I don't think I would describe myself as "born in the wrong body", but I might use it to help someone understand who's having a hard time.

I have a hard time describing things. I'd probably just end up saying "i'm transgender" and then just explain that there's more to me than meets the eye. Some people will think that it's something you're making up, or that you want to be this way. I just say "gay people don't learn to be straight... they're born with it. I was born like this, and all I can do is try to make it right"

Born in the wrong body just seems like... there was a switch at birth and that there's something wrong with me. I don't want to give people an impression that I can be fixed to being "normal" again.

For myself I feel that surgery will not be real for me until its possible.   Until all of the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed.   Which at the moment seems to be to be several million light years away.  Surgery is a good fairy tale for me now.    I have finally gotten serious about looking at the possibility of hormones, but it looks like I chose the wrong insurance company for Medicare B because all of the councilors that advertise that they work with transgender issues around me do not take my insurance, if they take any insurance.   In fact none of the councilors take it at all.   Planned Parenthood looks like an option here.  So the door seems to be closed until I pick my insurance company in November again.

I guess I don't know if I am in the wrong body or not, but mine is not female enough.  I have no breasts.  And as for my penis,  I wish it would just go away,  nothing personal.    I would also like to have more of effeminate shape and bearing.    Not that I am all macho male.   Never have been.     I have gone transgender female on Facebook to everyone who is still aware of my existence.   My grown up family, my students, and all my old friends.   Hey I am 65 life is precarious anyway.

So wrong body or just male characteristics out way female characteristics and I want to turn the tables as much as I can.   I have beget enough children so procreation is not an issue.    If it were I could just have my sperm saved.   And at sixty five who wants more kids anyway.   My penis is totally unnecessary for my sexual pleasure.  It should stay permanently tucked in where  it is anyway.   Wrong body? Its the only one I have.   But it needs to be more effeminate and less male.    I need to be ruled more by estrogen.   I guess its more about reshaping my body.   But because I am 65 and not 13 the reshaping will be limited.   

What I can reshape is my appearance making it more female than male.   I can be emotionally effeminate and can assert my femininity.   I can let be known that I am a transgender female and wish to be treated as a woman.   I can be myself.    Is my body wrong, or just too masculine???    The only thing I can do is be one of the grannies and let the rest of the world just deal with it.   Risky,  at 65 life is risky.  I need to let myself be and just become.   

Wrong body???  Where's my lip stick?   I can powder my nose in public and fix my make up.   I can giggle and visit with the granny sitting beside me at the bus stop.    I can just be more effeminate.   And wait for the day I can take hormones.   Because when I can take hormones, then I will know if I want to.    When I am sitting in the wheel chair waiting for surgery, then I will know if that is what I really want.   Only then will these options be real for me. 

May be its too easy for me to live in a fantasy world or maybe I am too much of a woman to let  having a masculine body make me less of a female.   Or maybe its just what my paradigm  of life is?   I am who I am.  Does my body really matter?   Well it needs to be more effeminate than masculine, that's for sure.

Katelyn and group,

If there is anything i have learned in my life as a genetic man it is that men have been stereotyped as much as other people on this earth. The one stereotype that is the most dangerous is this wide-spread belief that men are all perverts, predators, abusers, and so on. I have observed repeatedly on the street that two women who are strangers to each other can stop and give each other a friendly wave and smile, then become friends after making casual talk. If a man does this, everyone wants to summon emergency help or grab for their pepper spray, or they have something ignorant and judgmental to say in their attempt to ward off that man who may not want anything more than to be neighborly.

The boogey man, stranger danger syndrome is alive and well in society despite the well placed fact even by statistical showing that it is the person you already know who is going to be that "boogey man".

YOU are just a person who is trying to live the life that you always knew you should have been living, and are only pursuing happiness as you have the right to do. If you are convinced, and others aren't, then they are misinformed and it isn't in your control...just be happy being you and I know I will support you.

You know you are a woman, it's just that the world has yet to realise that some men have vaginas and some women have penises.  You, like the rest of us are just ahead of the curve.

Karen.