How young were you?

[Leah Lynn]

There have been numerous threads about us old folks transitioning and the many reasons for this.

I suppose it could be considered that I "tried" to transition as early as four years old. I remember many nights going to bed and praying that God would remove that little appendage, so I could be the little girl that I was supposed to be. When God refused to help, I tried another method. We had a shed out back with a corrugated steel roof. With many exposed nails present, I would slide down the roof, hoping to snag that horrible little appendage, either ripping it completely off, of at least damaging it enough that a surgeon could finish the job. Obviously, I had no clue as to how it was properly done. I soon learned the consequences of ripping new jeans.

I do remember learning about Christine Jorgensen, and feeling that there was hope for me after all! However, as I grew up in Iowa, there was nothing to be learned about the process, or how to achieve it. With a whole lot of nothing, I did the loathsome act of Manning Up!

Now, it's all at one's fingertips. Perhaps for some, it's too easily available; for some of us, there are major bumps in the road. My personal roadblock is still lack of funds. Others may have vastly different bumps/roadblocks.

Yes, I wanted to make my body match my core that early. When did you know you needed to change physically?

Hugs,

Leah

[PretzelGirl]

Eh, about the 52nd Birthday. The rest was levels of confusion, denial, or self exploration.

[Jorja]

I had just finished my enlistment in the Navy at the ripe old age of 23. I went full time the next day and have never looked back. I had started hormones about a year before my discharge date.

I was introduced to three transwomen who had been through all of it and just happened to be doctors. We became great friends and they help guide me along the way.

[Cindy J Angel]

You are right sometimes it just takes a long time to get there. As for being old i think we were told to be man a lot more. I know my child hood was good my dad was the best aver we did averthing togather. But i still had a nagging feeling that i was different. I was in to boys and girls and this was in the late 60 early 70 when with boys i was allways the girl. As i look back on my child hood i see a lot of thing i did that dose let me know that i am tran gender. So it took me a long time scared ashamed hiding being told it was always wrong.that takes a long time to get over and that's why I think you see a lot of older women transitioning at that age. Love cindy.

[Rianna Humble]

I have no real memories before the age of about 7, but I still remember quite vividly the recurring dream of my wedding - a very idealised one like most young girls dream of - although I never did see the groom clearly in the dream. I also prayed every night for some weeks that god (if he existed) would make me wake up as the girl I should have been, then cried myself to sleep because it hadn't happened.

In those days, you didn't talk about that sort of thing and when I did hear about Christine Jorgensen, the cost of her operation represented years of my parents joint wages, so to me it was beyond reach. Fast forward better part of half a century and I knew I couldn't fight it any longer. The rest, as they say, is history.

[Emma Beth]

I wasn't exactly directly told it was wrong, per say.

What I was told one time by my Father after I got caught with some clothes or something was, "It's perfectly natural to wonder and fantasize about the other sex; but that's all it is, fantasy."

I can say that I have always felt different or wrong somehow from around the age of 6 or 7, I think. But it wasn't until I hit puberty that my thoughts took off for me. Probably because I wasn't developing like I felt like I should have been.

I feel that everything has a time and place for all of us and for me the time now finally is right.

[Kaitlyn Michele]

I repressed and compartmentalized the whole thing...i'd read about transsexuals (i found a ts article in time magazine from 1972 and i kept it for many years) but i never thought "oh i'm a girl or I'm transsexual"...

i just thought i was cursed and crazy...and felt sorry for myself that i'd never "do what i want"...i'd plot and plan that someday in the future i will do something...

but it wasn't until i was in my 40's that i ran out of gas and admitted it to myself..

[Dianne S]

I knew --- absolutely, unequivocally knew --- at the age of 47. That's when something in my brain switched on and I finally understood myself.

I had had glimmers of revelation from as young as 6 years old and again my my 20s and 30s, but I pushed them down and suppressed them. I have conflicting feelings about this: On the one hand, transitioning earlier probably would have been better and easier physically. On the other hand, I have three wonderful children and have had a pretty successful career. Had I transitioned, the children would definitely not have happened and the career probably wouldn't have.

So though I have moments of "woulda coulda shoulda", they're relatively rare.

[Kaitlyn Michele]

Dianne i can't tell you how many times i've looked at my children and thought the same thing...

Plus my career was really good. i actually think my empty feeling of non existence made me an excellent quick decision maker because i never truly cared in a way that reflected back at me..everything was so bottled up my F-ups never felt bad (of course my achievements never felt very good either)..That career gave me the money for ffs and srs..

this comforts me from the sting of wishing i had been born as myself...(sounds like a weird thing to say but you get what i'm saying!! lol)

[Megan G]

My experience is much like Kaitlyns above where I did not know I was a girl or that I was transsexual. What I did know was something was very different with me.

