I'm not a fan of forced fem stories. If it's not voluntary, making someone do something that will put them in danger -- either at the time or later on -- is wrong and would be construed as child abuse in most of the cases in which they do this. I guess I see them as way too formulaic. There's also the fact that I was severely abused as a child... from about age 6 months to around age 15 when I finally stood up and stopped taking it

This is likely due to my own experiences as a teenager, when I was forced to be a boy by my family and the school board. I first came out to anyone when I was only 8 years old. My cousin told me then that she had considered me a girl pretty much since we started playing together 4 years before. So I knew I was a girl. I came out to a few others when we were 12 (five more). So our little group was seven strong. Me, my cousin, and our 5 friends. One of those friends' mothers would take the seven of us on outings a lot of weekends to the mall -- the mall in this case was 45 minutes away. She was let in on the secret that 'Hannah' wasn't exactly original recipe girl on probably the third trip we had made at 12. She insisted on helping me when I wanted to try on a really cute dress, and my cousin was busy across the store and couldn't play interference. She decided that I would need help with the zip. I tried to protest, knowing that in just my panties and training bra, she would know. The seven of us spent the next hour and half in a corner of the food court explaining why she couldn't tell my parents.

When I was 14, I came out to my mother... she was fine. My stepfather, however, went off. So. No to being Hannah at home. My cousin left home a month after her 16th birthday, and I didn't see her for nearly a year. I felt betrayed. I felt like she had abandoned me. The Summer of 1992 I attended a camp that changed my entire outlook on life. Following that, my cousin left... this is when my life was reclaimed. I never let anything touch me emotionally after that if I didn't want it to do so. I frightened a lot of people just by my mere presence, after that. Took a long time to unlearn that...

I didn't forgive her until we were adults. Seven years more or less without her. At 16 I tried to come out at school. School board said no. I still was as girly as I wanted to be, just couldn't wear 'overtly' girls' clothes.

I started living completely as a girl when I went away to college just after turning 19. My legal name is one of those androgynous names that can go either way, so the administration of the dorm figured they'd made a mistake when I showed up at the dorm, and re-assigned me to a girls' floor. A few weeks later, things came out to the admin, and they moved me to one of the empty triples as a single... triples had their own bathrooms and didn't have to use the community bathroom and shower. Other than that, they kept it quiet.

When I was 22, the girl I had been in love with died and I flipped out for awhile. I went to Chicago and finally talked to my cousin again... we finally worked things out. I also asked my mother what my name "would have" been that year, and the truth is I was unexpected. The name they would have given me was... untenable. So, I borrowed a friend's middle name and feminized my actual name. After a few years I realized I didn't like being a derivative of my legal name. So I started using my stage name from Broadcast Radio and the Vaudeville troupe I was a part of. I liked the stage name as a regular name, so I added the original suggestion of my friends way back when I was 12 (Hannah) in the middle and there ya go... how I came to be.