Hi Everyone

[Guest dimetra]

Before I begin I need to apologize for the length. It s something I wrote for my therapist. I am 55 y.o and have started HRT on April 3. I have noted some changes in some breast sprouting. I have softer skin and I cry easily. I am a tall girl, 6'3". I have practiced yoga almost daily for the last 10 years. I have started laser hair removal and electrolysis for the white hairs. I am feeling impatient as I want faster changes. I have to maintain appearances while I am at work, but sometimes I leak through . I love my life and my home.

Life Story

By Dimetra

Life Story Overview

As a young boy I was a sensitive child who liked drawing, housework with my Mother and pretty things. When I began school I had difficulty making friends with boys and typically had more friends that were girls. I liked art and singing. I cried easily when upset or teased, which attracted even more teasing and bullying. I was and still am an excellent speller. I could remember the words to songs and poems very easily and teachers always liked for me to sing in front of everyone. I was very shy and embarrassed from singing alone in front of my classmates and they would tease me afterwards. Other boys would threaten me and beat me up often. One day my parents noticed that the other boys picked on me and I would come home and cry. They decided to sign me up to play little league football so that I would be toughened up. When I began I was clumsy and accident prone, so I got bullied and teased by the coach and my teammates. The more upset I got the more they laughed. I cried a lot. Eventually, my parents joined in the teasing. The more I cried the more I would get teased and bullied until I began to get angry. When I got angry I played a lot better, which made my parents very happy, I wanted to be a good child and make my parents happy, so I continued in football playing from age 9-12. I improved a lot after the first year and I became a very strong player for a young boy. This did not make the other boys stop teasing me since they thought I was very strange.

When I got to be about 12 years old, the boys around me became bigger, stronger, and scarier since they were reaching puberty. It had taken me much longer but when it did the expression of it was more feminine. At this time I discovered that I liked wearing female clothes and underwear. I became even more emotional and that the emotions were very uncontrollable. I experimented with my mother’s underwear and clothes. I wore her bras and padded them like I possessed real breasts. This was all done very carefully and secretively, usually when no one was home and I had the house to myself. I really loved it and was obsessed over it and still am., except now I also think is just very nice to do along with being sexy. Sometimes, I would wear shorter and tighter shorts and shirts. I liked my legs and body and the way they looked in short tight clothes. If people saw me in anything it was in these clothes, but during the early 70s it has been my belief that short shorts were not seen as strange. Perhaps I was wrong about that.

Boys at school would tease me and call me names like Sweetie and queer and in locker rooms for PE and sports some of them would shout at me and hold their penises out at me. I would always get very emotionally upset and I could never respond with anything clever. I never liked this and I considered it at that time animal behavior and I did not understand how boys could be that cruel, angry, fixated on just one thing. I did not know if they suspected how feminine I was or what I liked to do when I was alone. As an adult I still am horrified and repulsed by this behavior and as a teacher I will absolutely deal with this behavior very directly in my classrooms.

At about age 13 I began having severe anxiety attacks. They would last a day or two and if hell really existed, then I experienced it during these episodes of terror. They would happen about every two to three months or so. My whole family was also affected but no one sought help for me because my parents did not want anyone to know there was a freak in the house. These attacks continued until my early 20s.

