often so long established that we call them customs.

So scripts are not only gendered, they are affected by culture, which is why men from southern Europe are more likely to kiss or hug when greeting each other than Brits. Greetings vary around the world, but within each culture the scripting is usually consistent and will most often be gendered.

Scripted responses are different to logical and emotional responses, but some can feel like emotional responses.

Take a cup cake. Logical response is: 'I should not eat another cup cake because I'm trying to lose weight'. Emotional response is: 'But I love cup cakes? Surely one more will do no harm?' I'm not aware of a scripted response to cup cakes, but if there was one, surely it would be gendered (read on) and something like: 'Its got pink icing. Real men don't eat cup cakes with pink icing', or 'You're a girl, pink icing is safe.'

One of the things scripting does is to take the uncertainty out of situations by giving us something to do and by making our reactions predictable. If the scripts weren't there, our stress levels would go through the roof every time we met someone new, while we tried to work out what to do next. Imagine trying to air kiss someone in greeting when they suddenly decided to stick out a hand with no warning at all. Oooof!

We learn hundreds of scripts as we are growing up, most of them before we are old enough to remember anything we have experienced, so much so by the time we are in our teens, our brains are packed with scripts interacting in complex cascades over which we have virtually no control.

A sophisticated example is that a man grows up to see a sink full of dirty dishes as a mess – while a woman grows up to feel the dishes are a job that must be done. It isn't so much that men are naturally lazy, it is many men are scripted that doing housework is not masculine and other people should be looking after their needs. This is a script cascade.

Scripts are taught us based on sex assigned at birth

One group of these scripts controls our gendered responses. People assigned female at birth (AFAB) are brought up with feminine scripts, while people who are assigned male at birth (AMAB) are brought up with masculine ones. Girls are dressed like girls and boys are dressed like boys because of clothing scripts which vary by culture, the important take home being there are hardly any cultures where the sexes dress alike.

At a deeper layer, if you are AFAB you will, for example, have learned female speech patterns and internalised that you should not be pushy amongst a complex mesh of other scripted behaviours as you grew up. If you are AMAB, you get a different program.

Society's gendered scripts only come in two flavours – feminine and masculine.

I notice on Susan's people sometimes use 'opposite sex', as if male and female are the only possibilities and so are binary. It shows how deeply scripts have their hooks into us that even trans people can't help thinking like this, despite there being members of Susan's who were born intersex.

Masculinity and feminity are collections of scripts

'Masculine' and 'feminine' are umbrella terms which describe society's understanding of how a man or a woman is expected to appear and to behave. We learn to be one or the other through collections of scripts we are taught as we grow up. Very little of this teaching is conscious at either parental or child level and it is reinforced continually by our playmates and schoolfriends, none of whom are aware they are doing it either.

This continual drip of scripting makes it feel as if our masculinity and femininity (gender) are directly, even genetically, linked to the sex we were assigned at birth. Yet scripts are no more than a set of people-generated rules.

If you doubt this, what about a genetic male who has complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, whose body appears female at birth and who will be brought up with feminine scripts? Or someone who with nonbinary gender dysphoria, for whom neither feminine nor masculine scripts provide a solution? Or someone born with one of the many genetic variations that result in intersex, who was assigned a sex at birth to make it easier (for everyone except them) and then loaded with gendered scripts to match a sex someone else chose for them at a time when they could not object?

A problem everyone here shares is our scripts are appropriate for our sex assigned at birth, but inappropriate for the gender we most closely associate with. Which is why our scripts play a massive role in generating our gender dysphoria – to the extent that when something triggers our scripts, it's like having your own robocop hunting you down that no-one else but you can see or get hurt by.

Why your and my scripts are out to get us

In my case, for many years, when I wore women's clothes it would trigger my masculine scripts. Out would come my robocop, armed with the latest weaponry, and shoot me up with disgust and shame rounds, because I was breaking the masculinity rules. The impact was shocking because those scripts lay at the essence of my being – at times it felt I had committed an offense comparable to murder.

Why am I not surprised so many trans people have prolonged mental health struggles? Pesky scripts.

What happened next was even worse. I'm struggling with this crossdressing solution that partially fixes my gender conflict, albeit at the price of setting my robocop on the loose, when somehow, my parents found out.

