How do you know?

[emmicd]

It is a commonly asked question. It is usually asked upon considerable struggle and denial. It is very emotional and very personal. It comes at a time when everything seems to be turned upside down. Why we ask? Is it something I can live with, we ask? Why me, we ask? What next? we ask. It seems we have to continually struggle as we ask this question. Even if we know deep down in our heart the answer we still ask this question because we want almost to not hear the truth. We fear it and wish to avoid it. We have repressed the feelings for so long that it seems that is all we know. But then with no real explanation we come to understand and realize what it is that we knew all along but was too afaid to accept. Then we start to do an introspection. We do a look into our soul and we come to the reality of what it is that has affected us for what seems our whole life. As we come to understand we ask this very simple question:

How do you know?

My simple answer is the following:

It is not so easy to know but after you come to accept yourself for being true to how you feel inside and you are no longer fighting the feelings that you have repressed for so long you start to accept who you are. I knew I was TS when I started to stop feeling sorry for myself and I started taking small steps in doing things that have now brought me to a place of self discovery. I knew I was TS when I was 19 years old and I prayed to have a sex change operation some day. I knew this was something I had to do. I am not there yet as I am just starting the process a bit later in life but at least I am taking action that will help me live the rest of my life as a woman. It is a journey I very much look forward to but I admit I also have anxiety and fear and I deeply need to find acceptance and still be loved.

It is my reality that dressing and being female is what my life has to be. This is who I am. I am a woman and I realize I am TS. I knew it and now I accept it.

So I ask you the same question:

How do you know you are TS?

emmi

[Kaitlyn Michele]

You "just know"....words don't do it justice

[Michelle.M]

How do you know that you're transgender? The same way that you know that you're cisgender.

[Kathryn Martin]

I knew I was transsexual when I realized that my body didn't match how I experienced myself.

I have always been a woman so in some parts I find it difficult to understand the question......

[Stephanie-L]

You "know" when you finally see how much easier it is for your soul when you finally accept it and quit fighting. When you finally say, "yes, I am a woman", and it feels right instead of saying "I am a man" and it feels like a lie...................Stephanie

[Julia_in_Pa]

Just like what Kaitlyn has said; You just know.

You know like the salmon know to swim upstream, against the tide in order to spawn prior to death.

You just know.


Julia

[emmicd]

Based on your answers you answered the question I didn't ask. Is being TS something you are born with or is it a manifestation? I believe in my heart it is something you are born with.
I feel reasonably comfortable if asked, telling people I was born this way and have no control over my feelings. I have control over my actions but not how i feel inside and admitting I am TS is based on this belief.

emmi

[KellyJameson]

Hi Emmi

I like questions that are impossible to answer so I will try to answer from my own personal experience but every idea, reason, action,experience and belief I share will leave out a million others and so any answer will only be a partial answer.

There were two separate life experiences (like paths) that I simultaneously walked.

One path were all of the relationships I have had with people since the beginning of my life. In their own unique ways they taught me that I was not who I appeared to be on the outside. I was slow to understand that what they were teaching me was that I was not a boy but a girl inside a boys body. They did not know this about me consciously and neither did I but they felt and witnessed my incongrous existence and were confused and repelled by it like a person is by someone who they sense is sick because their own survival instincts were threatened.

I experienced this as constant rejection,harassment,criticism,bullying,judgement, ostracism
ect... much like what happens to children who have a physical or mental deformity.

The second path was the path we all must instictively walk to seek our truth because without
self understanding we live separated from ourselves and are than unable to understand the world outside of us to find our place (where we fit in) and this is similar to insanity

This understanding is layered and self discovery is like stripping one more layer off our confusion
as we build an identity moving us closer to being able to remain whole and not fragmented in our relations with others and ourself ( we become very comfortable in our own skins)

This becomes impossible when you are living contrary to your body because the body is what we use for discovery of ourselves but this self was already established at birth and only waits to "become" much like a seed waits to become the flower, the design dictates the expression.

This is a problem that starts at birth that the world reacts to and we react to and the only difference between those with this problem is where they are at in their understanding.

For me I would move toward those who I sensed were like me. At first it was drag queens and gay men who I sought out but I did not fit in with them and did not feel a sense of kinship plus I had no interest in same sex sexual relations. It was only after being around MTF Transsexuals and crossdressers (some not all) that I started to understand.

There are many memories where I expressed the desire to be a girl or belief that I was but these were ignored, misunderstood or hidden by both me and my family and it is only looking backwards that I see the obvious.

I was made to belief it was a psychological problem that could be resolved so wasted time but
through my work and self education I now see how the mind is shaped before birth to make accepting an identity that matches the body we were born with impossible. The intensity of this experience is different between people where some learn early and others late in life depending on how it is reacted to.

But everyone has one thing in common, they are always looking for a cure even in childhood.

They may or may not know what they are trying to "fix" but they are always trying.

[Noemi]

Emmi it might not be that easy, to be a TS or not. Polarized at two points. You may be somewhere in that spectrum. I know that I am not a man emotionally, but there is a part of me that still sees use in me being a man right now....

I imagine it is the pain and depression that will provide your answer. That is solid, albeit emotional, but real, quantifiable information. Your pain will tell you that to win you will need to surrender to being a woman, or not, perhaps you can continue as a male who CD'S.

♥
Noemi

[emmicd]

thank you kelly once again for such a thought provoking and very sincere and honest reply. i can sense it comes from your heart! to me it seems that being tg is a condition i have no control over. i feel it is part of my makeup as a person and i am trying to understand it, be at peace with it and take the proper action. i always feel like i learned something valuable from reading your posts. thank you!

[emmicd]

Noemi,
Thank you for always providing me with your advice and for your sincerity and honesty. I really appreciate it and you make a lot of sense in what you say.
I am happy to have such a bond with you, kelly and all the girls here!

emmi

[LynLovely]

To say that you are TS presupposes you have done research and are informed. Depending on the era and area you lived in that information may not have existed. Without that information all you have is a gut feeling and no real way to say what you are feeling.
Growing up in the 50's in mountains of western NC there was zero information and all I had was the earliest memories and an image of me saying/thinking," No! No! This is not right." I felt like somebody had played a joke on me. Without that image to anchor me I still would not know even though that gut feeling would remain.
In my family I was the only "boy" with three sisters and one bedroom. I slept in the living room ( no privacy). The girls and our parents slept in the one bedroom. My sisters done girl stuff behind closed doors in that bedroom and that room was strictly off limits to me. I spent every day outside alone with my thoughts and my first 8 years were confused and pure hell.
Without the information and the image I would only know I was different.
I think puberty was the first transition and I feel now I am entering puberty again and a second one. I feel like I'm getting a second chance, a do over. Looking back I feel a lot of the bad habits and addictions I picked up was a result of testosterone rewiring my brain, because really it didn't have much effect on my body. Maybe hormones can rewire at least parts of it. Neuroplasticity tells us our brains are always capable of new connections and pathways.
For me knowing was that image and information later in life.
Good question.
-Lyn

[Xrys]

I knew back in gradeschool when i got teased for acting like a girl, and then I made myself forget. I knew in middleschool when I would use photoshop to crossdress because i was to afraid of letting my parents find out, then I made myself forget. I knew every time i looked in the mirror and saw something else looking back at me, and I made myself forget. Then one day when my entire life fell apart, when I got laid off from a job had for two years, and my car got totaled in an accident, and my mother got diagnosed with breast cancer, All the things that I made myself forget for all those years came back to me. There was only one thing for me to do, and it was something i had never let myself since the teasing in gradeschool. For the first time in 15 years I let myself cry