At this time I had a friend who was one of these early maturing boys. At 12 years old he was lifting weights a lot and had acne but he was not a bully. We were very close for about a year. He was one boy who did not threaten me or call me “sissy” names. I felt very safe with him, and his name was Gary. We would hang out and go everywhere together. We talked about everything and that included girls that we both liked. During one Summer I was hanging out with him in his house. We were in his bedroom and he wanted to show me how he lifted weights and what he enjoyed doing. I was impressed that he could actually bench press 190 pounds. Then he pulled out his penis and began making himself construct in front of me. He would then proceed to tell me how he liked to touch himself. I did not respond to this in some manner like “can I touch it too” or “I like the way you look”. I thought that it looked huge compared to mine and I wondered why mine was so small. I guess I did not think of him sexually but I did not run from him either. We still were friends. Later that Summer, we went to a church camp where we played a lot of games with a lot of other boys and girls. I met girls that I really liked but they always thought I was “too nice”. I made a lot of friends there. Later that week at camp I had a spiritual and mystical experience. It was at night and I was watching silent mime plays of Jesus’ death. I was sitting somewhere alone when I looked around me and felt like the whole universe was made of only love and that nothing could ever exist without and and that things remain in their existence only because of this love. I cried and cried, feeling that LOVE made me and everything and that I existed only because of it. Uncontrollable emotion destroyed all of my composure while my own tears wash over me. At older man approached me and told me that it was the Holy Spirit blessing me, which I did not understand. I continued to cry all night and in the morning all of us rode back to town on a big bus. The air was fresher and the sky was beautiful.

I stayed in sports, becoming more skillful as I was competing with bigger and stronger boys who seemed to have almost supernatural strength. The anxiety attacks continued. I started getting interested in other sports, such as swimming and volleyball. I learned to fit in better and to avoid the cruelty of many of the other boys. I really liked girls and they liked me but only for friendship not boy-friend-ship. I went to college after high school, getting in on the strength of test scores rather than grade point average. I struggled with grades my first two years as I had not developed the discipline I need for that kind of learning. I found the groove after my junior year and then college became easier. I majored in Philosophy and Religion and I had little insight into the future of job hunting. It was during my senior year that I discovered meditation. I started with TM (transcendental meditation” which aroused anxiety attacks in me. After that I discovered simple candle-gazing as a mindfulness practice and that is finally what ended my anxiety attacks. Young women were likewise not interested in me during college but I formed a band with a friend and I became the singer. I was a virgin until my 21^st birthday and the women who ended my virginity was a 30 year old unwed mother who was very kind and made me feel safe.

During my 20s, I found out that I really did not know how to work. Each time I found a job I would lose it after a week or two because I failed to keep my uniform clean, or showed up late too many times. I simply did not know how to work. About the only job I could do was nude modeling for art classes. I was called to model a lot and it paid more than most part time jobs. With it I also was able to work at several schools at the same time for art classes. It reawakened my interest in art that I had when I was a child. So during my 20s I was determined to go back to college and complete another degree in fine arts. I was not able to make it back until in my 30s.

Throughout my life I always maintained a small wardrobe of ladies underwear that I wore discreetly. I discovered new things about myself and what I liked. I never had an interest in a “boyfriend” since I really did not like men or boys that way. I would say that the thought of that sickens me a little. I took until I was 29 years old to figure out how to work. I learned by being forced to survive as my parents split up and my Mother got very sick, needing public assistance after extreme medical bills. I worked for a year at a 7-11 store making all kinds of mistakes and being accused frequently of stealing from the cash register. After a year of this I worked for Radio Shack for exactly a year. I found out that my social skills were not that horrible as many customers preferred my non-aggressive approach. After Radio Snack I started working for semiconductor fabrication factories and tat became my occupation for the next 15 years. It eventually became my opportunity to move to California as I found work at Western Digital in Orange County. I was in 1992 that I was able to go back to college to finish the degree that I wanted the most. I had learned how to work and I had been on my own for a few years. I still did not have a huge amount of money but I was very solid in what worked for me. In the Spring of 1993 I met Michelle who is my spouse and the person I trust the most in the whole world. I feel that I did not find Michelle, but that I was led to her by some irresistible divine force. We have been together now for 20 years and she exceedingly important to me. Her parents are still together. Her Mother is a bookkeeper and her father is a brilliant engineer, now retired.

