First view about transsexuals.

[sara.s]

Okay now i have a matured view but back then when i was in my teens i was a very innocent boy!! I had no idea that men could become women even partially. it was in my teens that a friend told me about ********. Apparently, he was attracted to ******* porn.

I didn't believe that men can be as beautiful as women. The thought of men surgically having breast and looking as good as women was unbelievable. I thought my friend was making up stupid lies until i browsed the websites myself. After that, I thought it was cool to be a *******, to be able to live with women in girls hostel and have sex with your roommate everyday and no one would know. i also felt TS were like spies who infiltrated the girl domain to know their secrets. My apologies if you feel annoyed by my innocent teen thought's at that time.

When did you find out about transsexual girls and what was your first reaction?

Edit: Some have felt ******* as offensive and i dint mean to offend anyone. I am really sorry, if so, mod may delete the forum. All this was many years before I was exposed to true transsexual girls.

[Stephenie S]

I also felt TS were like spies who infiltrated the girl domain to know their secrets. My apologies if you feel annoyed by my innocent teen thought's at that time.

Interestingly, there are groups of feminists who believe exactly the same thing. That trasnsexuals are trying to use their male power to infiltrate the women's movement to know their secrets.

They are called radical feminists.

[Sophie_C]

I don't mean to give away my age, but it would have been Caroline "Tula" Cossey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Cossey), a former Bond Girl, some time in the 90s, when I saw her on shows like this (I saw this live):


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBLa7fWjgvI

After that, it was clear what was possible, and that I absolutely knew what I was. But, there was no internet and she was like a unicorn, the only one in the world, one who pulled off a miracle despite all odds. To do it seemed insurmountable. Still, I felt good, not bad or ashamed about myself (maybe with something most people wouldn't get - which was accurate for the time) and not alone.

[AnitaH]

I played with the girls when I was young. Played their games with them. Dressed as a girl for at least one Halloween. Yet it was right after I heard/read about a man who had SRS that I realized men could dress as a woman. Men that dressed as women were a source of jokes to us guys before that. This is when it became a reality to me I have been caught ever since. I know now that was a softer, feminine side to me all the time. This is when it started to insist to be recognized.

AnitaH

[christina s]

Well when i first found out about transsexual girls i was going through a real homophobic stage in my life so i thought it was disgusting. But then i started to accept myself and found out girls like her http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4q_WSLfdVw&feature=channel_video_title

who have similar backgrounds to mine i'm much more understanding and it's really made me feel more comfortable in my own skin .

[Suzette Muguet de Mai]

Maybe the first time was at a school concert when the boys would also dress as girls, but that was acting. I only knew about the half man half woman at the sideshows when I was young and that was entertainment. Then I saw Danny Larue and the LesGirls and I thought that was entertainment. I dressed when young and thought I was weird, maybe a bit twisted. Then heard about Transvestites via the Rocky Horror Picture show, but that was entertainment. Never heard about the term ******* or Ladyboy till about 15 years ago due to the internet and never took much notice of it. I prefer transgendered because that is so me and who I need to be... me.

[Cynthia Anne]

Back in the early 60's I read about the first publicized man becoming 'Rennia Jorgenson'! Oh how I wanted to run away and do that! She was a pro-gofer! Hugs!

[ReineD]

I remember thinking that transsexuals were weird and creepy (sorry folks, but I was a teenager and this was long before the internet). I couldn't understand why a man would want to be a woman. I had no idea that gender identity for some people was separate from the body given as birth. I had not heard of transmen until well, well into my adulthood.

I never considered ******** as being transsexual, since transsexuals in my view do not like their penises. I see ******** more as gay men, even if they do have breasts, who are in it strictly for the porn value and the money. I've heard that some TSs finance SRS through doing porn or prostitution, but it must be difficult to make a living using an appendage that you plan on getting rid of.

[kimdl93]

My initial awareness of transexuals paralleled my awareness of CDing. They were one and the same in my adolescent mind. And I was afraid from that initial awareness that I might be one and the was so afraid that the differences I felt inside would somehow come out

I wanted to be normal.

[Inna]

A bit clarification as I see needed at this time.
The originator of the post refers to she-males and so far that term has been used lightly around the forum. There is no difference between Transsexual woman and *******. The prime sexual organ is a choice for many, weather it remains or is reconstituted by SRS. It simply is a choice, most transsexuals do resolve to correct what they believe is repulsive mistake of nature however just because some didn't make such choice doesn't make them not Transsexual. Term ******* was derived in realm of sex work, such as other Vulgar and somewhat derogatory words: Tranny, Ladyboy.
So when someone is describing a sex worker who happens to be trans above terms are usually applicable, but also do not change the fact those individuals are also simply Transsexuals.