I gathered later my mother got an inkling of what was going on and instead of talking to me, spoke to dad. I very nearly walked into the kitchen at the exact moment his masculinity scripts kicked off at the idea of his child being gender nonconforming, only it came out of his mouth as a rant ending with, '...our hermaphrodite son.'

I'll never forget those last three words, because how inappropriate was that comment? I checked inside my pants in case I'd missed something. Definitely male. That was my problem, male below, female in my head. Sorta.

This was great, now I have my parents on my case with dad thinking I am intersex? Being intersex would have made how I felt marginally easier as it happened, but all I thought was, 'What a mess!'

Dad's outburst in the kitchen happened no later than 1975 and I still remember like it was yesterday. But – and this is wild – nothing came of it. I lay low, expecting the hammer to fall, worried about everything from being handed over to the religious authorities (a risk, I was at a faith school) to being paraded down the street in a dress for public ridicule.

Something stayed my father's hand, which I suspect it was my mother's hand, though I never asked. The event was never discussed with me, but I took the precaution of hiding all my female clothes somewhere so secret I would have to kill you if I told you. Okay, it was with Ginny, who – angel in human form as she was – who took her provision of comfort to a new and breathtaking level.

Despite the Ginny driven positives, the event had negative psychological consequences, one of which was to underline how bad things could become if word got out about me. If it reached school, I was dead.

On the other hand it taught me, through Ginny, that feminine scripts had much to offer that masculine scripts did not. Including sympathy, support, unconditional love and helping others feel good about themselves. I once got into a fight over something some other guy said about her and if they hadn't pulled me off him I would have killed him.

How we overcompensate when we experience a scripting clash

Without realising what I was doing, I had doubled down on my masculine scripts, even though they had unleashed robocop on me. If you were AMAB and ever found yourself building muscle bulk in the gym early in your trans experience, you were suffering a script ambush equal in force to mine. And if you were one of the crowd that pulled me off that guy, thanks from the depths of my heart, because he had no idea what he had walked into.

But I still had to deal with my dysphoria, which I did by crossdressing in extreme secrecy – even as it triggered more disgust through my masculine scripts operating – because that was way better than losing all my friends and being bullied into oblivion.

That coping strategy and the ever accommodating Ginny helped mark time until I left both school and home. In some ways, that's where my life began.

Simon and Gagnon's paper about scripting came out not long after I qualified. It was the first time that anyone had ever put the idea of scripting up in lights so clearly and with such definition.

The paper isn't light reading and its title is 'Sexual scripts: Permanence and change' so it only touches on gender, but it opened up a whole area of research, much of which would be about gender. I'd love to know how many other people who read the work at the time suddenly understood themselves.

Welcome to your personal, script generated RoboCop and how to deal with it

For me, it was like the sun coming up and illuminating the smoking wreckage of my gender issues. Instead of being trapped in a maze of twisty little passages all exactly alike, with a mad robot at loose within them and appearing at random, I could see the glimmerings of a way forward. I realised my robocop was powered by my masculine scripts and why its shots were so uncannily accurate – my own scripts were telling it where to aim. What I saw as random was nothing of the sort – my robot's appearances were absolutely predictable.

I was making myself miserable. When I saw it, I laughed. Unfortunately, it was during a postgrad lecture about something else entirely and I had a mouthful of coffee. But boy, was it liberating even if they never got the stains out the tablecloth.

My episodes of disgust were happening when robocop hit my 'real men don't wear women's clothes' script and my shame was being triggered when it hit my 'no other man will think of you as a man if they find out you don't follow the rules' script.

Yet if instead I had been brought up as a girl, my robocop would be on the rampage against me wearing underpants instead of panties, or having a crew cut instead of letting my hair grow long, or for wearing a binder or a packer.

It is all the same to robocops because their program says, 'If thought or deed does not match scripts loaded for sex assigned at birth, open fire until ammo expended.' That's the good news. The bad news is robocops have an infinite supply of mags and their weapons are set to automatic.

Sexual reassignment surgery was an impossible dream in the UK then, so that wasn't a way out. However, I rationalised that meantime I could disarm my robocop and be a lot happier if I overwrote some of my more troublesome masculine scripts with feminine ones, or just trashed them completely. I became a script hacker of a sort.

Sure, it didn't deal with the risk of other people's scripts experiencing a meltdown if they saw me dressed as a woman, but most of the hatred I experienced was coming from within. If it worked, I would no longer be torturing myself. I could deal with everyone else later.

