Sunshine's Mini Bio

[Guest Sunshine]

OK, We are up to what? 2010?

First of all, I'm now 12 years older than I thought I would be when I died. I remember thinking real hard about this when I was younger. "By the time I'm 26 I'll probably be dead." Go figure...

Anyhow, grew up bouncing around the gulf coasts of Florida and Texas, raised for the most part as a boy. Puberty hit, things changed in unexpected ways, I freaked. As a way of dealing with it I ran off, got married, and joined the Navy. No heavy thinking required for a while. Follow orders, go surfing, go camping, raise a baby (after a year of marriage), and take care of boy scouts. .. nothing really complicated.

Marriage unraveled because ... well basically because I was married to someone that didn't know what they were getting into. Both of us had some basic assumptions about each other that proved to be wrong. Because of my spouse's healthy libido and heavy dose of religious conviction there was a crisis of faith when my spouse found an attraction to someone (lots of someones) other than myself. There was a lot of guilt and self loathing involved on their part after that because of what they did, and thing got really hurtful. Sex was used as a weapon. Other people were used as pawns in a game of self degradation, trying to find some sort of feeling of worth in the arms of another's arms while at the same time loosing more and more of what little self esteem was left.

After the pain of watching someone I love do things with all these different people, I ... I couldn't understand what was going on. I asked what I was doing wrong, and was told that I was "too perfect". It just didn't make sense. and the pain...

My heart was in my throat and I couldn't breathe. After a few weeks of this, while I was at work, I started crying and I just couldn't stop.

... I curled up in a ball

... under a desk at the hospital

... in a dark office

... and just cried until somebody pulled me out and took me home.

It got worse as time went by. As the feelings of worthlessness grew, there were more affairs, and as there were more affairs, my emotional anguish grew.

Eventually, in an act of mercy my chief got me temporarily assigned to unaccompanied duty in Guantanamo Bay.

My mom offered to take care of my son while I was gone, so after dropping him off with her, I ran away from my problems and left the country.

It gave me time to stop hurting, to forgive, and to think. I didn't even end up doing normal Hospital Corpsman type work. No nursing, not much patient care, there were a couple of times when bad things happened and I had to help out, but outside of that all I did was computer work.

Over the course of a few weeks, I started making friends with some of the other girls in the quad. The women's barracks were organized in the quads there, with 4 rooms, in which 2 girls would each share a room.

Now, there is something REALLY wrong with that last sentence.

Its the words "other girls in the quad", "women's barracks", "2 girls"...

I was so worn down when I arrived in Cuba, that I hadn't even thought about the fact that I was in the women's barracks. By the time I was in a state of mind to actually realize that there was something wrong with this, I had already been there for over a month, MUCH too late to fix it...

I had joined the Navy as a man. In fact, one of the big reasons I had joined was because I WANTED to become a what my own picturesque idealog of a "Man" was. It was supposed to counter the fact that when puberty hit...

stuff that was NOT supposed to happen to me began. My voice never changed, my hips and other parts grew a bit of padding, and there was worse (by that I mean stuff that scared the hell out of me because I was not expecting it and had never gotten "the talk"). When I was out with my mom, guys would hit on BOTH of us. It freaked me out BAD! This stuff was not supposed to be happening.

And here I was, in the Navy... which should have fixed all this ... because I had been crying too hard to pay attention to what was going on... and I was in a mess that could screw up my life even worse.

I know that the way I have written this might seem a bit, odd, but I'm trying to convey a sense of what it was like for me at the time, before I had the understanding I do now.

So many things happened to me that was torn up about. Most of it involved my failure to pass as male. I wanted to, but I didn't and... there was a reason. At some level I knew I was not.

No matter what, I always "wanted to be" and man. I never felt like I "was" a man.

And here I was starting to heal a little bit over the worse emotional anguish I had ever been through. and.. I... was ... feeling better?

But... oh nuts...

....

Nothing bad came of it though. I never got caught or anything. When I got back to Portsmouth, there was a little discrepancy in my service record in which they had actually lost me while I as in Cuba. Naval Medical Center Guantanamo had made up a new service record for me while I was there though, so they just merged the two records and nothing at all "bad" happened.

The friends I made and the time I had to heal while I was away helped get over the pain. For a while I was better... sort of. I just kind of had this weird secret about HOW I had gotten over it.

Yes there was the stereotypical double date thing that I got dragged into, and fortunately I didn't get killed while doing it. When I got back, there were things to deal with though. Its was time to get back to being a parent.

I picked my son up from my mom's house, got him settled in daycare, got myself a nice little appartment and things were really settling back into some semblance of normality.