My father used to have a book called "everything you want to know about sex"(or something along that lines) and there was a very tiny paragraph about a TS who had SRS. I read that many times over and even attempted to come out to my mother only to be threatened...

I repressed it from that point foreword, tried to convince myself that I was not TS (and worked very hard at it) but when I hit 38 I had a breakdown and could no longer hide it inside anymore and litterly blurted it out to my wife that I had to transition.

Megan

[Cheyenne Skye]

That book title was "Everything you ever wanted to know about sex, but were afraid to ask ". I read that too when I was about 13 and it sounded like what I wanted to do, but there wasn't much information on how to go about transition available. So like the others, I repressed everything with occasional cross dressing. The dressing got more frequent after I turned 35 till it got to a point I was always dressing female on my days off even though I still "presented " as male. My wife got to a point where she couldn't handle it anymore and when my marriage imploded, I started to transition in earnest. At that point, I felt I had nothing left to lose.

[KellyJameson]

It was a long process.

I was identfying with girls and as a girl probably by the time I was three but had the genitalia mixed up where up to the age of six I thought girls had a penis because they were like me and I was like them.

Somewhere along the way I realized that I was wrong about what I believed and started with the "magical thinking" where I was looking for a solution to "fix me". Than comes the trauma of realizing there is no fix so you suppress the identify and try to "man up" (be a boy) which of course leads to all sorts of bizarre and destructive coping devices but even while you are doing this your subconscious is searching for a solution.

You look for "your own kind" as someone born like you or dealing with the same "problem" This is also true for those who may be gay but think something is wrong with them until they find someone else like them.

I knew about transsexuals but the ones who I read about, watched in interviews or met did not resonate with me as "being like me".

There are so few of us it is easy to think there is no one else like you so you are left always asking and searching for the answer of "what am I"

I had to be convinced that transsexuality was a real thing and not something just made up in my mind as "wishful thinking". I was very suspicious of what my mind wanted and why I identified as female. I did not trust my mind to know what was best for "me". Therapy and therapists along with extensive research finally convinced me that yes it is possible that there is a biological component to gender identity.

For me in childhood an aspect of GD was feeling "deceived" so I had massive trust issues of what exactly is the "truth" from the experience of both"my body deceiving/betraying me" combined with everyone contradicting what I believed to be my actual gender so wondering if they were deceiving me as well. This dramatically added to the difficulties concerning transitioning because I did not know "what to believe" as to "what is true" which resulted in FEAR & ANXIETY.

Once I reached that point that "yes gender identity is influenced by biology" than it was a matter of confronting the fear of not passing because I feared not passing could actually make my gender dysphoria worse by intensifying the experience of "not being a woman" in the eyes of others and also no longer being a man in the eyes of others. It was extremely important to me to pass and I had great fear not being able to. I needed to feel "safe" and I would not feel safe if I did not pass.

I feared the purgatory of becoming a social outcast even more than I already was from the GD. I was being harmed by GD since childhood but I did not want to be destroyed by transitioning to stop the harm. More research and talking to surgeons answered these questions but it was still a leap of faith to some degree. For me passing was critical to transitioning because I feared I would not survive transitioning otherwise and it made no sense to transition if I was not going to survive it.

Some people, maybe most, can transition without any hope of passing and thats OK with them. They find peace and can live with the final outcome but I'm simply not that strong. GD had put me in a very fragile place so I have always had to be extremely cautious in my relationship to it. I have a very black and white, all or nothing relationship with it as to what "being a woman means for me".

So you could say I have always known I needed to change since I realized something was seriously wrong but knowing that you need change is very different than actual change being possible or advisable.

Being born transsexual means you are always living in deaths shadow. This is not always bad because it comes with gifts but it is certainly dangerous and has made me exquisitely aware of how precarious my life has always been.

With GD you live between "Dammed if you do and Dammed if you don't" concerning transitoning, unless you are both lucky and clever and I have never felt like I was either but maybe I was wrong because things are slowly getting better.

I will be thirty this year and regret so much of my life was wasted in futile struggle against something I could not win against (GD) but at least there is hope now for the future but it bothers me what a mess I have made of my life and the lives of others previously.

I should not have allowed fear to make so many of my decisions but GD can keep you in fear so I was trapped and looking for an easy way out, but there is no easy way out.

