Some Random Thoughts About Where I 'fit'

[Guest Riana]

I have been slowly trying to read the different forums here to see if there was anything I could recognise and something that may provide some answers to me. I found this forum now and there are some posts I am wondering about but they're scattered and I'd rather not derail too many topics for my own purposes so I've started a new one.

I'm mostly posting this to help get a better picture of things for myself and also wondering if I'm missing something here. I'm never quite confident in my own thoughts so I would like it if people could help out. It helps to understand where I am relative to others as well, because I understand gender is not binary. 'fitting in' for now may be a matter of figuring out which two extremes fit me most closely in which respects.

I feel lost anyway. I do not want to be called a man. But at the same time this has nothing to do with social roles. And I am not even sure I do want to look like a woman. This has nothing to do with i. But somehow I want to be acknowledge as a woman. I feel so rejected being told I am a man. Just being acknowledges without having a woman's body would be a relieve (the body is just a really great bonus).

This is very much how I feel. I've always hated the idea of being a 'man', it was as if the word itself had so much emotional load that just didn't fit me. Sometimes it almost like an accusation. But I don't see my body the same way, I feel that my body would never quite be able to match that emotional need as it is now.

1) Do you look at females and think I'd love to have a body like that?

2) Do you experience dysporia? You don't have to hate all you're physical features to have it but at least know that some of them make you uncomfortable to look at in the sense that they are the direct opposite of what you would wish to have (female physical features).

3) Do you feel more connected (friendship wise) with females

4) Do you feel like you think like a female?

5) How much are you willing to lose to transition? (family, freinds of family, you're friends or your job or all of them)

6) Do you suffer with depression due to your gender issues?

7) Do you feel feminine inside?

8) Have you dressed en femme or deired it? Why or why not?

9) If you have dressed en femme how does it make you feel?

10) Do you easily connect with males (freindship) and do stereotypical male conversations intrest and stimulate you?

1) Yes, all the time. Unless they're not particularly good looking, but I think no ciswoman would want to look like that either?

2) Yes, even if I don't want to acknowledge it all the time. It's usually more severe when I am reminded of what I could have, such as when I see people's pictures here or see a pretty woman on the street. I can't say I truly hated my body... it was more that it never quite was what I wanted it to be. Like life had given me the wrong tool to be myself with somehow. I was not dysphoric during childhood at all, but I think I perceived almost all the changes my body went through during puberty as negative in some way. Even though I knew rationally that it was 'normal'.

3) It's hard to tell. I've rarely connected with anyone, which may be a combination of gender dysphoria and asperger. Most of my friends have been male, but I always felt a kind of distance, a kind of coldness. What I called friends were always just 'people I knew' or 'people that shared an interest' and not 'people I enjoyed just being with'. I think I have known only one or two guys IRL that I could truly consider friends in the deeper emotional sense. I tended to connect with girls much easier, but I always was afraid that they were only being nice because I was pitiful (which is how I felt), so I usually avoided girls to avoid that feeling of guilt.

4) Not usually, but that may also just be because I have aspergers which gives me more typical male interests. I my once (and only) girlfriend was mildly autistic (I think that's the same) and she was much like me in that respect. She was different from me emotionally, but that may have been because I repressed my emotions and because of hormonal differences. I know that I'm much more emotional now than I was then, at least I was for a while, but I think depression and stress may have buried a lot of it again since then.

5) I have no job yet and almost no friends IRL, and my friends online all know me as female or trans and are supportive of me. So all I really stand to lose is my family, which would probably be very hard. But I don't think I would lose all of my family, and I would like to think that what others think I should be shouldn't affect who I choose to be.

6) Definitely, although I'm sure dysphoria was not the only cause of my depression. And I've only now really begun to understand how long I've been depressed... I had no idea I was depressed before.

7) Sometimes. It depends a lot on my mood and state of depression. When I feel happier I tend to have a desire to express that in a feminine way, especially since I opened up to my feelings more. Lately I've felt feminine more often than I used to.

8) I never have, except for a few times I tried on my mother's sports tops or bathing suits. The sports tops felt comfortable but I could never get around the fact that they were pointless as I had nothing to fill them with. And the bathing suit made what I had down there very obvious, even though I loved wearing it, it just felt really amazing and made me wish I could just be anatomically female so I could actually wear it.

I never had a strong desire to dress, neither in public nor in private, but it was not because I wasn't interested in the clothes. My mother dresses tomboyish so she has nothing feminine I can borrow, and the idea of going shopping and buying my own terrifies me. And I could never shake the feeling that if I would ever wear female clothes that my body just wouldn't match, that I would obviously look like a man wearing women's clothes. And that really put me off... even dressing in private wouldn't have done it for me as long as my body was still masculine in shape. It was not the clothes but my body that was wrong, though.

