Trying to accept that I am a transsexual

[sandra-leigh]

Finally, I realized that I AM a woman and because of that I feel like a woman.

Exactly! You now know yourself to be a woman. You do not need "reasons" to know that about yourself, you just are.

And my difficulty is that although I now know that I am not "male", I do not know that I am "female". I wish I did know that -- or at least it seems to me in my present state that it would be so much easier to live if I Just Knew I was female than to be as I am, stuck in the middle. (In contrast, I emotionally recoil from the possibility that I am still actually male.)

I struggled for a long time on the question of whether I was "just a cross-dresser" or something more, and I came up with "reasons" that I was one or the other. I was absolutely unable to settle the matter through reason, but one day, between two moments, I quietly knew I was not male. Revelation, if you want to call it that. A step of Faith. A Conversion. A Mystic Experience. However it happened, I didn't know and then I did.

I am intellectually prepared for the possibility that some day I will have another such revelation, that I will know that I am a woman. But I don't know that now, and I live with my agnosticism -- and with the possibility that some day that I will have a revelation that convinces me that I am not really female either. Though, to be frank, my heart leans more towards the hope that some day I will know myself to be female.

The latter, to me, is an oxymoron. CD's like Tara (heterosexual, non-op, not bi) DO want to be female when they dress.

Indeed, CD's that are like Tara are like that. Some CD's, though, dress to emulate female without wanting to temporarily be female. And there are CD's on the forum that state that they just like the clothes, the textures and colors and appearance and physical sensations of wearing them, and don't want to even emulate being female. A friend of mine who is on this system says it is strictly fun for him, that he does not identify as female at all, even when wearing the clothes,

For myself, cross-dressing (before I knew I was transgender) was a compulsion, and I really couldn't have told you what I was getting out of it. It wasn't (consciously) to "be" female, even for a time. As I wandered closer and closer to realizing I was transgender, it was through the realization that even though I didn't feel as if I was female, that living as female worked better for me in so many ways.