Lorelei’s biography

[Lorelei]

I have felt off for my whole life, not fitting as a boy or man. They diagnosed me with ADHD and Asperger’s syndrome pretty early on. But something else felt off and could never figure it out until like 2011 when I realized I really was transgender. I always did get along with girls and hung out with girls as if I was one early in elementary school. In hindsight that is probably when I should have known I was transgender and wish I had told my parents and pediatrician then, all of them were very liberal and would have most likely got me on puberty blockers. My pediatrician was openly gay and that is where I first saw a rainbow flag. But by middle school I was trying to fit in as a boy, playing soccer and baseball even though I didn’t like it. I was constantly bullied from like third grade up to eighth grade. In high school the boys matured enough to stop bullying me but still crude and offensive in how they talked about women. I was again getting along with girls better than other boys. The guys were still immature and gross. Relating better to the women continued through college and even up to the present. Guys still are still awful in how they talk about women in adulthood, it is most of the ones I have met. 

[Ashley0616]

There are a small number who aren't that way but not many. Even the guy I'm talking to said he can't have sex with me, but it didn't completely take over the whole conversation. Sex is important but it shouldn't be your whole existence. I do understand where you are coming from. I was bullied till I was in 9th grade and that was probably just because I played football just to impress my dad which didn't work. He was still yelling at me. I did what I wanted and joined JROTC and sometimes was bullied but at least I had some friends who would back me up. I do understand how it's easier to talk to girls than boys. My problem became they thought I was hitting on them when I just wanted friends. We can all say that we wished we did it sooner, but things aren't ever done in our timeline. If I came out when I wanted, I wouldn't have two sons.

[Lorelei]

High school

 

In high school I hung out with the average people so life at school was pretty easy. None of the elementary and middle school craziness I had been suffering. The guys I usually hung out with really weren’t really into crude talk about women which was a breath of fresh air compared to middle school. The jocks left me alone and I avoided them. Just movies and hanging out at the local pizza place. I barely passed in Latin but did very well in the other classes. We, mostly nerdy girls, would hang out in the biology lab with a freshly graduated lab teacher. She barely looked like she was older than us and probably knew we were cutting another class. I guess administration figured hanging out and talking about college to a teacher was low priority to enforce compared to the kids cutting class to smoke pot, tobacco or drinking alcohol in the restrooms. Gym was ok, but I did earn the nickname of hyper changer since I would change so fast that nobody saw me changing. 

I felt wrong though even though I was doing good socially. I definitely knew I was in the wrong body and hated my penis. Needless to say, I was very depressed in high school and had tried to kill myself a couple of times. It is amazing that my liver survived the Tylenol overdose I took before bed one day. My parents knew that I was depressed and had me on antidepressants but they did not know that I had attempted suicide until I told them a couple of years ago. The meds really didn’t help. I still didn’t tell my doctor that I was in the wrong gender. It didn’t help that my father was alcoholic and was verbally abused sometimes. He did get sober and my relationship with him drastically improved.  

 

I also huffed basically anything volatile to escape my life. I had some fierce hangovers from that. Nobody knew that I had been doing that either. Ultimately I quit that freshman year of college after face planting into a toolbox full of sharp tools. Outwardly I seemed happy to everyone. 

 

Like every boy I was expected to ask girls out, but the concept felt unnatural. It felt like that the girls should be asking me out. No surprise that I went to next to no dances, and the only one I ended up dancing was a goth girl, like the polar opposite of my lifestyle. I ended up hanging out with her and her friends pretty regularly. when prom came, we made plans to hang out at the mall, but those plans fell through. I still talked to them on Facebook up until I ended up marrying someone. I was definitely one of the girls with them, but I didn’t realize that. High school would have been a bad to have started transitioning as I would have likely been expelled. Catholic school. 
 

Later post for that. I initially did meet my wife in high school but it amounted to me saying “hi” and running off. I was very shy. I also thought she was with someone else, but now know that guy is gay and they were inseparably close friends. She was only one class with me.
 

