Hey all, thanks for this conversation! I think each of you took a separate scentence in my stream of conciousness and ran with it!

Just to clarify my end, as I'm thinking about it, I think the 'fake' I was thinking about was as relates to myself - removing a lot of boundaries suddendly can leave 'too' much freedom, perhaps. It leaves you thinking, 'wow, this is great!', but then, that little doubt maybe creeps in in the dark - oh, am I just overcompensating years of mild represion now? One day I'm going to wake up and realize I'm really like 99.5% male after all? - the horror!

I'm feeling like I was a little too comfortable not thinking much about it either way for too long, but now I'm feeling like oh, "you can take back my gender spectrum when you pry it from my cold dead fingers." And now I'm trying to reconcile those two positions. Like how do you go from feeling like something like gender that most people think they have 100% figured out and think it's pretty static, how can I sort of do like a 180 (or a 90 or whatever), and immediately feel authentic with myself about it?

I guess the thing is, it maybe doesn't actually 'feel' like a 180 so much, but it sure 'looks' like a 180, and I'm as caught up by the look as anyone, and it makes you question sometimes if the 'looks' is outpacing the 'feelings'. For 20 years the girl wardrobe fit in a shoebox, now it's needing it's own closet space. From the outside looking in, "somethin's goin' on". Maybe all the pink fog tales have me feeling a little cautious with myself, and that's no bad thing, the site has been very helpful in understanding it with my SO, etc. - somethings are easier taken at a pace less than headlong =)

I don't think it's causing me too much heartache...I've just come out of this narrow canyon, and I'm looking out on this vast plane, and I'm like, holy crap, there's a lot of open space out there! Thanks y'all for helping explore it...Summer