I was fortunate because most of the skills came with my job, so I could do the mental hacks needed myself. No longer is there a need for that, because these days an entire support network has built up around treating trans people and dealing with their scripts – even if your therapists don't call use the word around you.

Be aware of scripts, because when you experience strong 'anti' emotions about being trans, it is your scripting at work.

Quote from: TanyaG on September 27, 2024, 02:30:30 PMIt took me a lot of years to get there, but if I can do it, so can you.

So much of your story speaks to me Tanya and what an amazing and interesting story you have.  Thank you for sharing.  Definitely helps me in beginning to understand who I am and where I'm heading.  So much to digest.

Big Carolina Giirl Hug
Tracie 💗

Tanya,

As a retired hypnotherapist I did much of what you explain. I use self-hypnosis to help me rewrite scripts and to desensitize many of the triggers that cause me the most distress. It has helped me get to a point where I can function. I highly recommend that people seek out a therapist with experience in gender identities and related issues. It helps in so many ways.

Thanks for sharing!

Quote from: Lori Dee on October 01, 2024, 10:42:32 PMI highly recommend that people seek out a therapist with experience in gender identities and related issues. It helps in so many ways.

It is as important as hormones and surgery. It seems to me that being content with yourself and identifying what your gender issues are lays down a firm foundation for working toward GAMC and how to deal with relationship and peer group consequences.

Being trans means coming to an understanding about what makes us different, but it also means understanding that different can be normal. Understanding that difference and normalising it in our own minds can take years, so imagine the difficulties others experience?

By others, I mean partners, sibling, parents and people in the street who 'read' us, if you want to use that word.

Throughout recorded history, people have been brought up to accept that gender is linked to sex in the binary model that for a long time went with 'sex assigned at birth'. It works for the majority of people but it isn't necessary to read much history to realise there have been those it hasn't worked for, including women who have lived large parts of their lives as men.

In the past, that has often been because gender roles were so strictly enforced that women couldn't do many things men took for granted – it was illegal for a woman to own property until the early 20th century in the UK, for example. Men who wanted to live as women were more visible, but we've never been talking large numbers here and almost everything written about them was speculation.

Drag in British theatre in Shakespeare's time

That didn't stop crossdressing being the accepted rule in British theatre, where until the late 17th century all the female parts were played by young men or boys. Ironically, this was because gender stereotypes made it impossible for women to be on stage, which was considered shockingly indecent. It wasn't against the law for women to be on stage, but gendered culture was so strongly against it that it might as well have been.

Part of the fun of the theatre then was that actors playing actresses would ham it up to the limit – some of Shakespeare's lines are jokes only when delivered by a crossdressed man.

The key was everyone knew what was going on. When gendered norms about actresses on stage relaxed, enough people still loved the old tradition for it to continue through pantomime dames (who are always male in the UK) and in drag.

Drag in British comedy and pantomine

In the UK drag wasn't quite the extreme eye makeup show it can be today and through my childhood in the 1960s and 70s it was routine for comedians to include a drag sketch or three in their show and for nobody to blink an eye at it. A great example is Danny la Rue, who personified drag in the UK for decades and drew big audiences, even in the most industrial parts of the north. Especially in the industrial north.

Danny could be howlingly funny, one of my favourite comments of his being when a woman in the audience asked, 'Do you enjoy dressing as a lady?' and he shot back, 'Not really. Do you?'

Drag is a fantastic example of how acceptance of 'different' gender expression can be normalised. Half the appeal of music hall, stage and club drag lies in the audience knowing they're watching a man dressed as and behaving like a woman. The gag lies in the ways the artists leave a trail of cues they aren't women – by letting the audience in on the 'secret' everyone involved can let their hair down. It also lies in the thrill of watching taboos being broken – like a man exposing a stockinged leg through a slit dress – without anyone objecting. Drag wouldn't be drag without that.

Why didn't all this drag change attitudes?

Drag was so pervasive on TV in my childhood I was exposed to it on at least a weekly basis. My dad was not sympathetic to gender dysphoria in any way, yet I've seen him howling with laughter at jokes told by crossdressed comedians. Figure that out.

Like many people who took (and take) drag for granted, Dad did not accept the idea of crossdressing off stage. It sounds like hypocrisy, but the way scripts work means that Brits pigeonhole drag in a different place to many Americans, who (I believe) don't associate drag to anywhere near the extent we do with comedy and pantomime.