[Sara Jessica]

Inna is right on the mark with her clarification. At first I was a little uncomfortable with the original post until I read the replies and recognized the sincerity in what OP is trying to convey.

My first media exposure that I recall about transsexualism (rather than crossdressing as portrayed on the likes of Donahue back in the day) was on a prime time TV series. I'm pretty sure it was the one called "Real People" (remember this one? Sarah Purcell & Byron Allen were the hosts who come to mind) even though my mind's eye keeps going back to "That's Incredible" (picturing hosts Cathy Lee Crosby/Fran Tarkenton/John Davidson). Yes, I'm almost certain it was "Real People" and there was this segment where a husband & wife pretty much swapped roles and from what I recall, both transitioned, at least socially. I can still picture both of them to this day as clear as if it was yesterday even though this was back around 1980-ish to the point where I could easily pick them out of a line-up if I had to.

Now I'm sure there were TS segments on the daytime talk shows (as in Phil Donahue who dominated that genre back then) but the Real People segment was the one which made such a lasting impression in my mind. It showed me a normalcy in the TS world which is something that certainly wasn't portrayed so well elsewhere.

[Julogden]

I remember thinking that transsexuals were weird and creepy (sorry folks, but I was a teenager and this was long before the internet). I couldn't understand why a man would want to be a woman. I had no idea that gender identity for some people was separate from the body given as birth. I had not heard of transmen until well, well into my adulthood.

I never considered ******** as being transsexual, since transsexuals in my view do not like their penises. I see ******** more as gay men, even if they do have breasts, who are in it strictly for the porn value and the money. I've heard that some TSs finance SRS through doing porn or prostitution, but it must be difficult to make a living using an appendage that you plan on getting rid of.

There are many non-op TS's.

Reine, there are many who self-identify as transsexual who opt to keep their male anatomy, at least their penis. And they aren't in the sex industry either. If you can, check out a very interesting documentary called Beautiful Daughters, a film about an all-TS production of The Vagina Monologues in which at least one of the women has opted to not have genital surgery.

Carol

[ReineD]

Reine, there are many who self-identify as transsexual who opt to keep their male anatomy, at least their penis. And they aren't in the sex industry either.

Carol, thanks, and I'm afraid I wasn't very clear.

I've looked at some of the ******* porn online and when I see this I guess I categorize porn stars and separate them in my mind from the non-op TSs that I've gotten to know in this forum. I tend to see the ******** in porn vids as people who are in it for money and show. Admittedly, this is a bias against porn stars and perhaps I should reexamine my attitude, although I've not met a non-op TS who identifies as a *******.

I apologize if I offended any non-op TSs here. :sad:

[Momarie]

I was 14 and working alone at the Campus Dairy Sweet.

This great big hairy man would come in pretty often wearing women's clothes, garish make-up and a wig that was all wild with tangles.
He scared the sh*t out of me to be honest.

But there was this woman that came in all the time with her shirt unbuttoned and her breasts hanging out (really hanging out with nipples and everything) who needed to shave her upper lip who scared me even worse.
Once I politely told her that her shirt was unbuttoned....and she yelled at me.

[StarrOfDelite]

Went to a Drag Show, called Female Impersonators then, when I was in college. Didn't make all that much of an impression on me. I can't even recall too much homophobic banter afterwards, it was pretty much just entertainment.

[Suzette Muguet de Mai]

Hmmm nicely stated Inna. Unfortunately I cannot remember the first time I heard the term "transsexual" I am still trying to understand the terms "transsexual and transgendered". There seems to be a mixing of the use of the terms where ever I read hence my reply to the original post encompassed memories of being introduced to people dressing as women through out my life.
I think that I may have come across the term transsexual here in the forum with the other term transgendered. What I first believed was transsexual got very confused with the varying interpretations so I am at a loss. Then a few months ago I came across GID. Another term or name.
I thought transsexuals were similar to transvestites and was just another term for trannies. That is wanting to live as female 24/7 unlike crossdressers. I am a little more wiser now.
Sara.s I liked your younger idea of what a Transsexual was but I never ever thought that the girls movement would even think like that but come to think of it now, not a bad way to look from a female cynical mind. Funny how I never ever thought of being an infiltrator into the girls movement, but then I guess we all are subjected to scrutinizing eyes in all parts of society. Its like if we have no excuse that snags some form of deception, then why else would one want to be female.

Stephenie comments about radical feminists certainly makes one cringe with any confrontation with a feminist. God they are so cynical about everything masculine.

Getting more afraid to come out of the closet now, never thought about feminists and their views on us.