My high school was a catholic school so everyone was expected to attend college. We had three West Point cadets come from my class, but one of them ended up deciding to go to Harvard medical instead (it was an Ivy League medical school, I am not entirely sure it was Harvard). I graduated in 2000 with honors and got accepted to an engineering school in New York City with a partial scholarship. Currently the only people from high school that I am in touch with are my wife and her gay best friend. 

[Lorelei]

College. 
 

Engineering school was so difficult and time consuming that I rarely thought of gender. As a result I was a lot less depressed and was suicidal only a couple of times, with no attempts. It was commute-class-commute-homework-study-work repeat. I didn’t sleep much. My father got sober so my home life drastically improved. I only asked one girl and I did get rejected. Apparently she was in a group that forbid dating people from other ethnicity’s and had I got involved with her I could have been killed. I was told about getting killed by someone in that group much later, but I don’t know if that was true or exaggerated. 

 

I nearly flunked out and lost my scholarship freshman year which was a real big stressor. But I hit sophomore year running and kept getting A’s throughout my college years. I did get the scholarship back. I studied so much that I was able to complete 15+ credits of graduate school while still undergrad. I graduated with honors. 
 

My closest friend was in computer engineering (I am civil/environmental engineering) and he was gay. The rest of my friends were women. I definitely felt right with that. My class was like 75% female. I connected with the women much better than men. Although I was definitely presenting as male at that time I felt like I was one of the women. I still didn’t know about the concept of being transgender, all I thought of that was they were cross dressing. But at this point I knew I was a woman inside of a man’s body and men’s clothing. 

 

After graduating, I got a job at the sewer department and took night classes to complete my masters degree in two years. I was able to complete it so quickly because of all the masters credits from when I was undergrad. So it was now work-commute-homework-studying-commute with little time to think about gender. So I was actually pretty happy and not depressed. The summer of graduation I started caving which led to a lot. 

[Timi]

I'm listening ... Thank you for sharing, @Lorelei. 

 

-Timi

[Lorelei]

After college, I started full time as a civil engineer in civil service, so no long unpaid overtime days like my private sector classmates. I now I had time to think about dating and gender. For the first year, I was doing well, but by 2007 I was very depressed. I went to a psychiatrist and put on antidepressants, and quickly got manic. So I got diagnosed with bipolar disorder and started lithium. The meds did help, and I had worked with a therapist. He really wasn’t that great, but gender did come up as I was having a hard time with dating. For some reason he had a fixation with the higher rate of homosexuality in professional athletes… I am definitely not attracted to men, but I started to consider that I was lesbian. I had also joined a caving club and got active with that hobby. Caving introduced me to many people of backgrounds that I had never encountered, including a trans woman. I didn’t really know her well personally, but I had heard a lot of stories about her transition. A few people compared me to her. By like 2011 (possibly back to 2010), I knew I was a closeted trans woman. In 2011, I had I told my mother, who told me that I never fit that description. That hurt and I dropped it. But I did start to grow my hair out, bought women’s clothing and looked into HRT. I was out to my caver friends by 2011. I was actually pretty happy. But in August 2012, I had a massive stroke. My biggest fear was that I was going to die in the wrong gender. Between a few weeks in the ICU and more inpatient rehab, I was really considering coming out to everyone. In the ER I had to undress and my painted toenails gave me up to my mother. I was also wearing a bra. To be clear, she did not see me getting changed into the hospital gown, only the nurse who assisted me, but I was barefoot and was given the bag with my street clothes. She did my nails for me when I was unable, but still didn’t see me as transgender. I was devastated when I realized the contradiction of estrogen and ischemic stroke. I recovered my language abilities over many months and went back to work. In early 2013, I was seeing visual disturbances and went back to the hospital. A cute nurse came up to me asking why I was in the cardiac room and if I recognized her. It was the girl who I said hi to and ran off when I was in high school. She had been on a different unit, but had recognized my name on the roster and came to see me. She gave me her phone number and email address and then had to return back to her unit. I was transferred to another hospital. It turns it was not a second stroke, it was either a mini stroke or my first migraine aura. Either way they put me on blood thinners. I was so thrilled that a woman came up to me. I would have been too shy to have went to her. The stroke was devastating, but it had set up the chain of events leading to me getting married very quickly. 