For us, drag is about making Christmas fun for kids and about laughing until you wish it would stop – such gendered connotations as it might once have had are so weakly scripted now they are gone. We all have good memories of drag from our childhood, so much so I cannot look at an act without visions of trees, decorations and wrapping paper. It is that powerful an association.

How, if history of drag goes back hundreds of years in Britain, can it have done so little to increase acceptance of the trans community? Because drag isn't – or at least wasn't – about transgender. On the face of it, it seems it should be, but once you know the history, you can see how classic British drag never was.

Which is why the same people who compete for tickets to the best pantomimes for their kids to enjoy at Christmas can insult a trans person to their face should they read them in the street.

Drag didn't set out to shift the dial on trans until recent years in the UK when the beginnings of a change have emerged. I'd hazard that's because we're reverse importing elements of the drag scene that spread from here to the US, a country which doesn't have the powerful cultural heritage drag does here. I may be wrong about this.

What on earth is going on?

What I do know is that as I was becoming aware I was gender non-conforming, the rules were impossible to figure out. People detested seeing men dressed in women's clothes in the street, yet paid money to watch them on the stage. The only model around for crossdressing was called transvestism, which didn't apply to me because some numbskull had tacked a sexual gratification element onto it. Even more mystifyingly, transvestism was only for people assigned male at birth, so where did that leave Ginny? She was as keen as dressing up in my clothes as I was in hers and I was more than familiar enough with her to be sure she was a girl.

Something was off. It took me years to find out what it was.

When the medical model of trans identity began its evolution late in the nineteenth century, it was rooted in the idea of 'opposite' sexes. Female and feminine and male and masculine were the only alternatives because gender and sex assigned at birth were treated as synonymous. We've come a long way since then.

Beyond some vague scoping exercises in which psychoanalysts became mired in Freud's ideas during the late nineteenth century, the first medical model of gender incongruence was Hirschfeld's concept of 'transvestism' published as The Transvestites, the Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress in 1910. Hirschfeld studied both people assigned male and female at birth, of at least four sexual orientations, and helped some through the earliest recorded gender affirming medical care (GAMC). For a psychiatrist of his time, his books, some of which have been translated into English, are remarkably readable.

Hirschfeld and transvestism - 1910

Hirschfeld's theory was based largely upon seventeen individuals who had either been referred or had corresponded with him, so he did not meet them all in person. Though their stories are of their time and some are fantastic, most would pass without remark here, complete with the same emotional rollercoaster experiences and mixed reactions from families and friends. Although nine of Hirschfeld's cases were married, reading their accounts, the first reaction one experiences is how sexually repressed people were a century ago – and how it coloured their entire experience.

Male crossdressing was illegal in Germany and many other countries then, so sixteen of the seventeen were doubly challenged. The other was assigned female at birth.

One of the group, case 13, 'John O' from San Francisco, wrote such a perceptive account of gender dysphoria that if Hirschfeld had highlighted it, the transgender model would date from 1910. But alas he did not. Three of the seventeen were into BDSM, virtually the entire group viewed masturbation with horror and people with same and mixed sex attraction were overrepresented. The title of Hirschfeld's book came from something his 17th case said:

'Except for my erotic drive to cross-dress, I suffer from no sexual deviation from the norm. But this drive, too, does not serve directly as an intensification of sexual feeling but rather is connected with the primary fact that in my mind and in my emotions in many respects I am feminine.'

The majority of Hirschfeld's seventeen patients told similar stories, right down to identifying their conflicts between masculinity and femininity. So did others he recorded later, including more assigned female at birth. Yet despite Hirschfeld writing that across his group of seventeen, '...the awakening of the sex drive... had little to do with the drive to cross-dress,' and despite his explicit disconnect between crossdressing and fetishism, and his clear explanation that his subjects, sought 'the emotional comfort of feeling and performing what is feminine,' it would be the wearing the clothes of another sex for sexual gratification that captured the imagination of the press and psychiatrists for fifty years.

Hirschfeld did everything he could have done to prevent his far-sighted concept being hijacked, writing a long chapter about the gendering of clothing and even quoting Rousseau, who had much to say on the matter. It seems likely Simone de Beauvoir's famous line, 'One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one,' was inspired by Rousseau's 'We are born as it were, twice: the first time to exist, the other for sex.'

Despite Hirschfeld's efforts, transvestism did get hijacked and twisted into a lesser concept than the one he had in mind, but even so, it helped make gender non-conformance a psychiatric diagnosis.

