Quote Originally Posted by PaulaQ View Post
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.

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.
Hi Paula. Thanks for the discourse. Your experience is just that--your experience. It's not transferable to everyone suffering from some level of gender dysphoria. Believe me, I've had bad days, where I am sickened by the hypocrisy in my life, and ashamed of how much mental energy, time, and money I devote to CD, which could be devoted to my wife, children, job or some more productive endeavor. I'm often repulsed by my male--hairy--muscular--bony body, and I lament the effect of decades of testosterone. I've been a click away from ordering black market hormones from online pharmacies. I've had two visits with a gender therapist. I've looked into the local Planned Parenthood clinic to find the name of the transgender sympathetic doc that will start me on my journey.

Other days, I enjoy being a successful husband/father/business executive. Life is good. Those days I tell myself it's not worth throwing it all away, especially at my age.

Sure, GD never goes away...but it's not the all-consuming force for me that it was/is for you. I am under no illusion that you had a choice. I am grateful that I have one. But I also know that I am on that ledge...and if I ever got really good at CD...to the point that I could contemplate transition without making an absolutely farcical spectacle of myself...that it could influence my decision. I don't like making people feel uncomfortable. I don't want to be some champion of diversity. I'm not saying you are any of those things; again, this is very personal for me. I want to be graceful and classy, and behave with conviction and principle--the way I believe I present as a male. If I progress to the point where I could do that, then maybe all bets are off. Then there are my wife and my children. My wife is an adult and if I get to that point...well I guess it's her decision. But my children are innocent. They will be affected. And until they are older, I feel the weight of that responsibility.

For you it was black and white--transition or die--I get it. Can you accept that for some of us, there is grey? Under the right circumstances, I can see myself living as a woman. Hell, I think about it every day. But on the bright side, I have never been suicidal. I can't imagine that. I'm sincerely happy that you got out of that dark place.

The "more and more" path is well documented. I've only been actively CDing for 3 years, and I've seen many go this route. It may not be the path for everyone, but it is certainly common. My gender therapist told me that she's seen quite a few cases. I guess we can debate the statistical difference between "common" and "most" but what's the point? I concede that you are a verified TS, and your experience is valid. Can you envision a CD with TS tendencies that is able to keep the genie bottled up, for whatever reason?

Cheers

Gretchen