After we got married, we celebrated everyday. I worked hard and made more money. We bought a house in Long Beach and lived very fashionably. We both completed our BFAs in painting and together we also made money building stained glass windows and painting murals. We both had gained a lot of weight and Michelle was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. That is when she began practicing yoga, which really helped. I kept getting bigger and then I was laid off due to factory closure. The industry was moving to China and I did not want to follow. I started looking for jobs in education, thinking that those jobs would never be shipped out.

In 2004 I became a special education teacher at a high school. We sold our house in Long Beach for triple what we had paid for it and immediately bought a place in Lancaster. After the first year in teaching, which was very stressful, I was at a low point in my life physically. My weight had ballooned to 290 pounds. I had high blood pressure, dangerously high cholesterol, and I was borderline diabetic. I did not feel sexy and I was not feeling like wearing my feminine wardrobe. At this time Michelle joined Weight Watchers and she started telling me how to do it. I went from 290 to 220 and that weight loss completely eliminated any unhealthy blood chemistry. I felt amazing and sexy again. I began doing yoga like my spouse beginning late 2005. Since that time I have been practicing almost daily. I am still teaching special education, but now at a middle school.

In 2010 my mother died from congestive heart failure, in 2011 my father died from liver cancer. I saw both of them before they passed. About that time is when my desire to live life as a woman became stronger. I had been reading web articles on the subject as well as people’s experiences of their lives. I had a doctor visit to a urologist because I wanted to make our sex life better without the risk of pregnancy. Despite being completely in love with her our sexual experience is not very physical and seldom is their actual intercourse. The urologist told me that a vasectomy was unnecessary since I had what he said was Klinefelter Syndrome. He suspected this because I am way taller than anyone in my family, have very light body hair and small sexual parts. I was tested for various chemistry issues and found out that I had very low testosterone. I read more on the subject but I am skeptical since I do not think I have ever had a learning disability. Most recently, I had an actual blood test that determined that I did not have Klinefelter’s.

I found the subject of gender dysphoria to be fascinating so I read and studied more. About 2 years ago is when I really started thinking of this as a possibility for me. I had been teaching yoga at a local studio and I recognized that I have acquired a large group of female friends, while observing that I had no male friends. My world is a world full of women and I seem to fit comfortably in a women’s social circle. Also, I have become increasingly aware of wanting to express myself as a woman in the world. Emotionally, I have rediscovered myself and instead of feeling frightened of people knowing, my emotions are liberating me. I have been talking this over with my spouse and explaining to her what I have experienced. We talked about this a lot when we first got together and I showed her some things that I liked. She was very loving toward me and accepted me. At this time, my desires have become stronger and new desires have surface which I have been discussing with Michelle. Eventually, I want a full transition. As I near actual retirement, I recognize that I have challenges before me, but I also desire to have a plan. I am a woman trapped in a man’s body and I want on the outside to match what I feel inside. I am beginning hormone therapy as I have an Endocrinologist prescribing then for me and checking my chemistry periodically. I will soon have laser hair removal on my face and perhaps my arms. I have been working on my voice and my walking. I will need to collect female “outer” garments. There will be a lot more to come. I will have to maintain appearances at work as far as clothes and voice, until I can fully transition legally and physically.

[Charlize]

Welcome to Laura's!

Hugs,

Charlize

[Guest Opal]

Hello Dimetra, and thank you for sharing this with us! I am 57, and there are quite a few parallels between your early life an mine. For instance, in my elementary school records, there was an entry by one of my teachers who put 'Cries when hurt a little'.

My mom participated numerous years in an annual Flower Show in our town. I had some entries, and got second place ribbons a few times. I believe I was the only "boy" who participated. No doubt my dad didn't think much of it, but my mom usually out-ranked him (Probably the only reason I am still alive).

Wish you well on your on-going journey! Be seeing you around the Forums!

Huggs,

Opal

[Carolyn Marie]

Thank you for sharing your story, Dimetra. Welcome to the Playground. I hope you find what you are looking for here, and also find friends.

HUGS

Carolyn Marie

[gennee]

Welcome to Laura's, Dimetra.