Transvestism survives in DSM-5-TR more than a century after Hirschfeld published, preserved by the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic criteria which - despite borrowing Hirschfeld's term - have little to do with the concept. Hirschfeld specifically included women and excluded fetishism from transvestism after thousands of words of explanation. The APA does the reverse. Why?

I find it hard to imagine the APA used the definition they did unknowingly, because for decades they took the same approach with homosexuality, only dropping it as a pathology when public opinion had turned heavily against them. The one excuse the APA have is the subtitle of Hirschfeld's book, The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress, didn't help his case, but even a superficial read reveals he didn't use the word in the same sense they did. My belief is the APA has as often been a part of the problem as it has been a part of the solution, especially where sexuality and gender are concerned. We're looking at an example of that here.

So often does the APA allow conservative caution to trample its capacity for independent thought that two psychiatrists I have worked with independently described entire sections of the DSM as an albatross hung around the profession's neck. But the DSM has its place, even so.

Transsexualism - 1966

Against this background, transsexualism seemed a big advance when proposed in 1966. The term wasn't new because Hirschfeld had used it, but the sixties version made it explicit gender was the central issue and dropped the link with fetish.

There was immediate and predictable pushback from the usual suspects, yet while it was a helpful idea at the time, transsexualism continued to identify what we call gender dysphoria today as an illness.

At one step transsexualism opened a therapy pathway, but at the price of reinforcing transvestism's implication there's something mentally wrong with people whose gender doesn't align with sex assigned at birth. Sure, transgender people most often do have mental health issues, but they are mostly side-effects of not being able to express their gender, or caused by society's reaction to them expressing their gender.

This time around, the media reacted more sympathetically, even if it couldn't resist being sensational. 'Feeling trapped? It's the body that's wrong, we have sexual reassignment surgery for that,' was how transsexualism came to be understood by the general public – and by many doctors. While this drastically simplified how our community saw ourselves, we embraced transsexualism because it was better than the alternatives.

Remember, without transsexualism, there would be no gender clinics and no gender recognition certificates. Two massive steps there alone.

However, a weakness of transsexualism is it is binary, dropping the middle ground Hirschfeld realised must exist. Under transsexualism's umbrella lie solutions for people who feel trapped in a female body and would like to be male, and vice versa. But there is no place for anyone else and about a third of people diagnosed with gender dysphoria are non-binary.

Transsexualism distorted treatment because of the pressure it put on people going through the system to conform to the one path on offer to them. That pathway was determined by sex assigned at birth, which meant that by the 1970s, many medical decisions were based on how well people conformed to the stereotype of their chosen gender. Logically, this was indefensible, so because of that and all the reasons above, people began questioning transsexualism in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Transgender - 1990s

One of the most powerful arguments against transsexualism was put by Boswell, who wrote 'It is our culture that imposes the polarization of gender according to biology. It is our culture that has brainwashed us, and our families and friends, who might otherwise be able to love us and embrace our diversity as desirable and natural – something to be celebrated.'

What Boswell and others did was truly radical. They laid the blame for gender dysphoria squarely at the feet of society because its ruthless imposition of gender conformance on us all. They proposed that people with gender dysphoria did not have a medical problem, but instead had issues some of which can potentially be treated medically, along with others which would not be issues if society got off their case.

And so, with a single, well-timed blow, sex assigned at birth and gender were split asunder, opening the way for people with non-binary gender dysphoria to make themselves heard.

If you grew up with the transsexual model, which many of us did and which persists even in definitions recommended on this site, it can be tough to see blue water between it and transgender, but in a nutshell:

The transsexual model sees gender as binary and gender dysphoria as a psychiatric syndrome. The person is the problem.

The transgender model sees gender as a continuum and gender dysphoria as a reaction to intense discrimination. Society is the problem.

A bunch of benefits have come with the idea of transgender, including space for non-binary people and a logical, non-judgmental home for crossdressers of any sex. However, transgender's biggest contribution has been to reframe gender dysphoria as a condition made worse by society's stigmatisation.

That last mechanism – highlighting the stigma – brought many, though not all, in the gay and lesbian community on board with us and played a major part in creating the new LGBTQIA+ community. Which is united against discrimination. Well... more or less united. Somewhat united.