9) See above.

10) See 3) mostly. I tend to have more masculine interests so it's easier to find something to talk about with guys. But the guys I always connected with most were the quieter and more considerate ones, the ones that didn't expect me to be masculine in behaviour.

He told me that he is happy I have finally understood that AGP is a symptom in my case and not a consequence. It is just a way to to deal with the anxiety coming from gender issue. He said that it is the role of one's sexuality : to give a relieve.

I always experienced sexuality in much the same way. For me the relief always mattered much more than the enjoyment. I would need it more often when I was more stressed. Except lately it tends to relieve only some of the stress while making me feel more depressed. When I was with my girlfriend I never liked her touching me down there, it just kind of alarmed me. I also preferred to hide it from her and wanted to pretend it didn't exist. Lately I've wanted to avoid looking at it more and more. So maybe I still have some of the symptoms of a true transsexual. I can't tell yet at this point. It's still all very confusing...

We talked some more and I finally told him something that I was not aware of. This is the first true news: I have a wish to be a motherly figure! Ouch! I did not even imagined that. But I have only one thing to say: touché. Be aware that I do not want to replace my mother (no oedipian complex here). I want to be motherly in my relationships to others. I do not know what to do with this but this is an interesting discovery. And it explains a lot of things about me! On the other hand this quite weird / funny. Wanting to be a motherly figure is something very very inusual (even more than gender disphoria).

I've often had a desire to protect and be there for someone, but I would often confuse it with just wanting to be a strong protective boyfriend. That all changed when I started to have similar feelings towards guys... I found a part of me I never knew I had. But it felt so much better than the strong male role!

What I have always described is that I want a feminized body and think I did not even hear the simple wisdom in my own statement. That is exactly the solution. I am feminizing my body in the usual way, but since I do still look more male than female and happen to have a substantially male brain and associated job, I continue to live as a male.

It is interesting that this progression to my solution for me did start with cross dressing. This was erotic but was not the solution to anything. I wanted breasts and soft skin and no body hair. I wanted to know what it felt like to have breasts and to touch them or have them touched. This is not erotic, it is sensual. The female body is really sensual. The softness and smoothness of the belly and calfs and even around the knees is just amaizing to me. This is what I realized I want. It is not about sex, it is not about wandering about in a dress, trying to fit in. It is simply having a feminized body. I don't think my breasts will ever get very big and that works just fine for this solution. I get to live male but still get the sensuallity and inner calm with having this body. This is even more satisfying than underdressing with panties and such. I just feel that I am more feminine--I guess like a woman who wears jeans and a man's shirt. (A little added bonus is that my face even looks younger and smoother...and is softer to the touch also--more sensuallity).

I have lengthened my hair to longer than some women but clearly longer than men have. I style it in an androgenous manner. And I now get the sensuallity of being able to run a comb through my longer, finer, slikier hair.

What I have described is an application of the thought that "I am me". At times I really do enjoy the added sensuality of women's clothes but just as the way women live, I do not have to do it all the time. It can be a special time, a treat.

One more thought...most people here worry about starting male and trying to pass as female. Why can't the challenge be to have a feminized body and try to continue passing as a male? I think it is easier.

Reading this made me realise that my thoughts were always very much in this direction. I've wanted to experience life as female, in a female body, but without committing to it fully at first. I think my 'regular' identity will always be androgynous or tomboyish, because I've not been truly male in appearance for years and I don't intend to ever dress 'normally' male. Crossdressing never appealed to me because it was always missed the point for me. I wanted to be female, not just appear female. Still, I've had some very good experiences with the tiny bit of crossdressing I did, and only now that I recall how good it felt, I realise I may dress more femininely once in a while just to be special. It's still a bit saddening that I will never be able to wear a bathing suit without SRS, because it really felt amazing. But I find the idea of wearing something that's just slightly feminine very appealing. Just enough to say to myself, yes, I am pretty!

But those are questions I simply can't answer at this point. I'm happy at least that there is someone who is following a dream that's very close to mine... which means I may one day be able to follow it too. It's very encouraging.

[Guest ignota]

Hey Riana

Just found this.... i had a few thoughts.

Tucking is something you might want to try - it allows you to forget about the thing down there and makes it look smoother. There's plenty of info floating around on that subject. There are even transgendered models who use surgical tape so they CAN wear swimsuits. I guess it just takes practice.

I can completely understand the motherly instinct, i think i've had that before. In any case, perhaps there are men need women like us to look after them