Where to begin...? I'm sure that my story is nothing new, so I'll just throw out some of the basics and give a link to the whole thing if you want to read an essay I did on myself.
I'm currently a 20 year-old pre-therapy MtF TS. I was born and raised in a very largely Christian environment, and attended both church and a Christian school for most of my life as a kid. I've known about myself as long as I can remember (which dates back to one of my first memories, when I was three or four years old), and I probably spilled the beans to my mom several times when I was little, though I don't think she would even remember it today (she probably thought it was just me being "cute"). Of course, I quickly learned to emulate masculine behavior, to such a degree that I don't think anyone I know suspects anything of me (if they did, it would be in that, unless controlling it conciously, I have very feminine inflections in my speech patterns. I only know this from hearing myself recorded; nobody has ever said a thing to me for some reason). In any case, I mostly learned to ignore my feminine side, strong though it is, throughout all of elementary school and most of middle school. It wasn't until I hit puberty that, like so many others, I began to realize again just what I had always known: I am very definitely in the wrong body.
In any case, last year I had the fortune to learn that I wasn't the only person who felt this way, and I began scouring the Internet for any sort of information that I could find. Basically, that led to my stumbling upon this site a few months ago. While I paid it no heed at first, I found it again in another search just a few days ago, and decided to check it out and maybe mingle with its community if I decided that I liked the place (I do). I currently have no plans to go through GRS, mostly due to a combination of my personal society (friends, family, etc.) and its unwillingness to accept anything that isn't totally Bible-written, and also because it's just too much money for me to afford as a stereotypically poor college student. Don't get me wrong, though, I dream at night of GRS, and it would make me the happiest person alive to experience life the way I believe I was meant to (even if I have missed out on an entire girlhood).
Okay, well that about wraps it up for me. I'm still a Christian, though I'm not at all pious or preachy about it (I think it's rude to insult another person's intelligence by trying to force my beliefs upon them), and I'm pretty loosely religious at that. I follow the rules and everything, but it's not like I have to be on church every Sunday or my house will catch fire. So that's enough of that.
So...uh...it's good to meet you people!
PS: I plan to see a psychologist soon (as in within the next several months), so let's see where that goes!
