Getting sent to the psychologist for testing after my mom found my pitiful little stash of women's clothes hidden carefully in my closet. That was embarrassing. I lied about the whole thing to her and to the shrink. ("I was confused." "It was a phase." "Hadn't looked at that stuff in a long time.")

If the shrink had been approachable (this was in 1975 or 76, I was 12 or 13 years old), and asked me nicely what was going on, I might have explained my feelings about my gender. But instead, they gave me a big ol' MMPI standardized test, and it seemed that after answering a few questions that lying was the way to go, because they were looking for something that was wrong with me, and I wouldn't be wise to let them find anything.

Lying about all this came pretty naturally though. My uncle, my mom's brother, was a gay man. It was fairly obvious something was going on, even when I was little. NO ONE in our family discussed this, and my mom, to this day, has only used the word "gay" once in reference to her brother, and still doesn't always acknowledge that he was gay. (Ironically enough, I live in the condo he used to own. The complex is full of gay men, and it's in the heart of the gay district in Dallas, and is less than one mile from, and on the same street as, the gay bars in Dallas. There is no way this location happened accidently for my uncle - he stayed here 30 years.) Anyway, the message I got as a kid was "we don't talk about some subjects in this family", and my gender issues seemed like they were absolutely not something we were ever going to openly discuss.

I stopped cross dressing after I got caught. Really, there was a lot more to it than that. (Well, I suppose that goes without saying now.) Instead, I went through high school going out of my mind with gender dysphoria. (I have mild psychotic breaks when my GD gets really, really intense - I hallucinate a little.) By the end of high school, I was visiting a psychiatrist, but he didn't help much (I hated the Lithium he gave me), and ultimately just took up good old fashioned alcohol. In large quantities. Of course that became it's own problem rather rapidly, and it did lead to some embarrassing events too, but I was no longer a child by that point