It was amazing what ingenious ideas we could come up with when we were younger Brenda. For instance who didn't use a towel for a head scarf and/or a skirt? I remember smearing ketchup on my lips and putting baby powder on my face to make it look lighter and pinching my cheeks to make them red. Some of us may have been rough and tumble boys but we were also delicate flowers. I miss those days of innocence.
Second star to the right and straight on till morning
With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight I can see that the "girl inside" has always been with me, but for four decades I was ashamed of her, denied her existence, and pushed her into the deepest back corners of my mind.
Eryn
"These girls have the most beautiful dresses. And so do I! How about that!" [Kaylee, in Firefly] [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
"What do you care what other people think?" [Arlene Feynman, to her husband Richard]
"She's taller than all the women in my family, combined!" [Howard, in The Big Bang Theory]
"Tall, tall girl. The woman could hunt geese with a rake!" [Mary Cooper, in The Big Bang Theory]
Same here, Eryn. Except I only pushed her away for two decades.
Just came back from horseback riding in my long hair and womans stretch pants. Several girls walking by on the trail waved their hands saying "Have fun riding girls" to me and my wife on another horse. Felt so good inside.
Clorissa
Since age 4 or 5 would go to the womens section of the store instead of the toy section just to look and feel thenat age 7 is when it alltook off now at age 49 I am comfortable just being me
This side of me has been there since I was about 10.
Not really a girl inside, Just a boy that really prefers to wear women's clothes.
Just being me.
my sister's reply when I told her how I prefer to dress
"Everyone has there thing, all that matters is that you are happy, love what you do and who you do it with"
I feel there is a "girl inside", or that I hide her in order to present my male side in the world. By doing so,
I create a bifurcated world. I want "her" out more and more, as a result. I feel I cannot do so, or
feel social humiliation, shame, etc.
--------
Love your woman within...
Know thy self -- Be your true self......
I'm still not sure if I have a girl inside or if I just have the urge to 'put on a girl suit' every now and then. If I ever had a girl inside, it's sitting in a jar on the shelf right now waiting until I get her out again so I don't have to carry her around all the time.
There's a real sense of accomplishment when I manage to look 'feminine' and fool other people, which may have become a thing on its own, but I'm fairly sure the deepest motivation for me to do this is purely a sexual one.
Getting in touch with your feminine side, that is to say accepting womanhood as a way of life is a huge step and should not be taken lightly. Crossdressing on the weekend is one thing, deciding to live your life as a woman is quite another. I accepted womanhood as my way of life a few years ago and I regret all the years I spent as the person that I wasn't. My birth sex did not represent the person that I am. Through this group, I found the courage and support to live my life the way I should.........as the woman I really am.
Don't waste one more day in denial, once you cross that bridge, while there are still many obstacles, you will be so much at peace with yourself!
I have been aware of the "girl" inside of me for as long as I can remember, since I was 3-5 years old or so.
As I've discussed in my other posts, some of my earliest memories are of my desire to crossdress (and/or be a girl).
It has been a part of me ever since I became "self-aware" (about 3-5 years old or so).
And I never chose to do it. That is why I feel it is genetic.
I know there is a girl inside me.....when I dress up as Tanya everything feels so right and natural....I never practiced any femenine movements but when I am her it is way to natural , like I'm finally relaxed and whole. I even walked in heels perfectly the first time I wore a pair.
The girl and boy in me were one individual for quite a few years. When my dad got sick (I was in the third grade when we bussed out to Ohio and he told us), the girl was one of the casualties. Not right away, of course, but right after he told us he was sick, he went to Wilfred Hall for a year and my bro and I lived in El Paso with our grandma. The first school we went to (the one in which I finished the third grade) was, ummmm, how do I say this? We were white boys and WE were the minority. We didn't notice this at the time, it wasn't until looking back on it with the 20/20 vision Eryn was talking about that we could see this. Hispanic, early '80s, the definition of macho, right? I couldn't go near the girls because for every girl, there were 5 boys waiting to kick my peckerwood butt for approaching her.
Well, the school was so bad (there was a story in the new paper about a kid getting stabbed by another kid at this school), we finished the school year and moved. So for the fourth grade, I was in a new school, and I was on top of the world. This school wasn't the monolithic Hispanic school the previous one had been, but white was still a minority. Hispanic was the plurality, but ethnicities and cultural backgrounds were extremely diverse, more so than I've seen ever since then. Everybody got along, everything was ok. I built a solid group of friends, and there were a few girls I would play with and we'd play girly games. I even talked by boy friends into playing girl games. The rest of the boys in our grade were soooo jealous of us because we got to play with the girls....
My dad went into remission and came out of remission while we were in that house. The owners got a divorce, and as a result, the level of support we got from our landlords dropped. There was an incident with the water heater where my parents ended up calling someone out and charging it to the rent (after the deadbeat husband showed up and tried to blow us up), and when the AC went out and my dad was pukin' his guts out on chemo, that was the last straw. So we moved.