Sure, the transgender model isn't perfect and it too is likely no more than a station on a journey toward something better. One issue with transgender is that people with binary gender dysphoria, for whom sexual reassignment surgery has worked, can feel defensive toward the idea. That's understandable, because transsexuality was a perfect fit for them, but looking at the demographics they need not fear.

Transgender has allowed a middle ground of non-binary trans people to emerge. This group was invisible before, but in no way does welcoming them dilute the reality that just under two thirds of our friends are binary. This enlargement of the pool, with non-binary people becoming visible, has caught the eye of governments because with its growth, gender services have come under strain. An awareness of non-binary formed part of the motivation for the Cass Report, yet the revelation that two thirds of trans people in Britain were assigned female at birth and that half or more of them are non-binary has hardly registered with media.

I'm not a supporter of the Cass Report. It has some sense in it, but like every inquiry in the UK this last century it churned through vast sums of public money before bogging down in a mire of the inquiry's own making.

Where next?

The biggest issue with the sunset of transsexuality and the sunrise of transgender is funding for care because the latter is vulnerable to changes in discrimination legislation. Under the transsexual model, the person is seen as unhealthy and in crisis, so medical care is appropriate. Under the transgender model, the person is seen as healthy and agentic but equally deserving of medical care.

Should we swing back behind the transsexual model for fear discrimination laws might be changed? Surely not – instead we should fight against laws being changed should they threaten funding. There is massive funding for other anti-discrimination programmes with large investments in medical care attached and transgender should be no different. Not only that, if society can own and walk away from its discrimination issue, it will ease the pressure on the people whose gender dysphoria makes their lives so much worse than they need be.

Having funding for treatment coming down the medical pathway is and will continue to be necessary, but it has distorted both diagnosis and treatment by portraying our experience as a mental illness.

I don't want to be seen as having some kind of psychiatric illness, firstly because I don't have one, and secondly because it grants permission to every conservative and their dog to paint me as having a mental or a sexual problem – before extrapolating to me being a threat. In doing so conservatives distract attention from their issue, which is their long campaign to preserve discrimination, including but not limited to slavery, racism, the lack of equal rights for women, and most recently their intense opposition to gay rights.

History tells us that while we might the latest target of conservatives, we will not be the last. I shudder to think what the group after us will be put through, but whoever they may be, they will most surely deserve our support. Let's not make the mistake some of the LGBTQIA+ community have made and side with the people who made our lives such hell.

The future

The need for gender affirming medical care will persist even when society relents and accepts gender and sex assigned at birth as independent things which sometimes do not align. Once society accepts that, being you or me will be much, much easier. Don't hold your breath waiting for it, but the day will come, as it did for slaves, people of colour, women, and the gay community.

What I'd love to see is a change from a system whose origins lie in deciding whether people assigned male at birth were fit for surgery, toward one in which sex assigned at birth is irrelevant and the aim of therapy is to help us make sense of our gender – while leaving a choice of solutions open. We are moving toward that, but an end to discrimination would open another, powerful option, commonly known as acceptance or tolerance.

One sign we have reached that point will be the number of people joining Susan's Place when they are desperate and lack any kind of social support falling away to nothing. Instead, people will introduce themselves with questions like, 'All my friends think I might be transgender and I've been exploring it, can we talk?'

In my opinion, the main problem of the full legalization is that the conservative society doesn't separate people who desperately need to to find themselves by choosing genuine gender/s from the people who have come here just for the satisfaction of their sexual kinks (there are people who go back to being homophobic puritans after the satisfaction). Conservative society doesn't realize that transgender people have the limits and morality, sometimes their moral values are higher than homophobes. The deep state society is afraid to allow transgenders into power, cause they think that the state will be destroyed, in fact in the basic fundamentals of the national existence nothing will change. Choosing gender is like a musical taste, you don't care what kind of music a person listens to in order to love and respect this person - when all of the society realizes this, the struggle will be over.

I left my bio at the point where I'd told my partner I was trans. To begin with, she was incredibly sympathetic and we agreed I could crossdress around the house, which worked for me by allowing a safety valve for my dysphoria. In retrospect, this period delayed us dealing with the situation properly, but we've always been best friends as well as lovers and turning to each other for advice and support before we turn to anyone else is built in to how things work. Neither of us wanted to consider anything that would risk that.

It helped I'd married one of the most logical and understanding people on the planet, and although that didn't prevent some turbulence along the line, it limited its amplitude, if this makes any kind of sense.