[Danni Renee]

My first exposure, per se, was hearing about a boy in my hometown who wore dresses and presented as a girl. I was probably 15 at the time and it was the first time I really found words and ideas for what I did in private. As I grew older and the internet was created, I went looking and found the porn sites which really set me back as it made me feel like a freak versus someone that was misunderstood. It was really coming out to my SO and her finding this forum that I finally began to recognize that I am different, but not a freak or pervert.

Danni

[desa ray]

My introduction to this lifestyle was Mtv and Boy George. I was around 12 and I was blown away. It was very soon after that I begun dressing.
Desa.

[Schatten Lupus]

First experience was when I was very young, and I caught a glimpse of a Dear Abby article that said "Men who become women can use women's restroom." I remember thinking how wonderful it must be to wake up and be a girl. Several years later I saw something on Guinness Prime Time that mentioned the town in Colorado that done the most sex change surgeries (this was many years ago). It was then I began looking up stuff related to GID and the standards of care and all that.

[Samantha_Smile]

Other than my own actions, my first exposure to Transexuals was that infamous Jerry Springer show (4:08 in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5BmHh2fhP0&feature=related)

Didn't help the secrecy thing much.

[Kaitlyn Michele]

Time magazine...197?... a one column article near the back about a person that was mtf.. he was a geeky looking guy, and the picture was a really happy looking cute woman..

i "stole" it from my parents magazine pile...

[Tina B.]

Mid fifties when Christine Jorgenson, hit the cover of Life magazine, I was around 13 or so. I think it was the mid sixties when Renee Richards, the tennis player, made a public display of going from a male tennis player, to a female. By that time I was old enough to get into adult book stores, where that was about the only place to get much of anything on the subject, and to much of that was just the usual porn, chicks with with unnecessary baggage, shall we say. At the time I could not find the words Transvestite, or Transsexual in the Dictionary, polite society still didn't use such words or talk about such things. Just the low life types that hung around Adult Porn Shops. (So I became one f those low life's that hung around porn shops, but I didn't look at the pictures, I just read the articles, we also said that about Playboy) That's also where I first heard about Stonewall.
Tina B.

[Aprilrain]

I never considered ******** as being transsexual, since transsexuals in my view do not like their penises. I see ******** more as gay men, even if they do have breasts, who are in it strictly for the porn value and the money. I've heard that some TSs finance SRS through doing porn or prostitution, but it must be difficult to make a living using an appendage that you plan on getting rid of.

I don't think there is any such thing as a *******. ******** are mythical creatures that live in internet porn land and men (many such men are on this site I reckon) go to internet porn land to live out a momentary (maybe a minute tops : P) fantasy with a beautiful but ultimately fictional entity.

The girls one sees on those porn sites are Transexual Woman trying to make a buck in a sex saturated world. They are capitalizing on their status as sexualized and dehumanized objects of male desire. Im sure there are some who like the attention and seudo stardom but it won't last forever!

Anyway lots of TS don't have strong negative feeling about their male genitalia. The absence of a penis does not a woman make! I never assigned any meaning to my having a penis, I mean if I were to cut it off the world wouldn't even know and they would still relate to me as a man so how would that help? Would I RATHER have a vagina YES! but I don't and you learn to live with it besides there are surgical options now a days. If your patient and work towards it you can have a neovagina that looks so good not even your gynecologist can tell BUT they need ALL that donor material!

[gretchen2]

ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

[sometimes_miss]

I knew about transsexuals quite early; the story of christine jorgensen was public knowledge when I was a teenager. But the surgical technique was still not exactly perfect then, and by the time I could figure out whether or not I would like to be a female I had already developed way past the point where I would have had any chance of being the girl I thought I was supposed to be. I'm not sure it worked out for the best; in retrospect, perhaps had I the option of being a pretty TS girl I might have had a happier life. As most know, it's not that such a life would be easier, but maybe being closer to what I though I was supposed to be would have worked out better in the long run. I'll never know.

[LilSissyStevie]

I knew about crossdressers when I was about 12 or so from a CD porn novel I found and read. I had never thought of CDing in a sexual context until then. My first exposure to transsexuals was in my own imagination where I would fantasize about being with women who had penises. I don't mean ********, I mean something like futanari. My first exposure to actual TS people was in the 70's when I was a student at a live-in vocational rehab facility in Baltimore. All of the "male" students in the cosmetology program were either TS or femme gay dudes. I naturally gravitated to that crowd even though I wasn't really one of them. But they were a lot more fun to be around than the rednecks there. That experience cured me of any suspicion that I might be gay or TS. But, for a long time after that I thought that all MTF TS were flamboyantly femme, androphilic and aggressively oversexed. It was a much different crowd that what hangs out on internet forums. It left me with more questions about myself than it answered.

