My name is Amanda, we are plural, living with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) in addition to having to deal with our being transgender. We have not been active for a number of years because we were focusing on working on the underlying trauma and did not have much to add about trans things. Grieving the schism of the United Methodist Church has also taking much of energy the past few years. We have dropped by regularly to see what is happening, but not participate.
We seem to be somewhere in the bigender or genderfluid space, but have been considering that we might end up more as transfeminine if we ever merge together. We are married and now in the 60ish age range.
There are three me's (alters) that we know about, we have the adult male me we call Maleme here as his real name is the birth name we are know by in public and a very young girl me.
We always knew we were different, but never really understood why. We started cross dressing in our early teens, but thought it was some kind of sexual perversion which added to the shame from our trauma. We crossed dressed off an on, but kept trying to live as the version of masculinity we grew up with in the conservative southern US. It was not until watching our father slipping away to dementia that we realized that life is short and we need to live as ourselves. We got up the courage to get a couple of dresses from a thrift shop and explore this part of us. After a couple of years, we had the insight that we are actually transgender which we experienced as a divine revelation.
It took another couple of years plus our wife coming home early from a church meeting and catching us with the subsequent hard talks that I got a therapist with experience with gender issues. To Maleme's surprise, he began to open up to the trauma we experienced and I popped out. After a while, we followed the crying inside to rescue our little me. We had assumed she was a very hurt little boy, but last year she finally felt safe enough with Maleme to share her name and story with us. It was quite a shock to Maleme that our innermost me is female. He was holding out hope that all of the gender stuff was really caused by the trauma and could be cured with more therapy.
We are out about our transness, to our therapist, a now-retired pastor, our immediate boss who has a trans daughter, and mostly to our wife. But, we have been afraid to tell her about our little one being female. Our family has a mix of liberals and conservatives, so it is risky to tell any of them. Plus, our wife does not want anyone she knows to know. She is tolerant, but not accepting, does not want to see us in femme mode, and gets really nervous when I-Amanda or our little one is in front.
Maleme is slowly becoming more open to some kind of social transition, but is leery of anything physical. Our little one hates our body and wishes we could fully physically transition. I-Amanda am tempted by hormones, but do not feel the need for anything further. Alas, it is not safe in the conservative state we live in that is in the process of banning all transgender care. Plus, our wife says she would leave if we made any physical changes.
