The elephant in MY room is starting to make some noise

[Debglam]

I guess this is what I was getting at. If your wife were on board with all of this, do you think you'd like to transition? Would you be prepared to live life fully as a woman, body parts and all?

I ask this not to put you on the spot, but because I believe that gender identity does run the full spectrum between the gender binaries. There are transwomen who know without a doubt they are women born in the wrong bodies (they want to get rid of their male anatomies), there are men who know without a doubt they are fully men and nothing else (they would never dream of presenting as a woman), but there are also people who feel they are some combination of both along a widely varied spectrum ranging from more male to more female, and their cross-gender expression is not propelled by sexual fetish motives.

Reine,

As much as some folks want to be exclusionary, I am absolutely certain that you are correct - that there is a scale of "discomfort" or "intensity" for those of us whose internal gender identity does not match their birth gender. Fetishists aside, I believe that this discomfort is alleviated by some degree of presenting in your internal gender, going all the way to needing to permanently transition to your internal gender. MTF 10-90%, 50-50%, 80-20%, whatever works, up to 100% full transition. Again, it is whatever works to alleviate the individuals gender "discomfort."

Now to answer you question: Complicated for me. I have done a lot of soul searching, looking back at my life (as accurately as one can do that), and think that given how I think I felt as a kid and a teenager, IF I had supportive parents and IF society was more like now and less like it was then, I would probably be a woman now. But. . .

I am in my mid 40's with a male body that has suffered the ravages of a male life all these years. I am madly in love with my wife, and yes, your question is "if she were onboard," but I am extremely satisfied, to be the man in her life and the father to my children. Finally, and I will admit that maybe it is a lifetime of being "conditioned" as a man, there are aspects of my life that I want to experience as a man and not as a woman. Maybe conditioning, maybe 40+ years of male privilege, whatever the case I AM happy and comfortable being a man at times. I still haven't figured out what percentage in what gender I need to be perfectly happy - I'm starting to think that it is a constantly moving target, but a life in two genders seems to be working.

So for you middlepathers (MP - oh goody, a new acronym :D), how difficult is it to be in guy mode a bulk of the time? It must be unbearable if you are TSs who choose to remain with the status quo for the benefit of your families.

Going back to a matter of degree, sometimes miserable and sometimes fine.

Bringing things back to the OP:

Seems there are quite a few of us out there who can relate. The shared experience makes coping so much easier.

The analogy that was shared with me several years ago by my friend Christine Daniels was that it's like the white noise on a television set that isn't tuned to a channel. Some days that noise is quite loud and others it kind of fades into the background. Regardless, the noise is ever-present.

TG is a concept that is sometimes really hard for some people to get their heads around. You have to figure that 99.whatever% of people don't give a second thought to their gender on a day-to-day basis, yet it's something that I'm reminded of constantly whether I like it or not.

Thats it!!!! I read something that really resonated with me - Julia Serrano I think.

She was asked after she transitioned if she sometimes went into the wrong restroom by mistake. Her reply was that she never in her life went up to those restroom doors without consciously considering her gender and which was the "correct" door for her to enter. That hit real close to home!

This entire TG thing offers a richness of experience that I couldn't imagine trading away for anything because it's all I have ever known. Yet at the same time, it can be a royal pain in the ass that can cause so much heartache.

I think this is true. I think that if more people in this world were true to themselves, whatever that may be, it would be a better world.