Having been through a long period where I had disguised my gender incongruence and everything that went with it, I found it temperamentally difficult to adjust to the more open situation I found myself in... and missed an open goal.

This is going to make you laugh, but it happened because my wife, while unmistakably a woman, is primed against some feminine scripts as deeply as I'm committed to them. She's a riot as a partner but if she was the only customer on earth, there would be a cull of fashion and underwear stores such as has never been seen due to lack of trade. Yet at that time, we'd set things up so a consistent part of my expression of gender incongruence was through clothes and to a lesser extent, lingerie.

Our failure to join the dots meant we never discussed this difference in our gender expression led to a compromise where I could crossdress in the house, but didn't ask if we could set aside some space in the bedroom for my clothes. Nor did she volunteer it as an idea. Looking back this partly happened because we hadn't got used to talking freely about how we both felt, but mostly because neither of us wanted to say or do anything which might rock the boat.

By that stage I had mostly worked my way through myself and my partner had accepted I was gender incongruent, but then I tripped her wire because there were days when the really feminine side of me gets let out and it's broderie Anglaise time. Big mistake. I would never have gone there if I'd realised what I was dropping her into.

I know a lot of people are going to read this and wonder, but I have never been in a position where the benefits of the relationship I've had with my partner have not outweighed the disadvantages by a considerable margin. We get each other to the extent friends laugh whenever we have to share food – the closest we ever get to a fight is when we are each trying to give the other the nicest bit.

It took her a while to process the trigger and as she did, we went through a period where she rejected the agreement we'd had where I could crossdress while she was around. This was really difficult for me, but I still had enough opportunities to crossdress to prevent gender dysphoria overwhelming me.

Looking back, those opportunities were crucial, because if my dysphoria had lacked a safety valve, I would have taken a completely different path. I'm not saying that path would have been better for me or worse, only that I would have opted for GAMC – because once I was settled on treatment, any arguments against my crossdressing would have been null and void. Why? Because after GAMC I would have gender appropriate expression.

I'm not offering this as model reasoning, it was what went through my head.

Somewhere along the line I broached the idea that gender incongruence was part of what makes me who I am and taking it out of me would make me someone else she maybe wouldn't love. That hit the nail on the head. My partner dropped her objections to me crossdressing when she was around – accepting it was normal for me and no challenge to her.

This still left us with her dislike of frills and lace, which was fair enough as her preference for herself, but maybe not so fair on me, because I'm fine with either or both. Again, we both missed an opportunity here and it's only in recent times she's seen why and relented. Now and again she'll tease me to flash some item of underwear that would have triggered her in the past and it's become an in joke.

Then we had kids. Once they were no longer babies, we decided I should no longer crossdress around the house when our daughter was there, so we went half a step backward, though only half of one because my wife was okay with me making space for my clothes. So we were open to each other, but somehow never got around to introducing our children to the news. Our explicit motivation was we didn't want them bullied at school, but it turned out they inherited quite enough of our personalities to stand on their own two feet.

Again, looking back, it would have been a better idea if I had at least partially crossdressed so they got used to the idea that was how I was, but there were other areas of my life where coming out would have caused chaos. Back then, if you had shouted the word 'gender incongruence' in the high street, clocks would have stopped. It was a different time.

Rightly or wrongly, our shared view was, 'Let's minimise the risk by keeping our heads down and raise this new family being we have created.'

Bringing up children who have no idea you have gender incongruence is difficult, but our life circumstances made it much easier and again, my safety valve was never compromised. It was at this stage we fully explored areas that helped bring my partner's empathy fully online, with her fully accepting my gender incongruence as a part of me and how dysphoria was something I was highly motivated to avoid experiencing. Together with my need for a safety valve.

From that moment on, any tensions between us vanished. Result!

As I wrote earlier, if I had had few opportunities to crossdress or heaven forbid, none at all, I'm sure I'd have pitched into dysphoria and taking avoiding action would have altered my path. There have been times when my dysphoria has been as strong as anything I've read in posts here, but the way we've lived our life has always provided moments that have allowed me to relieve it. It's helped a lot I've disconnected every unhelpful script I could find - that's still a work in progress, but I'm down in the small print these days.

It took a long while for me to appreciate who I am. Gender incongruence is an ICD-10 concept I find helpful – it applies to me because my natural gender expression is female. If I could snap my fingers and live my life over as a woman it would suit me.

