I started going to a gender therapist. I've had 4 hours worth now, the latest of them yesterday. And what the gender therapist is telling me is this:
Don't label yourself and then define yourself and your likes and dislikes according to what is associated with the label. Instead, try different things, a variety of things, and find out by experiment what works for you; leave the labeling for afterwards, or just don't bother with it. Construct your identity according to your experiences, according to what experience shows works for you -- what works on the inside, not just on the outside.
An example she gave is that when a young woman starts "dressing up", she doesn't know if she is the kind of woman who likes makeup (or what kind of makeup). So she experiments with a variety of makeup, and through her experiences, finds out whether she likes makeup or not. Especially as she gets a bit older and matures out of the peer pressure to wear the latest pop-star look, she doesn't rationally decide ahead of time that she will or will not like
makeup: she tries it and finds out and constructs herself around how she feels, around how she feels about herself when she wears it, around how she feels about how others react to her makeup.
A small bit of context: I went to the therapist feeling myself to be transgendered but not transsexual -- feeling that I was an every-variable mix of male and female. But my life hasn't been one conducive to knowing that is "normal and acceptable" as a "plain male", so I wanted a second opinion from someone experienced in the field. I'm new to this (5 years since I started crossdressing, less than a year of thinking of myself as transgendered), and it can be more than a little confusing: how did I know I was asking myself the right questions?
So the first thing I wanted to do with the therapist was to determine whether my self-assessment was more or less accurate. But from another perspective, making that determination is called something else entirely: it could be called "labeling myself", categorizing who I am and working out everything after that. And my gender therapist is saying is that instead I should continue what I had been doing: experiment, see how I feel, move forward from that.
One way of phrasing this might be that the gender therapist is telling me that I am not a Category: I am me, very much still evolving, and when I settle down more, figure out more how I want to live and dress, whether there is a Name for that type of life doesn't matter. You are who you are.
If I might add a note about this process of self-discovery. This isn't what my gender therapist told me / guided me, but my gender therapist is fairly pleased that I have done it:
I recommend that when you are experimenting with what you like, what feels comfortable to you, that your experimenting includes some trials of what is sometimes called "gender-bending": deliberately mixing the male and female. Don't confine your experiments to being "as female as possible": that's defining your identity according to pre-conceived categories, not according to your experiences.
Being "a guy in a skirt" or "a guy in a dress" is nerve-wracking... the first few times. Some of you will find you hate it, will find that you really want to be "pure female" -- but others of you, including definitely some who thought they wanted to be pure female, to be perceived as a Woman with the male hidden or internally pushed aside, will find that "being a woman" is not really where you are. Unless you are intending to Transition (with or without surgery), "being a Woman" (as far as others can tell) will be a part-time occupation: by trying the experiment, some of you will find (as I did) that the the feminine part of you wants full-time potential for expression without "replacing" the male part of you -- will find that you need to live your life as a gender mix.
This may sound like a paradox, but as long as I was "hiding behind my wig" and trying to look as female as practical (considering time and budget constraints), people continued to perceive me as male no matter how I was dressed -- they were nice, the women especially were encouraging, but I was picked out as "male" in a fraction of a second. Now that I have mostly given up on that and started going out as a blended person, guy face and light makeup and notably female clothes, when until I stopped caring about what they perceived and became comfortable with being me: now people perceive the female in me. It's like Zen: I had to give up the trying and just be.