[dawnmarrie1961]

To me, all these labels can be rather confusing. Crossdressers,transvestites,transsexuals and the like. How’s a person supposed to know what is what and who is who since they all, well maybe not everyone, have the ultimate goal of passing as the opposite sex, wither it be for fun, desire, or a lifestyle choice?
Ask your local psychiatrist? I suppose. They are pretty good at categorizing everything and sticking a nice fancy scientific label on it. ](Hence Cro-Magnon Men who had the desire to wear warm fluffy pink bunny fur instead of manly bear skins could be categorized as being Cro-Magnonites.Who knows? We just haven’t dug any of them up yet to prove it. Or perhaps the scientific community doesn’t want us to know. Conspiracy Theorists Unite!! )
Nay! I’ll stick with what I know to be true, for myself. I cross dressed as a child, in secret, because of feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness because I could never measure up to the stature of my father. I knew it was wrong. But it made me feel some amount of control in a world that I had no control over. As I grew up, in order to fit in, I tried to understand and emulate what I believed a “man” was supposed to be like. The more successful I got at it the less I needed to cross-dress.
I married and had children. I did all the things I thought a “man” was supposed to do. Life was good.
How was I supposed to know how fragile the human mind really is? And what an injured mind will do to compensate in order to survive?
It took three very traumatic events happening in my life simultaneously to send my beleaguered brain reeling over the edge towards certain madness. Maybe I was or wasn’t aware of how bad off I was mentally? I knew I didn’t feel right. But instead of seeking out professional mental help I did what any “man” would do……..I put on a dress. And it worked!! I felt better. :D
Trouble was I never took the dress off. I let the clothes control me and take over my life. I lost myself in the wardrobe. In other words “I lost myself.”
:eek:
When that happens it doesn’t take long before you lose everything else that you hold dear.
My wife says I “pushed everyone away” and she’s probably right. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I saw the pain I was causing.
Then I was alone. No. More than just alone, I didn’t even exist anymore.
It’s taken me years to rebuild myself again, to find out who I am. I’m a work in progress.
What kind of label would you put on a person like me? Does the words “absolute nut case” work?
I prefer “Normal Human Being.” It makes a good label. :)
So lets be careful when we start throwing labels around. Somebody just might end up getting hurt.

[CynthiaD]

Back in the 50's and 60's there was a magazine called Sexology that was aimed at physicians and clergymen. They ran a number of informative and accurate articles about all aspects of sexuality. I learned about transsexuals from this magazine, which was available at my local news stand. One month they had an article about transvestites, which I saved for a long time -- until my mother found it and made me burn it in the fireplace. The article was extremely accurate, and would make good reading today. It explained that most transvestites were not homosexuals, nor did they wish to become women. This is where I learned that I was not alone.

Of course, this was the early 60's, so the general attitude of the magazine was that transvestism was an aberration that should be discouraged, but for the most part they addressed sexual issues in an open and non-judgmental way that was almost unheard of at the time.

CK

[BLUE ORCHID]

Being a life long crossdresser (from age 5) now almost 69 all the stories that I saw or herd about were very fascenating to me.

Orchid

[Tess]

Mid fifties when Christine Jorgenson, hit the cover of Life magazine, I was around 13 or so.

Same here. The Christine Jorgenson story was a bombshell and everyone was talking about it. I had already experimented with crossdressing so I was very interested and wondered if what I was doing made me a transsexual, homosexual, or what. I think I decided to ignore those labels and just enjoy what I was doing.

[SarahLynn]

MY first knowledge/contact came when I was already in the service and happened in San Diego, CA. I was attending diving school at the 32nd street Navel Station and when riding the bus back to station after an evenings liberty saw two "ladies" standing in a half lit doorway. Being a true sailor I looked them over and thought, "Hmmph wonder if they are working girls or just looking for a bit of action." It never dawned on me that they might be men dressed as women. I went back later with another student and we survayed them up close. To much makeup but hey they looked ok. He spoke to them and that is when one of them said, "Move on boys we're men." In spite of the thick coat of makeup still you could have tripped me over with a small pebble.

It was much later I came to know a proper name for the behavour I exhibited. Since I didn't follow the "tranny" life style it wasen't until I saw the movie Tootsie many years after it had been a hit did I see a man dressed as a woman who exhibited what I'd call "good appearance."

Of coarse there was the movie, "Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask" by Woody Allen, which I saw bits of, but the "tranny" in that movie acted so stupid I couldn't even watch it. Mind, I hate SitComs and this was the most stupid sit com of the centery. I never did see the end of this movie or much of the beginning either. I really wish I could have missed all of it.

SarahLynn