Yet thanks to my safety valve having kept my dysphoria in check for as many decades as it has, I've come to appreciate I have as many non-binary features as binary ones. Reaching deep into my subconscious, if I could snap my fingers again and have the body and voice of a woman but still have sex as a man, I'd settle for that, too.

Reaching even deeper, if I could pass without effort as a woman, then I would be good with that also, but I'm only halfway through thinking that one out and it's likely a proxy for, 'If there was a magical way to avoid being discriminated against for diverse gender expression.'

I'd also be fine with being a native American two-spirit, which is hands down my favourite cultural concept.

It was thinking through all these possibilities that finally led me out of the maze.

Your blog should be mandatory reading. My personal "our h son" moment was when my father called me a 'sissy.' Not quite the same graphic content but equal emotional demolishment. I don't cross dress around my daughter either, and she's 36. I need to ruminate a bit on your suggestion for de-scripting by being more honest in my coming out. I've told everyone. But no one believes me.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 02, 2025, 02:07:36 PMI've told everyone. But no one believes me.

You take the words out of my mouth. Why does no one believe us? I think maybe because if they don't it spares them the effort of having to adjust their framing of us, because that's more challenging than persuading themselves we're playing April fool. If they interpret our behaviour as being us fooling ourselves, they remove their own conflict entirely.

I've had this conversation with a daughter, where I was at home wearing a dress and heels and I was like, 'Do you honestly think I would go to all this effort to prank you when there are so many other ways of doing it?' Even she had to laugh!

It is like the silly notion that we go through therapy to get a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, so we can take hormones, spend huge amounts of money on laser/electrolysis, voice training, top and/or bottom surgery, dress up in feminine clothing, put on our best makeup, do our hair/wig, etc. ...

so we can sneak into the women's bathroom and watch someone sitting in a closed stall peeing. 

Yep, Lori, I can't think of any other reason. TanyaG, I must confess I was a bit smitten with Ginny as I journeyed through your blog. If she's ever in Montana...
I was also intrigued by your take on the Cass Report. It essentially mimicked mine upon initial review. Although I looked askance at conclusions and recommendations, I couldn't fault design, methodology or statistical analysis. Since then, I visited several sites that claim the study was fatally flawed throughout, including claims that Ms. Cass undertook the project for the purpose of dismantling transgender healthcare throughout the UK, especially for children. Do you share that perspective?

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 03, 2025, 12:15:26 PMTanyaG, I must confess I was a bit smitten with Ginny as I journeyed through your blog. If she's ever in Montana...
I was also intrigued by your take on the Cass Report. It essentially mimicked mine upon initial review. Although I looked askance at conclusions and recommendations, I couldn't fault design, methodology or statistical analysis.

Ginny could not have happened at a better time for me, in almost any way I can think of, from helping me understand that gender incongruence wasn't original sin, to understanding that much else wasn't original sin, either. This being an all ages site, I'll pass on the 'much else,' but she's sui generis. Part of why I'm who I am.

Yeah, I agree with you about the Cass Report. It was a committee of course, not just her, but the design, stats and methodology were sound, as you say. The recommendations though... they read like there's a disconnect and come across like someone stepped in at a high level and said, 'You must reach these conclusions.'

One of those disconnects is the mental health aspect. For something so central to gender dysphoria, mental health is thinly covered and there's barely any consideration of how much suffering someone who is trans will be put through if they have to undergo a puberty they don't want to experience because it reinforces the gendering that causes their dysphoria.

I felt the report trivialised that experience, in the same way people have trivialised the experience of you, Lori and I, as we've shared in the posts just now. Only the trivialisation was done on a national scale, making it feel as if it was trivialised to justify stopping prescribing of 'puberty blockers' at scale and reduce them to a (much needed, but smaller scale) prospective clinical trial, which can't be blinded because the effects are so obvious.

At various points the report does its best to assert that mental health problems are what cause trans people to become trans, when as we all know that's putting the cart before the horse as far as the vast majority of us are concerned.

Maybe the government panicked in the face of the numbers of people assigned female at birth who were entering the GAC pathway. The service surely needed rescoping, if only because of the explosion in referrals, but if I was going to conduct a trial I knew would only produce grade 2 evidence at best, I'd have done it in parallel with ongoing care and acted on the results, rather than shutting everything down the way they did. It could take years to get any meaningful results, and the sceptic in me says, maybe that was the aim.