Is the world today leaving us here behind?

[PaulaQ]

I believe part of that fear is not of whatever repercussions or embarrassment one would face personally by presenting in public, but of the thrall or inexorable pull those public outings might have. So, you go out dressed the way you see yourself in your mind's eye. You are not outed, you have pleasant interactions...you meet kind, sympathetic people or fellow CDs...doesn't that reinforce all the good feelings about CD? You do it more and more, get better and better at it...and then wonder what it would be like to just live that way? I suspect many self-proclaimed crossdressers are really on the TS end of the spectrum but the fear wins out.

Yup, that's certainly possible, that more folks here than are suspected would transition. But I'll say more about that in a minute.

What about the effect a transition would have on others? How do you deconstruct a few decades living a lie without doing major damage on loved ones? There is big fear there--and justified. We don't live in a vacuum.

The longer I spend on this forum, the more I believe that most CDs...if they were honest with themselves...would or could envision more. But as you point out, they are held back. For some, the pull forward wins out. For others, situational factors give them pause. I don't know that it is all ego and fear. Maybe it could be love for others, or respect, or knowing the destruction transition would leave in its wake.

Allow me to say some things about this:
1. You seem to be under the illusion that you, me, or anyone else who transitions had a choice in this. We did not. Your gender is a force that you cannot stop. If you need to transition, you will, or you will be destroyed.

2. Most of the damage to loved ones is self-inflicted. My ex-wife didn't have to kick me to the curb after I came out to her. In the process of doing that, she did a lot of damage to herself because of her reactions. Those reactions aren't my fault. Indeed, if you want to think about the damage we do, my plan B was suicide. I'd already tried it once. As crappy as this plan - transition - seemed, it was a LOT better than plan B, both for me, and for my family.

A lot of us do put this stuff off for a very long time just because we are trying to preserve the status-quo for loved ones. I certainly did that. I should've transitioned in 1990. I didn't because of my infant son. I then proceeded to make things worse for others by marrying my second wife, and never telling her about any of this stuff. So for 20 years, her life was materially better than it would otherwise have likely been.

So in that case, I helped one person, my son, and hurt another, my future wife. How much I really hurt her, as opposed to how much she hurt herself is debatable. Yeah, I get it she didn't want to stay married to a woman. I'd agreed to that, and we'd worked out a plan to ease her transition to life without me - when she just abruptly kicked me to the curb. At that point, I was in self-preservation mode - I needed a place to live!

It's a miracle I didn't end my life before the end of 2013 - I was that miserable. Had that happened, the damage she sustained would be far, far worse, at least financially, and at least as bad emotionally for her, and worse for our kids.

3. You also seem to think that the common path is to CD more and more, going out in public more and more, until transition is inevitable. That does happen for some, but that's not true for most of us. It definitely was not true for me. I didn't leave the house, fully dressed, until after I'd come out, and realized that I had to transition, at least in some form. I didn't fully dress until about a month before I came out to myself as trans, and two months before I came out to my wife.

Let me just reiterate this - you do not control this. You can feel you have control by stopping it for a time, but you do this at your peril. By the time I started transition, I'd waited far too long, and had HRT not had a rapid and dramatic effect on how I felt emotionally, I'd have been dead before the end of the year. I barely hung on until I got HRT. Not all of us experience this - but it's a lot more common than you'd like to believe.