Before transitioning I was very "erratic" from not having an identity. This leaves you in a very fragile place psychologically with the inevitable result that you will cause harm to yourself and or others by being so erratic/unstable but the very nature of being this way makes the idea of transitioning seem insurmountable.

Small steps and a long path out of darkness.

[Rachel Mari]

I remember when in the summer before my 5th birthday (October) of figuring out something was different but I didn’t know what it was. I know I talked to my mother about it (don’t remember what I said) but I remember that she reassured me that I was a boy and that I would always be a boy.

I soon learned in school to never ever say anything about it to anyone, not matter what. At 7 years old I prayed for two months at bedtime (kneeled down and everything) for God to turn me into a girl. At 13 years old, I so hated life that I made the decision that if I was to survive, I had to embrace being male and make the best of it. I wanted to be a good son for my parents.

Life took over and I was there doing what I was supposed to do, but I never like myself much.

Dianne: I totally agree with what you said. I too have three kids (I always knew I wanted children from a young age and I needed them to be of me) and can’t imagine them not being there.

Kaitlyn: I agree with you too but unlike you, I couldn’t make a decision about anything easily. I agonized over each and every decision as I so distrusted how I felt about anything and figured I’d be wrong. I was of such two minds about it all. It wasn’t until I was in my forties that decisions finally became easier.

I was 54 when I finally went to a therapist to try and figure it out and get rid of the thoughts. Six months later I came out to my wife (didn’t go well but could’ve been worse).

Things have greatly improved since then (four years ago). I like who I am. I feel true, honest and authentic, and I can’t go back.

And my relationship with my wife is getting better (we’re just not divorced yet). Just tonight she (coparents/best friends, not a couple) told me she trusts me more now than even before I came out to her (when she had lost all trust in me).

[Marleena]

Like most of the others here I knew something was wrong with me at an early age. I felt like an outsider all of the time and was hiding something. The concept that I could be female didn't make any sense though. Like I said before here my GD peaked in my twenties and I tried to self medicate to be female. I didn't know where to go or who to trust for more help so I just gave up "manned up". Here I am in my 60"s on HRT and feeling "right" without that disconnect for the first time in my life. Help is readily available now, I just wish I was brave enough and had found it sooner.

[Carlene]

That can be a complex question. I believe that I recognized a change was necessary to my emotional state first. I didn't like who I was or how I was behaving. Somewhere within, I knew that my actions and tainted attitude were bi-products of living years trying to be someone other than who I was meant to be. Having said that, many years had passed living this way, thus making the challenge about learning who resided at the core of my being. I still struggle with this. It is continually difficult not to slide back into the patterns learned long ago.

With regard to physical changes, they seem to be taking place as I become less fearful/more accepting of my true identity. To this day, I don't know where the end point will be, nor do I necessarily think it is the most important issue for me.

I can tell you this much, I suppose.......I was not a young adult when I realized that I could no longer continue to live the rest of my life as an angry, hurtful person.

Carlene

[Leah Lynn]

I see so much of me in most of your posts.
Many years ago, Groucho Marx commented that he wouldn't want to join any golf club that would have him as a member. I've thought about that often, and have asked myself a question; "If I were someone else, would I want to be my friend?" Answer: Hell NO! I was often surly, mean, arrogant, basically PO'ed at the world. I often wondered why on earth my wife ever married me! I knew I wasn't what I should be, but by then I'd blocked the belief that it was anything to do with that silly notion that I should be female. Now, almost 18 months on HRT, I'm starting to like myself.

Leah

[Rachel Smith]

I had the feelings of being an outsider even when other males went out of their way to include me I felt like I just wasn't with the right group. I remember at about age 8 my parents threw a b-day party for my 2 younger sisters and I was so envious of them getting to wear such pretty dresses. I was like Kaitlyn in that success' were nothing great but the F-ups were no big deal either. Decisions came easy because I really didn't give a crap one way or the other. This made me very impulsive.

In my late 40's I was starting to unravel, the box I was in felt like it was gonna fly apart at any moment. In my early 50's I met Michelle and we talked alot whenever we were together and she told me just be who you are. It took about 5 years for that to sink in and I realized transition was inevitable so here I sit at 59 living MY authentic life, whole and complete though somewhat not a normal one.

That reminds me of something else Michelle told me. I used to tell her "I just want to be "normal"." When I would say that she would say "you just need to find out what normal is for you."

[lesliecleves]

I can identify with so much of the feelings and experiences being registered here by Kaitlyn and others. It has been a struggle over a lifetime and I'm only yet in the earliest phase of transition. I do finally know I am TS and that is a watershed event I am thankful for despite the hurdles now ahead.