Then I made what I have always thought of as Mistake Number 2.

It was approaching Easter, and my soon to be ex (divorce would be finalized in 2 weeks) was in town, she asked to stop in and see the baby. This was the first time that I had seen her since I went to Cuba. When I saw her, there was no pain. I was in shock. It didn't hurt anymore. Something had healed and I could be in the same room with her and not want to run to escape the memories.

There was a 3 year old who had not seen his mother for ages... and she was back... and it didn't hurt. And then she asked me to forgive her for the stuff she had done and... I figured that the baby needed both parents, and so like a complete idiot. I decided that for the baby's sake I would. Then she asked to move back in with me. COMPLETE idiot... I said yes.

It did not work out well.

Granted, after that she got help, got into counseling for her sex addiction, renewed her ties with the church. So none of the affair stuff started back up again. I was not there anymore for her though. My pain was gone and I figured that if it gave the baby a chance to have both parents I would just do what I had to do. I just couldn't reopen myself to that kind of hurt again. In addition, there was all the stuff I had learned about myself while I was in GTMO that I had to think about. What the heck did it mean?

When my enlistment was over, my mom offered to let us move in with her so that I could go back to school and get a degree. I did,

earning a BS in electrical engineering in 3 years.

work, don't feel...

I got a good job...

work hard enough so that there is no time to think...

she became preggers again...

if I am too busy with kids and work I don't have to think about anything...

and again...

and then I realized that I was depressed.

4-5 years had passed since Cris had come back. We had settled into a routine in which I worked, cooked, and played with the kids, while patently avoiding dealing with anything that had happened.

So, since I had a good job, medical benefits, and it looked like the mental health stuff had helped with my spouse's pain... I made an appointment.

Pandora's box...

The psych asked me why I was there. What I said, was not what I thought I was going to say when I went in. I worried it over for days before actually showing up, so when she asked this question I knew exactly what I wanted help with.

"I want to learn how to think like a guy."

stupid stupid stupid...

The councilor got a puzzled look on her face, we talked for a while, and then eventually, she told me about a trans group.

At this time I still thought that "crossdresser's" were gay men in drag. I KNEW I was not gay... why the heck did she want me to talk to "them"?

So, I contacted someone and eventually got routed to an F2M group. oops...

Apparently my questions had led me to the F2M group and by the time I got there to the meeting, I had convinced myself that it made sense.

I remember someone asking me about if I had the name of a doctor that would do the top surgery yet. Someone else offered up advice about a doctor in the area that was willing to prescribe T for me... and as I absorbed the info, I was thinking..."This is awsome! so that's all it will take, of course!"

Then I asked a question that changed EVERYTHING.

"So how do you learn to think like a guy?"

The guys in the room just kind of looked at me like I was a complete idiot.

"You don't."

Then one of the guys started asked me probing questions, and after discovering how completely clueless I was, tried to explain to me what TS is.

"Sex is between the ears, not between the legs. Its how you think. You can change the body to match the mind, but it doesn't work the other way around. People try, and they eventually end up either learning to accept themselves, or as a statistic."

it took a while for that to sink in...

oh... nuts...

but it fit...

it made SO MUCH SENSE!

It explained so much.

So, if this were true, and it feel true to me, and I had been trying all this time to pass as a guy, even though it didn't work very well, what was the alternative?

I went home, and looked up information on transsexualism, which then lead to me looking up inter-sexed conditions. Then I pulled out my medical record from the Navy, and started putting pieces of my life into something that actually made some sort of sense. It was right there in black and white.

My body was mostly female

My brain was mostly female

I had been trying to pass as male, and according to every old picture I could find, it didn't work. So what was the alternative? Is it that simple?

What if I just stopped trying?

I was excited that I had such a simple answer. When I got home, I could hardly contain my excitement. It was something that finally made some sort of sense.

I burst into the house, "I figured it out, I finally understand now!" And I called my spouse and young son over to talk in front of the computer. I know now that this is a stupid thing to do, but I pulled up a "brain sex" test and asked each of them to take it (it was a G rated one). My son come up as male, my spouse came up as female, and I also came up as female.

We talked about it for a while, then my spouse and I went to the bedroom to talk privately.

She asked me what it meant. And I tried to tell her that all those times that she went running into the arms of a man, I could understand it now. It made sense. She was a straight woman in trying to be in a married husband / wife relationship with me, she was fighting the part of herself that wanted to be with a man. I was not, and never had been manly in any way, not even on my best day. By trying to be with me, she was fighting her own natural sexual orientation. I could not be the "man" that she wanted and I wasn't going to try to be any more.

"What does that mean? Are you saying that you want to wear dresses?", she asked.