To another school like the first. And it was there that the girl inside got dropped off. Let's face it, at this point a lot of things disappeared, and it took me several decades to recover most of them. But this is a CD forum, so let's focus on the girl getting dropped off.
After that, she informed my feelings and had input into my life, and as I said in a different thread, I saw her from time to time. After finishing up the sixth grade at the third school (and last one in El Paso), my dad forced his oncologist to give him a work release (he'd been in remission for a year and a half to two years by then) and he found a job in southern New Mexico, and we moved there.
Of the things that got left on the wayside in the soul-flaying, the girl was the first to assert herself. At 12 I started nabbing my mom's stuff from the laundry (I had a system that kept me from being discovered, and the one hiding place she'd never look being between the mattress and box springs). At first it was off and on, since I was also discovering my sexuality (well, y'all know that started sooner, but this was when the hormones really kicked in). I saw the first hairs on my chin and got angry. I'd check out my back side (not butt, the entire back side) in the mirror and see a girl I found attractive, stuff like that. I'd meet my eyes in the mirror and throw a flirty smile at the girl I saw...
From 14-16, I'm gonna have to say I managed to dress in private in my room at least 2 or 3 nights a week. My parents had a strict bedtime where we'd go to bed, and they'd stay up and watch TV. Dad had suffered hearing damage (a combination of chemo and working in a shop most of his life), so the TV was always loud enough to hide whatever noises I made, and they really didn't care if we went to sleep before midnight, but there was a midnight check. Quite a few of those had me laying with my blankets over me, hiding my outfit (which was invariably ripped from my mom, and not only does she have bad taste in clothes, but they obviously didn't fit well). There were more than a few horror movie style scenes where she'd walk in and carefully stalk me, making sure I was asleep, and I'd lay perfectly still hoping she didn't pick up the blanket. A few minutes later I'd hear bed springs, so it didn't take many of them to tell me why she wanted to be sure I was asleep. This is also the time period when I found Leona written right there on my birth certificate. Didn't know what to do with the extraneous "rd" part of the name, though, largely because I couldn't drive.
At 16 I put the clothes down and dropped down to like once every four months or so, if that often. The hypermasculine nerd culture I was in really pushed that on me. I traded it for playing DnD with female characters, and computer games with female characters. That was quite satisfying.
At 18, I moved to Austin and stayed with my sister. That was when I nabbed one of her bras (she wears masculine clothes, and at that time she wore a lot of clothes bought in the men's department because they didn't have stuff that worked for her in the women's department), she noticed it immediately, and they searched the house. When it ultimately turned out to be in my room, I got several well-meaning lectures about how it's ok to be a "transvestite", and denied that was the reason the bra was there. As far as I know, she still doesn't know. Maybe I should call her some time, since the rest of my world knows.
I moved into my first apartment after that, and had the strongest urges ever. First taste of freedom, and no girl clothes anywhere. No way to express it! Well, that wasn't entirely true. I found ways to express it. I grew my hair out, played with styling it, had girls I worked with show me how to do different things, etc. Unfortunately, working in fast food, I was again in a hypermasculine environment, and the boys I worked with decided I needed to stop hanging my hand, walking like a girl, and talking like a girl, and they were relentless. I was not strong enough to resist.
I wish I had been.
The girl showed up on and off again over the years. My first wife, during our dating period, wanted to paint my fingernails, and I readily agreed (well, mostly, I readily wanted her to, but I didn't know how she really felt about it, so it was a Mexican standoff the first night, and the second night I asked her to do it, and she thought I'd asked her because she wanted to, it was weird). I dyed my hair blue and then purple when it was still socially unacceptable to do that.
The hardest part for me was when I entered the automotive industry. I guess I was around 23 when I did that. I loved working on cars, and I did so and felt quite girly doing so. It seemed to be a weird contradiction, until I learned much later that the skills that made me a talented mechanic at 23 were, in many cases, traits associated with a biologically female brain. Anyway, surprisingly enough the hypermasculinity wasn't nearly as bad as I thought, but I had to give up my hair. So it was a rough few years, and this would be the time when I saw the girl in the mirror even with a buzz cut. I started underdressing with panties, and at one place where I worked, we all changed into our uniforms together. So the panties were there. The first couple of days there, I slipped into the bathroom to change alone. After that, I just did it, right there. The panties had a lace garter belt, they were really cute, and really comfortable. The otherwise homophobic environment quickly supported me, because, well... One of the things that had been left aside when my dad was sick was a natural ability to lead. A certain natural charisma, but I don't see myself as charismatic. I'm kind of a dick. But once I had strong followers, they accepted anything about me. I even had a coworker admit to having gone "gay bashing" in a literal sense and apologizing to me for it, and when I pointed out I wasn't gay, he said he still felt I was a good person to apologize to because I didn't approve. But we ended up with the opposite of what you'd expect. Instead of ME being bullied for my underwear choice, the other employees who had trouble with it were bullied to accept it or they got run off. Several coworkers even suggested we go dress shopping for me, and their wives/girlfriends were willing to go along.
