Admission

Deep inside I always knew that there was a strong female side of me, I just didn't know what to do about it. As a kid I would dress in my mom's clothes whenever I could, then for years dressed only intermittently. Told my wife within our first year of marriage (45 yrs ago...) but since i rarely dressed it wasn't an issue. I think it was coming out to friends, and the support from this site, (and from my wife and GG friends) that maybe 10 years ago opened the floodgates. I had been dressing more and more over the last 20 years, now it is part of my life.

It has been a slow process although when I was twenty it really took off in many ways.

Hormone treatment and supportive room mates helped cement the feeling in me then.

It started when I was a boy. I would watch female impersonator Danny la rue and dame Edna everidge on tv and as you never saw them in male mode I got it into my head that they dressed like this all the time (remember I was only a boy). So I wanted to see what the attraction was so I went to my mums wardrobe started with a pair of tights and shoes that I could squeeze my feet into. I looked in the mirror and felt my legs. Hey I like this thanks Danny thanks Edna. The rest is history

D I:

Funny, I don't recall any specific point. The first time I went out was Halloween 2003. The next time was January 2014. There are many reasons for that: I was working outside of the country for 6 years, etc. But, what I do remember is that I was quite comfortable when I went out the second time. And, I remember being mostly OK on that first trip out. That would suggest that my personal calibration was either during that first trip or just before.

DeeAnn

While like many others here, I always knew, or at least always had, an understanding that I had this feminine thing going on. Pre internet, and small town informed, I pretty much thought I was the only person on earth like me... So the acceptance of myself was super gradual, over 40 years or so... But, now that I have accepted that I am somewhere more female than male on the TG scale, I roll with it better, and actually take that part of me more and more seriously. So once the acceptance happened, things seemed to start moving faster, with many miles to go it seems.

It would have to be ungodly slow and gradual, because I didn't know what was going on. I didn't understand what I was for decades. I mean, it all started over 50 years ago, when there was no information about us. I didn't hear or see the word transvestite for the first, oh, maybe 10 years? And all the confusion after that, with nothing much to go by. The information was pretty much only available to the few researchers out there, so the general public had nothing to go on. There was the very brief period where I thought I was gay, the very long period where I thought I was some sort of TS, the very long period where I thought I was normal and all previous was 'just a phase I had been going through', the return to the TS phase, and then finally figuring out I was just CD with lingering feelings of TS from what happened to me as a kid. Yes, a verrrrrry long, gradual discovery process, before I could accept what it all meant.

For me, it felt like a werewolf experience. I was lead investigator on the case, surrounded by mounds of blatant evidence that I was the werewolf all along.

Very much a gradual acceptance over many decades. My epiphany came about 17 years ago when I realized; well that's for another thread.

From the time I started as a youngster until my late teens, I did not think about it much other than keeping secret. I knew enough to feel that was best. In my early twenties I came to the realization that it was part of me. Period. That being said, I felt it was a part of me that should probably be kept secret. I had no burning desire to go in public so it was just my thing. A long time girlfriend and I experimented with it a bit and I opened up about it to her to some degree but still kept it under wraps. I married in my early thirties and told my wife shortly after. I have felt the same about it since my early twenties but having an accepting spouse makes it much easier to live with. Secrets in a marriage are hard, even when the taboo may be part of the attraction.