"No, I just don't want to pretend to 'Be' anything anymore. I just want to quit trying to act like I'm someone that I'm not. Instead I just want to relax and be myself."

She got really quiet. Then said, "Well, I always wanted a sister." Then she broke down crying.

I thought for a while that things had gone well. I decided not to really act on any of it though. It was new information and I needed time to think about the implications. As I did, I kind of went into a panic. "I can't do anything until the kids are older", I kept thinking.

Meanwhile, my spouse called up a local Christian Counseling center and set up some marriage counseling for us.

We went in, the therapist talked to each of us separately. He gave me a couple of tests to take... and then, we had a session with the three of us together.

Then, the therapist pronounced sentence, "I never thought I would say this, but you two should not be together. In the eyes of God, two women can not be married." ACK! WAIT! What?!?!?

... sigh...

Two days later, my spouse asked me to move out.

Not wanting to bring shame to the family, or hurt the kids, I went ahead and just left. I didn't even try to fight it. I just packed up and moved out. Part of me was even happy that it was over and that I didn't have to deal with her anymore. Another part of me was screaming because I had just lost the one thing that really mattered to me. My family.

Well, after that there was nothing to loose. I had two choices as I saw it. I could suicide to end the pain I was in from loosing the family, or I could take a chance and see what it was like for me to just be myself around other people and see what happens.

After that my transition was kind of a whirlwind. Within 2 months I was full time, living as female. At work they called me in and told me that there was some confusion because people had seen me out & about. Basically my boss ordered me to quit causing confusion and to go talk to HR. HR was excited to have something eo to do and explained everything to my boss. I was then barred from the men's room and told to dress "more appropriately" at the office. (Then they handed me a copy of the dress code). The following Monday, the office was reintroduced to me and ... well that was what I now use as my birthday.

Despite several sincere attempts, I have not ever been able to pass as male again since that day.

Eventually my spouse and I divorced. My son (13 by this time) asked to move in with me and things sort of settled into a state of obscene normality.

Life got much better.

But then... I did have one little issue that I had not really dealt with yet.

Even though I was able to get my legal paperwork fixed because I don't have male reproductive organs. I was still anatomically neither female nor male. In addition to this, I was now beginning to wonder about my own sexual orientation.

I guess it was natural, perhaps even inevitable, but a couple of years after the divorce I started dating. After dating a really sweet trans-man I had met for about 9 months, I said yes when he asked me to marry him.

I didn't really love him, at least, not as much as he loved me, but I thought that since he and I both understood all of the issues, it might make things work out a little easier.

Also I thought that even if I just liked him now, with time I the like would grow to love, and... well... I was wrong.

We have been married for 2 years now. My son (now 18) has moved out and gone off to college, and I'm in marriage with a man that is constantly hurt by me. As if the like vs love thing were not enough, in addition I have discovered that I have VERY serious issues when it comes to sex.

To put it simply I panic whenever anything goes below the belt. In order to make it through, I have to either take Valium, or get drunk. My husband is taking this personally, like it is something wrong with him and no matter how hard I try to explain, he doesn't get it. Granted... I don't really want to be with him, but I don't want to see him hurt either. I knew after 6 months that it was not going to work, and have been kind of waiting for the marriage to die ever since.

I'm still not sure it if is because I'm not sexually attracted to him, or if it is just issues with my own body, but I do know that I need to end it.

As of 3 months ago, he moved out and bought a house across the street.

Last Friday, he and I went in and signed divorce papers.

I am now looking for a therapist. I need to figure stuff out and get back to living my life.

[Guest Charlene_Leona]

Hi Sunshine

It sound's like you've had an interestingly confused life like the lot of us here, welcome to the playground. You will find us to be a very loving and supportive bunch of folks. You will be able to PM after 5 post so start and go have fun and meet the great people here. I hope your life will continue to work out for you it seems to have found it's own course. Your work accepting you the way it has is fantastic, I think we all wish it worked that well for us. Relationships are defiantly interesting as you have found out and it sounds to me that you are comfortable just being on your own which is great you need to do what feels right for yourself. Once you have the ability to PM I hope you would be comfortable chatting with me if you would like.

Take Care

Charlene Leona

[Guest snow white]

Hi Sunshine ,

<<hug>>

Welcome to Laura's Playground.

Please feel free to come over and chat sometime.

The Chat room does require another registration that is separate from from your forums one.

Please read the chat room rules before coming in, and expect a short interview with one of the chat room moderators.

One of the things that they will ask you is if you read the rules.

We have MTF meetings-Mon & Sat 9pm est, and you are welcome to attend.

We all look forward to seeing you.

vanna