Was I Ever Transgender?

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To make it short and sweet, I hated men due to my early experiences with them, and I hated being one. The people around me never said I was manly, especially my wife of 38 years. Finally, I gave up and started trying figure out what living as a woman would be like. There are some good people around me, so I didn't do suicide because I didn't want to hurt them.

Comments

Perhaps Not Binary?

The culture that I live in seems adamant that one is either male or female, and it has become clear to me that I was never one or the other. Being a submissive INFP has taken a lot of thought though.

I think you're perpetually asking yourself the wrong questions.

I keep seeing you post blogs asking:
Was I this or that?
Are we this or that?
And things of that nature.

I think you need to re-frame the questions you're asking yourself, hon.

Stop worrying about who you were, and instead ask yourself these two questions for me:

Who am I now? Not what, not even why, but simply, purely, who?

and

Who do I want to be in the future?

The more you continue to dwell on the past, on the ifs and maybes and whatabouts, the less you're paying attention to the now, and to the future.

So, maybe next blog you can explore that for us? Who IS Gwen, and who do they want to be in the future?

*hugs*

Melanie E.

Identity

Andrea Lena's picture

We so often are faced with how we see ourselves, and I suppose those moments increase the older we get and the further from our beginnings we grow. But we were created, either by divine design or some less spiritual process, as WHO we are. According to some, we all fall in place somewhere on the transgender specturum. And even at that, our expressions and even self-conceptions might be fluid.

But it's who we are that remains important. My late wife recognized that my being transgender, as minimally-explaint to her as it began, still did not define who I was. At the end of it all, we were best friends.

All that to say? You're Gwen. And as some of my parental characters are wont to say, "It's not how you started that matters so much as where you are headed and maybe end up." And you're my friend.

  

To be alive is to be vulnerable. Madeleine L'Engle
Love, Andrea Lena

Hmm, how to say it?

0.25tspgirl's picture

Yes you are trans. You’re not flaming trans, but you are on the continuum. The constant questioning you do as well as your history strongly support this.
Mostly you are you. A unique individual of value and great worth.
Your ruminations and reflections on your past are part of being older. We seek to organize and sequence our history to make sense out of our lives. We rethink major decisions and work through traumas to try and settle them. The more chaotic our lives the harder the questioning. Being an unmanly man and an unwomanly woman just means you fall into the middle part of the trans spectrum.
And none of this has any bearing on your being a valuable and good person.

BAK 0.25tspgirl

The Latest Psychatric Opinion.

Lately it seems that prevailing opinion has shifted in a way that is unfamiliar to me. Of course the DSM 5 is increasingly coming into play and frankly some of the academic 'bad guys' are gaining a foothold. It makes me sad. I was studying Psychology in College and gave it up because I did not want to become an asshole. I still wonder if part of my TG journey was because of the abuse I suffered at the hands of my stepfather. Later in life, I found out that he had suffered abuse himself. Then there is the possibility that he abused me BECAUSE I was quite feminine. I never had gay feelings but always believed that women are superior to men.

There is no bog standard TG

person. We are all different. Vive la difference and long may it remain so.
I would not worry about all this stuff. Just get on with living your life as best you can.
Samantha

Well whatever the hell you are you're okay

laika's picture

Well whatever you are Gwen, you're okay. Because I think there are other questions lying beneath the "Am I transgender?" question. Fiendish 3 a.m. instruments of self-torture like: Am I okay? And if not, why am I like this? Is it MY FAULT?! It is, isn't it?

When we compare our insides (thoughts, feelings, issues) to other people's outsides (material success; presentation, stated opinions, lies) we're sure there MUST be something seriously wrong with us or we'd be like them, but deep down the majority of them are full to bursting with the same self-doubt; and the ones that have no self doubt are either bodhisattvas (like saints, extremely rare) or sociopaths (all too common).

Labels are seductive, they give us an excuse for the wrongness we're so sure is at our core (my recent one is: "If I'm on the autistic spectrum then I'm not just an economically marginal weirdo who never made anything of myself, never had a relationship, who freaks out over nothing and slaps myself when I get stressed"). A lot of us have this sense of wrongness because somebody much more screwed up than us told us we had this wrongness, over and over, at an early age; But when you consider the source that wrongness starts to look more like somebody's sadistic head trip than anything real. We're not perfect, we've all done bad things that might need addressing and sometimes guilt over specific things can be productive if it leads to doing better; but SHAME over existing at all is nonsense and on my good days I can see that. I guess whatever I am it's who i'm supposed to be, and at least I'm not some angry embittered self-pitying incel who relates to that disgusting movie JOKER and blames everybody else in the world and "woke media" for what I never found.

I'll probably get neurotic about giving sermon like this (Who the hell do I think I am? I'm not a goddamn guru I can barely leave my house, ohmigod what's WRONG with me????) and delete this whole comment; but until then...
~hugs, be good to yourself Sweetheart; you do deserve it. Veronica

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What borders on stupidity?
Canada and Mexico.
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