I started dressing in 1961, I was 6 years old. I'd wanted to be a girl since 1958, when I was 3.
Then they told me that I was a boy and couldn't play with girls anymore, I had to play with the boys.
The boys threw rocks at me and hit me with sticks. They called me sissy, fag, queer, fairy, tinkerbell, and worse.
They whipped me with wet towels, they whipped me with belts, they beat me with fists, and kicked me with boots.
I went to the hospital 64 times. The doctors didn't want to send me home until the bruises healed, even though I was there for asthma.
I talked to psychologists, therapists, and social workers - it took months to build up enough trust and courage to share what was in my heart,
and they told me they couldn't talk about that.
My mother knew, but had been told terrible things would happen if anyone found out - so she didn't even talk to me about it.
My father knew, but he had been badly hurt himself because he was so feminine - so he didn't want to talk about it.
My grandfather told me I was going to burn in hell, that I was an abomination - and he didn't even know.
My grandmother knew and let me play dress-up in her cellar, but we had to keep it a secret.
My cousins knew - two of them wanted to dress up too, one wanted to kiss me - both were boys.
Friends thought that because I was so girly, that I wanted to date boys - but boys brought back memories of pain and terror.
i enjoyed pleasing my girl-friends, but when they reached between my legs for the thing I hated so much, it was hard to tell them no nicely.
My friends in college thought I was a transvestite - they gave me a magazine with pictures of men with hairy arms, legs, and faces wearing frumpy dresses and panty hose. Was this what they thought of me? I knew I could be much prettier, because I had been when I was younger.
And then I met someone who was transgendered - like me. They weren't drag queens, they weren't freaks, they were boys who wanted to be girls.
This was on a usenet newsgroup back in 1984. That's 23 YEARS after the first time I told my parents. It was on net.motss or net.women.
In 1985, I was finally able to find books and videos on she-males and transsexuals, they weren't terribly informative, some where just wrong.
Websites like this one didn't "turn me transsexual", they gave me the chance to share feelings that I had kept hidden from everyone BUT myself for over 4 decades. There wasn't a day in my life when I wouldn't have asked the fairy godmother to turn me into a girl - even if I only had ONE wish, that was the one.
I prayed to God, but good Christians called people like me "an abomination" - some even said people like me should be killed, slowly and painfully.
Others wanted to "cure" people like me - with torture, shock, and lobotomy - we'd be dead, but we'd make obedient slaves.
Here I learned about therapists, how to find them, how to find doctors, how to get hormones, how to get through the legal hurdles, how to communicate with my wife, children, and in-laws. Even how to communicate with people at my church. I learned that I didn't have to dress like a **** to be beautiful. I even learned that I didn't have to be beautiful to be accepted as a woman. Simply put, I learned how to live the life I had wanted to live for 50 years, and now I'm finally living it.
Too often, people think of "brainwashing" as similar to what the North Koreans did during that war, breaking down mental defences and forcing someone to do something they never wanted to do.
What happens here is more like "Brain Washing" - taking the power away from the kind of thinking that caused us immense pain and suffering. It helped us to know that there was a solution to what we had previously thought was a "permanent problem". We found out that we could love, and be loved, without having to pretend to be something we never wanted to be in the first place. Before this "Brain Washing", we felt so trapped, so powerless, so frustrated, that it often appeared that we were suffering from depression, bipolar disorder, or were neurotic. Even today, modern therapists have been getting special training in APA workshops to help them understand and properly address the needs of the transgender and transsexual clients.
Many of us actually DO suffer from post traumatic stress syndrome. When you are violently assaulted by 10-12 boys every day for months, and you know that it will happen today, when you go to school, and every day for the rest of the school year - it creates fear, trauma, terror, panic, nightmares, and pain. When adult men go to war and experience this type of trauma, for example in POW camps, even with treatment it can take years to recover. Imagine what it's like for a child who is only 6 or 7 years old?
When we finally build up enough courage and trust to tell loved ones, especially spouses, they can't understand how we could have been so deceiptful for so long. Often they reject us, divorce us, take our children away. They don't understand how much terror and trauma has already been experienced. Even the most supportive wife may find that her cross-dresser husband seriously struggles with even the possibility of going out in public, of even being in the same room with another person. Even if his secret desire is that he wants nothing more in the world than to be able to live as a girl, there is so much terror and trauma that if his wife calls him a "Sissy", he will clamp down, shut off emotionally, sexually, and socially.
Some of us have even fallen in love with someone, only to lose them when they finally managed to get us to admit even a tiny bit desire to be feminine.
So yes, the group here has provided experience, strength, and hope for thousands of men and women, boys and girls, boys who want to be girls, girls who want to be boys, and their wives, lovers, and families. After years of hiding, of living in terror that our secret would be discovered, and the pain would start all over again, the experience of other survivors of this "halocaust" is a good and healthy thing.
