Progress made, that's what is important.

What motivates you to move forward - loving who you?

@indigoflame0812316Welcome. You can be all those things you mention above and that's all right. Who you feel you are, YOU ARE. Yours is the most important opinion. I understand not having role models and in my case I was surrounded by male influence and they always felt wrong but I had no support.  As I came to have so many conflicting inner feelings, I finally found a really good workbook by a gender therapist that finally helped me in so many areas. It's called Gender Identity by Dara Hoffman-Fox and is about $15 on Amazon. Dara asks many of the questions you already have and so many you may not have considered yet. Dara sets it up so you answer based on YOUR life and helps bring all those feeling and thoughts together to focus on you and your life.  It really helped me and I highly recommend it. Know you are supported here and we will answer your questions to the best of our ability. All we want is for you to be happy being who YOU are. I'm so glad your wife is supportive. That is so important. Hugs, Heather

@KLindbergYou are entirely welcome and I hope you feel supported here as we are community and community stickes together.

HEY @Jossica   I love this! It's so joyful to see steps and evolution!    I think it's so great to be able to love and value yourself in all the steps along the way of evolution, and knowing it is OK to stop any where on that journey when you feel comfortable!    I think a lot of us have to get past internalised transphobia that only applies to ourselves and not to others for whom we can have more love and acceptance.   Thank you for sharing this, it's so lovely to understand where you are coming from and may be going.   

Hello all!   Like so many of y'all, I'm always thinking about my inner life and how I feel. It's coming up on a year since I first started questioning my gender, and I guess I just felt like sharing an update with people that I know will understand. And it will be kind of like a journal entry I guess, but I seem to have an impulse to just share this kind of stuff with someone, and, again, y'all have been so supportive this year for me.   My default view, 12 months ago, was that I was a cis male. I mean, what else would I possibly be? I was born with a certain set of body parts, have a certain set of chromosomes, and a certain proportion of hormones. I played football (the American kind) as an offensive lineman, and was blessed with lots of stereotypical masculine traits that made that possible - a big frame, the ability to put on a lot of weight and muscle, durability, and the special kind of stupid that comes with thinking experiencing pain in every play is normal and kind of fun. You know, typical high school dude stuff. And yet... Well, there were signs. A ton of them, now that I've looked back. Enough that I'm sure that someone would have caught it when I was a teenager if not for culture, trauma, and mental health stuff. If only I had access to LGBTQ-informed therapy as a teenager!   I suppose I could start the clock of questioning my gender about two and a half years ago, when I began regularly thinking, "Huh, I'm actually more like a woman than most men in this area too... I wonder why that is?" All the while, I never once considered that I might not be cis. But once I actually asked myself, "Am I nonbinary?!" the process went fairly quickly. A month and a half later (mid-August 2025), I had settled on genderfluid as the closest term to my gender identity. While I still feel like the term "genderfluid" is the closest term to my experience, there has been a pretty big shift in what I feel like that means.   At the time, I didn't think that I had experienced gender dysphoria. Or at least not related to my body. I still thought of myself as a man. Not quite a cis man, but I was so sure that the LGBTQ+ label didn't really apply to me. Okay, maybe WAAAYYY down the expanded list of letters. But while I really wished that I had a woman's body, I knew that I didn't, and so that means I'm not a woman and can't be a woman. I wasn't so transphobic with others, but I certainly was with myself. I thought I was going to have to settle for being a guy who felt like a girl on the inside. And, maybe when I was feeling especially girly, I could act a little girly too. But my default position was that I was a man, and I float into girly territory here and there.   Now, I feel a bit more like the opposite. I feel more and more like a woman who enjoys floating into masculine territory here and there. I feel like my masculine body, which I do legitimately like as far as male bodies go, is almost more like a mecha for my girly spirit - to use some anime kind of language. And it's a great mecha when I need to do manual labor! But it's feeling less and less like "me" in some ways. Which, in some ways, isn't exactly healthy, and I need to do some work in reconciling my view of my body with my inner experience. I think, at least for now, that if I magically got the exact female body that I've always dreamed of having, I would still identify as genderfluid. I would float between very feminine presentation and androgyny, with a desire to have a male body every once in a while. Or maybe I'd be exactly where I was, just from the other side! Who knows?!   I'm obviously still working all of this out. And I still need to start therapy with an LGBTQ-qualified therapist. That part of things is on hold while my wife and I are still trying to sort things out between us and are trying to get couples counseling, complicated by schedules and insurance. But until then, I'm mostly sorting things out on my own. The main thing that I'm confident about is that I'm not done developing. I'm certain that in a year, I'll have a different idea of who I am, likely with more clarity in some areas, and plenty of other questions to continue exploring.   Thanks for listening! I can't overstate how helpful y'all have been in my life. I try to read as much as I can of y'all's posts, and I wish I could comment so much more than I have been. But life's responsibilities just take so much time and energy.