[Lorelei]

I probably should have broken that up into paragraphs. Sorry if it was tough to understand. Effectively English is my second language due to the damage from the stroke. I had 100% lost my original English language center from it. 

[Mmindy]

@LoreleiI thought it was a good read, and hope you continue to share your experiences.

 

Hugs,

 

Mindy🌈🐛🏳️‍⚧️🦋

[Lorelei]

I was so shy that it took me months to email that nurse, partly because I was considering transitioning. We ended up talking via email until my birthday, when she called to wish me happy birthday. We ended up setting up a date in December, but we got the time wrong. We both thought we got stood up by the other. Our first date ended up at a snowstorm at a Starbucks since we missed the restaurant. We hit it off very quickly. 

By February I was totally in love with her. I knew I was in a serious relationship with her and decided to tell her on Valentine’s Day that I was transgender and would eventually transition. I knew I had to have her know that before we went any further. She took this in stride and told me that she was bisexual and my gender didn’t matter to her, just me. I was so relieved and excited. We did end up having an unrelated fight and she broke up with me, but I did not realize it. I had continued to call her and she saw how determined I was to be with her, and she took me back. That was when I lost my virginity to her. We agreed that we should get married so I proposed to her at a wonderful dinner. We got married shortly afterwards at the town hall with just our parents around. It was exactly 6 months between our first date and us getting married. 

Our first year of marriage was really challenging. She was sick a lot and was still working overnights at the ER while sick. She knew what she needed, but her doctor refused to do the required surgery that she wanted because he said that she might want to have children. I so wanted to punch that doctor. It got to the point that she collapsed from blood loss and required emergency surgery. The doctor came to me asking me my permission to do the surgery. I told him it was her choice not mine and that he should have done that surgery a long time ago. I was furious with him. It was a hysterectomy so no chance of children, but we were fine with that. I brought this up here as I know a lot of trans men have been refused hysterectomies for the same reasons she was refused. It is just wrong. She is not transgender though. This strengthened our marriage in the long run. 
 

She did have a hard time with me cross dressing when I had started that. But that was because I had been trying to present as male. She was going through a lot at that point as she was still anemic and changing careers so I did not hold it against her. I ended up presenting as male until I started out growing my hair out in 2017. That gets into my second attempt to transition. The first one was prior to the stroke. 

[Lorelei]

In 2018 I told my wife that I was going to transition. I was out to my psychiatrist and my in-laws. I couldn’t bring myself to tell my own family though, remembering the time in 2011 when I tried to come out to my mom. My aunt had figured it out though (but I didn’t know this until this year), and was the only one who wasn’t surprised. I got so anxious and depressed that I couldn’t come out to my own parents that I eventually tried to kill myself. Fortunately (in an awful way) it was interrupted twice firstly when my wife called that she was in a car crash and was in the hospital and the second time it was so cold that the diesel gelled and I was unable to get it started to get to where I had planned to do it.

 

That was when I decided to voluntarily commit myself to a psychiatric hospital early in 2019.  I looked awful, having been too depressed to shave my face and my hair was a mess. I wasn’t able to shave in there. When I was there I decided to go back into the closet by lying that I had been in a bipolar mixed episode and that was why I had started to transition. Outwardly it worked, and the new medication cocktail worked pretty well.

 

I was relatively happy pretending that I was cis male for a few years. But the feelings of being in the wrong gender continued although they weren’t de habilitating. By the spring of 2023 my wife noticed that something was still wrong and asked if I wanted to transition; that she would still love me and be with me if I did. I initially lied and said that I didn’t want to. In June 2023 we went to the Stonewall Inn in NYC for pride month. Over drinks I told her that I did want to transition, and do it the right way this time so I wouldn’t end up in a psych hospital again. I cried a good bit and she hugged me and told me that she loved. 
 

We decided to go slow at first and that was what we ended up doing she made an appointment at a gender affirming clinic for me which I went to in August. I started wearing a bra under my work uniform and I ordered chicken cutlet silicone inserts. While they were in transit, I was stuffing it with socks. This was before I was I formally came out to many people, but nobody said anything. That is when I finally came out to my parents, who told me that they would love me no matter what.