[becky77]

I've pretty much always known, I never fit in. I feared Transexuals and Transition and it was only after therapy did I open up to the truth.

[Peggie Lee]

I was 9 when I asked my mother how much longer was it going be be before my body would change and I could be finally be a female. She laughed and told me its to late, your a boy. I cried at how unfair life was , I knew I was a girl. I am a Kline's and at 10 started female puberty and the body changes that go with it, I hide this from my parents as they kept telling I was a boy. At 13 could no longer hide it. My parents and Doctor's decided to fix me, T therapy and counseling to set me straight. It's been many years since then and now I am transitioning to my true gender, I just completed 1 year RLE and HRT and waiting for my surgery date to get here.

[tara.emily]

I was young, maybe 5 or 6. I urged my friend everytime he came to my house to play husband and wife. I know it was young; but, he was the first person that I passionately kissed... It wasn't two boys kissing, I knew that I was a girl.

A lot of things happened in my life after that. I was in the closet until 16, when I shared with my close friends. I then moved city at 17 just so that I could be myself and present as female when I wanted without the sense of worrying (I had almost and thinking about it, probably was outed by someone to one of my sisters in my home town). Then I had to move city again and I closeted myself again and that's when my denial and shame started. I turn 34 on Thursday, I've moved home and changed job many times and only now am I beginning to find peace, letting the real me come out.

[Suzanne F]

I remember being about 6 and playing dress up with girls across the street and their mother catching us. I knew I was going to be excluded by their mother's reaction. She sent me home in disgust. We used play a game where if the girl caught you she could turn you into a girl. I remember the anticipation of being caught. However, I knew there was no way my father or any of my parents were going to allow this.

I would be playing in basketball games and long to be with the cheerleaders. No one could know though because I was such the boy! How could the basketball star be the cheerleader. There was an effeminate boy that did hang out with girls since his sister was a cheerleader. I laughed withy the other boys but inwardly I knew that I was really more of a girl than him. I vowed no one would ever know.

Later I found an article in Penthouse about a mtf transexual. I felt like someone would know I was reading about me. I never discussed the article with anyone. I just couldn't face the ridicule and lose my status. I was adopted and I think I felt my status was how I got any approval. I couldn't face risking that.

All my life I knew that if you really knew what I was you wouldn't feel the same way about me. Turns out I was right. People don't feel the same way about me and it is ok. I appreciate the ones who have experienced the real me and are here. Finally, I don't feel left out all of the time. I don't feel like I am in the wrong club. One that would throw me out if they only knew.
Suzanne

[Angela Campbell]

My earliest memories were of thinking I was a girl. Then came the realization that I needed to hide it. That took years ....decades to get over.

[LeaP]

When did I know? Would that be the knowing knowing or the not knowing knowing, the temporary knowing, the anti-knowing, the refusing knowing, or what else have you?

And all the childhood experiences? Oh yes, the being as knowing. The adolescent and adult episodic crossdressing? Ah, twilight zone knowing. Then came the reasoned knowing, followed by finally knowing, along with the realization that I really don't understand anything. I'm pretty sure I know THAT.

My wife has only one thing easier in life because of all of this. That is, she didn't know and now wishes she didn't know now that she knows. Simple.

[Karen62]

OK, Lea, what are you doing in my head? That's my life you described.

I can go back to when I was 5 years old when I discovered the utter delight of sheer, slinky nylons, or I can recall during my junior high school years lying in bed and wishing I would become a girl so I could fit in, or remember the extremely detailed story I wrote out of the blue when I was a late teen of a guy (guess who?) waking up one morning to discover he had been physically transformed into a female overnight and then described the slow mental and emotional transition taken to finally and fully become a woman, or I can detail the hidden moments of secret crossdressing while I was married (and the multiple occasions when I was *almost* caught!), or the ever-increasing need to dress every night over the last year or so, just to seek emotional relief from some unknown driving force compelling me to do so, or perhaps we can just go back to when I hit a crisis moment in my life this past December when I had to look at my life and wonder what was to become of me (I was confirmed to have an incurable, genetic health condition) and if I was going to have a potentially abbreviated lifespan, I decided I was no longer going to life the rest of my life in a stupid, stealthy secret. I accepted myself for who I really am (whatever it is), and that little moment of liberation unleashed a massive change in me that continues to erupt today.

So when did I know? I always knew. I never knew. I don't really have a clear cut answer to that. Maybe one day I will, but I can't talk to you right now about any damned forest. All I see are these trees surrounding me.

Karen