A weird example where I was fully accepted by others, but not myself, and all in a hypermasculine environment.
Anyway, the ex-wife not only had problems with the idea I might crossdress (an accusation that, for her, fits the broken clock test, you know "even a stopped clock is right twice a day", because she accused me of everything under the sun), but actually ripped into me over it many times. I could only do it around her, but she never wanted to see it, stuff like that. And I hadn't even accepted it about myself! So I had this dress that we'd bought as a halloween costume (and the previously mentioned panties were part of it, and as gross as it sounds, I did wear them several days in a row each week)....
She and I separated at one point, and I found the dress. I started wearing it off and on at home, alone, and then one night I decided to shave everything and see what I'd look like as a girl. I got one leg shaved and realized I needed razor blades, so I threw on whatever was convenient, jumped on my motorcycle and rode to the grocery store. On the way back, I laid the bike down, resulting in road rash on my arms and scars on my legs that are still visible (the right leg more than the left). In the hospital, the nurse got curious and asked why I had only one shaved leg. So I explained that I was buying more razor blades when I crashed, and she got a really sad look. Then she asked why I was shaving my legs in the first place, and I, being all drugged up, told her about the dress. She said she wanted to see it, and offered to help me with my makeup.
Alas, I passed out and never got her number.
The ex-wife and I got back together a few months later and she made the dress disappear.
Fast forward to the divorce (you can take it as read that during the get-back-together phase that lasted 7 years, I found opportunities to dress), and I was hanging out with a GG friend of mine who also wanted to do some casual loving. While working up to that, one of the things she asked me was what sort of random facts could I tell her about myself. I told her I wanted to find a dress that looked good on me. She, being a psychologist, went pretty deep into the subject, and wound up being another person on the growing list of people who accepted that I was a CDer when I still didn't accept it.
Nothing came of it, other than me getting laid (and her too, obviously).
And during this period, the girl in me showed herself a lot more. I was a bicycle commuter (even more eco-friendly than the folks who drive electric cars
The current wife and I started dating and I was several clothing sizes smaller than she was. When we started cohabitating (after getting engaged), I tried on her clothes. She, like my sister, wears mostly masculine clothes, and since my policy had always been to raid the dirty laundry (since I couldn't make it dirty if it was already dirty), there weren't many opportunities.
Then the several nights' progression. She'd bought some sexy outfits over the many months we'd been together (it was over a year at this point), and she wore two of them two nights (one each night, with one being brand new). Then I wore one and we did our thing, and the next night I wore the other and we did our thing, and the next night...
I was sitting on the bed looking in the mirror, doing facebook stuff, and I saw the girl again. And I knew what it meant, and it all made sense. And that's when I told her about it.
So, if you've read down this far, I guess you could say the girl was always there, but until my dad was sick (third grade), she was active. She was passive from then until I told my wife she was there. She's been active since then, and I'm finally integrating her into my self-identity.
And she's still not totally accepting. It turns out that a lot of the acceptance she offers, she does it because she thinks she should, but doesn't want to see it. But to be honest, we're past the point where she gets much of a say, in part because when she had the say, she offered support instead of what she really felt, and in part because she stranded me in downtown Austin, dressed, and against my will, and that caused a huge change in my own views of myself. Moral of THAT story: If you GGs want to have a say, don't get your SO arrested while dressed, because you lose your say at that point.
It's been a bit of a long haul....
Last edited by Leona; 08-09-2013 at 12:45 AM.
The girl that would become "Gina" didn't show herself until I was ten. One day I was home alone and on a whim dressed in my mom's sexy clothes, wig, and make up. There staring back at me in the mirror was what I thought was a pretty girl. After that, I began dressing every chance I got. I had feminine features and a slim body type throughout my pre-adolescent and teen years and was similar in size to my mom and both of my sisters, so I had a great selection of clothes. I just dressed like the girls at school. In the summer, I could shave my body, which really completed the package, even allowing me to go to the beach in a bikini. I kept this up as much as I could, until I joined the military. Gina was on hold for seven years until I got out and got a real job. Then she returned. Marriage kept her under wraps until that ended, then she came out full throttle. I went several months as Gina full time, then for some nutso reason purged everything. Now, almost 40 years later, Gina is back when time allows.
Oh yeah she's been there a long time, and she's tired of being cooped up. The woman I've come to know as Dana has been with me since about 7 or 8 years old. I thought it was a passing thing when I was younger but it wasn't. All my life I've been dressing and acting like a man. It's when I dress like and act like a woman I am who I really am.
No girl inside, just like dressing in women's clothing and I love makeup and wigs
Originally Posted by NicoleScott
Lol, I just spotted this. My H would agree.
66 years ago, at age 6, at least the first time I remember, I not only used that towel Kate, I only bought red Popsicles from the ice cream man and would hold them against my lips until I got them red, then I would try not to lick it off.
Magic is the art of changing consciousness at will.
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