 

In September I was able to convince the nurse practitioner that the benefits of starting estrogen outweighed the absolute contradiction of having a history of stroke. I started estrogen on September 7, my HRT birthday. I came out to a coworker asked, and told him to let anyone who asked that I was transgender. I called my brother and told him, and he was supportive. He was supportive and was concerned about the stroke and taking estrogen. 

[Lorelei]

 I left it out that I started presenting as a women during the anti harassment training program at work. I continued to go slowly until December when I wore a dress to work for the holiday party. Nobody said anything, but a retiree did look shocked. After that I would periodically wear dresses to work. I started using the ladies room in September when my wife and I went to Minneapolis and exclusively used the ladies room everywhere except at work. I continued to use the men’s room at work until I wore the dress to the party. After that I had been using the ladies room at a nearby supermarket. I didn’t start using the ladies room at work until I submitted the paperwork to legally change my name and gender. That was my self imposed benchmark. Just this week I talked to my boss and they are using the correct name and pronouns for me and my coworkers did the same. The name change is still propagating as I change documents. 
 

The estrogen patches that I started using were not working to increase my estradiol levels, but halved my testosterone. I did have breast development start. In December I finally got prescribed estrogen shots and then the psychical changes started pretty quickly. My breasts are now noticeably bigger and getting bigger. The spiriolactone dropped my testosterone to near zero. There was a significant shrinkage in the genitalia which was welcomed as well no longer performing as a male. 

I came out to my extended family recently and just got invited to my cousins bridal shower. 

 

At this point, the story is still being written in real time. 

[Lydia_R]

Nice read!  Thanks for sharing!

 

Hugs, Lydia

[MaeBe]

1 hour ago, Lorelei said:

That is when I finally came out to my parents, who told me that they would love me no matter what.

❤️ I bet when they said that it was the best feeling of relief.

 

53 minutes ago, Lorelei said:

I started using the ladies room in September when my wife and I went to Minneapolis and exclusively used the ladies room everywhere except at work.

I struggle with using the ladies room, yet you did it even just starting on HRT! I've been on for three months and present feminine in public, but still feel like I have to use the men's room. Did you just decide to do it? Or was it the Minnesotan air? I breathe it every day though, so that can't be it.

 

Thank you for sharing so much of your story with us!

 

💜Mae

[Ivy]

Thanks for your story.

[Mmindy]

2 hours ago, Lorelei said:

At this point, the story is still being written in real time. 

Happy Friday @Lorelei thank you for sharing.

 

Best wishes, stay positive and motivated

 

Mindy🌈🐛🏳️‍⚧️🦋

[Ashley0616]

Thank you for sharing your story! It's wonderful to do it with someone and not alone.

[Dilly453]

Thank you for sharing your story.  I’m very happy for you that you’re on your transition journey.  You’re a very brave and strong person.  I’m hoping to eventually get to a point to take some steps myself.

[Lorelei]

Our tenth anniversary is in June and my wife and I are going to renew our vows, with me being myself. We did a big renewal with a big “wedding party” back in 2019 for our families since we got married at the town hall with just our parents back in 2014, but I was presenting as a man. This time it will be just the two of us with me wearing a white wedding dress. Neither of knows what the other one will be wearing. I am so excited to get wedding pictures of us with myself being myself. Update the photo albums. 

[Ashley0616]

1 hour ago, Lorelei said:

Our tenth anniversary is in June and my wife and I are going to renew our vows, with me being myself. We did a big renewal with a big “wedding party” back in 2019 for our families since we got married at the town hall with just our parents back in 2014, but I was presenting as a man. This time it will be just the two of us with me wearing a white wedding dress. Neither of knows what the other one will be wearing. I am so excited to get wedding pictures of us with myself being myself. Update the photo albums. 

That's awesome! I'm definitely wearing a wedding dress to my next wedding if I'm able to find someone for me. It's seeming like it won't happen. Although I need to get the divorce finalized and will start paperwork in June or July. She abandoned me so I have to wait a period of time before I can file.