Good Morning, y'all! How are ya?   Mum's picking me up so we can do a bunch of things together today, the most important of which being taking me to a Laser Hair Removal Clinic for my skin evaluation!  It's obviously not the actual first hair removal appointment, but today I'll find out if my skin is suitable for such things! I really hope it is!   To my fellow Brits, I hope you're ready for another hot day. Where I currently am, it's supposed to hit highs of 32 Celsius, or 89.6 Fahrenheit, with tomorrow's highs going up to 34 Celsius/93.2 Fahrenheit.

Oh @Max I'm so sorry. That all sounds horribly difficult.    Are CPS, I mean, do you feel like they are working in your interest? Can you ask the worker for help?    I guess y'all are on summer break now?   (I want you to have someone there for you)         

Hi Indigo!   I'm a 44 yo AMAB who's been married for 21 years now. It's such a strange time and place in life to discover such a big thing about yourself, isn't it?   If I were to guess what advice you're looking for, here are a few possibilities. Do I want to be a woman? What gender am I? And how do I even go about figuring that out? Once I sort that out, how am I supposed to present myself? How do I know if I want to transition? What does that even mean anyway? What kinds of transitions can I do? How will all that change my marriage? But you tell us what you're looking for!   This, to me, feels like a good description of genderfluid. But you'll have to sort out whether that fits you or not, and whether you like it or not.   I have always had some kind of weird hangup around nails and makeup. But all the rest of it: Yes! Me too! 100%!! And if I suddenly got a girly looking body, I'd be into the makeup and nails too, which makes me think it's probably because of repressed gender identity stuff coupled with internalized transphobia.

I've also been thinking a lot about what it means to fit in or not fit in with the LGBTQ community. I know that some of it is imposter syndrome. Or maybe all of it? But I also worry that maybe I'm not trans enough or Queer enough or whatever. Despite so many of us on this forum being older than me, I still feel like transitioning of any kind is a young person's game and that I'm well over the age limit. I feel like I'm going to be judged as not even trying to be feminine if I'm not gonna shave my beard or take hormones. And while I've had nothing but acceptance from all the LGBTQ people I've told so far, my doubts keep telling me that behind my back, they're probably scoffing at me and think I'm just pretending to act cool or something. It's weird, but I almost want there to be an application to fill out and be approved by my local Queer council so I can get an official membership card or something to prove to myself and others that I'm part of the group. But that isn't how it works, and it isn't how it should work.   While there are definitely times that I feel like I've stepped into something new and that it's all wonderful and exciting, as it turns out, more often I just still feel like me. We're all just ourselves, and we always have been.

im very sorry abt that, but i havent gotten many chances. lots of CPS drama, new schedules, more exterminator visits, less food in the house, etc

@Petra JaneThank you!

Yeah, sometimes I just get caught up in OTHER PEOPLE.  And ALSO I think in wanting to be more noticeably NOT the same person.  Unfortunately, or otherwise, I cannot really do that. Which is really a happy thing, because, it means I am and have always (bit for a small weirdness in the middle) actually just been who I am.  But I *want* to feel something different.  And I think that's the thing that makes me (and others) rush ahead before dotting Is and crossing ts.  So I am glad for patience I guess. 

Hey @indigoflame0812316 Welcome.    You said you wanted advice? What advice do you want? I mean that genuinely, because you seem to have a lovely handle on what you want to try, and that your wife feels supportive?   More people should know this, like it's some socially hidden secret, but, clothing and makeup is not gendered. You can genuinely wear and try ANYTHING YOU WANT. it won't change who you are, at all, BUT it might make you feel more comfortable, or happier or more like other people can see how you feel you should be seen.    And you said, you spoke to your wife and SHE thinks you want to be a woman? But you didn't say that YOU feel like a woman? How do YOU feel?    Being transgender, or cross dressing, or ANY flavour of LGBTQ+ is PERFECTLY fine, and good. You can wear and present and be whoever, but do it because it comes from YOU.  THAT'S the adventure. And, for me, it has been full of joy. So, I wish that for you.