It is hard to imagine that it took this long to realized that I was never the person I thought I was. My feelings are very clear now, even when I look back on my long life. I was always trying to be one of the guys. The guys that all the girls wanted. That part was true. I always dreamed of being with the prettiest girls. The ones with the best hair and shapely bodies. The girlie girls, the ones who wore the most makeup and fashionable clothes. That desire was real and many times I got what I wanted but the competition was fierce. Most times the best girl was the one that got away or more correctly the girl who went with the other guy. The feeling of inferiority was always with me. The other guys were better at sports and they always got the prettier girls. I had to be happy with second best. I had lots of friends, some very close but there was always the pall of me being less of a man. At the time I thought that the feeling of not being good enough or at least man enough, was only in my head. But now I realize that it was obvious to everyone who knew me. I am sure of it now, later in life, more in touch with reality. People who know me now, do not think of me as a manly man. They can all see that I am different from most guys. When I was younger I did all the things guys were supposed to do. Play sports, work on cars and interests that were predominantly male orientated. I was never really good at any of those things but I tried to be. Now I see that I only tried so that I could make up for the rest of my male shortcomings. No one ever thought that I was a great athlete. None of my male friends ever thought that I was particularly masculine. I had friends but I was always on the fringe, not really one of the guys. A few years after school one of my coworkers tried to pick me up and when I turned down his advances he told me that he was sorry, he misread me, he thought I was gay. All of this seems so clear to me now but for most of my life I pushed it out of my brain.

I was dressing up in girls clothes as long as I can remember. I was probably 10 or 12 when I first put on a pair of tights. That was enough to make me feel like a ballet dancer and it felt really good. Dressing that way always made me feel good and I never stopped doing it. But, I also never owned up to it. When I was young I never thought that it meant anything. As I got older I understood that I really wanted to be a girl. Everything inside of me is feminine and I began to understand my feelings. But, I was a guy and I did everything a guy is supposed to do except every now and then I’d dress up like a girl. I didn’t know what it meant and didn’t want to find out. So this was my life. Every now and then someone would find out about my secret clothing habit and they would leave me. Since it was killing my relationships I had to keep it hidden. I still do but lately it seems that people know more about me than I think. I don’t dress up outside my home. I don’t really wear gender bending clothing in public except maybe workout clothes. But lately people are making comments to me about wearing feminine clothing and having a feminine side to my personality. Since I am always hiding it, I can’t imagine how they could know about my secret side, but it is obvious that they do.

Recently I finally did what I know I have needed to do for a long time. I talked to a professional. It was on line which made everything a lot easier. I was able to dress in feminine clothes during the session and I think that was enough to give me confidence to be completely honest about my feelings. Of course we talked a lot about my past and those memories seemed to open up my thinking about why I feel the way I do these days. The therapist thinks that my gender dysphoria is real but is now manifesting in an unhealthy way because I may have repressed memories about abuse. After telling him my stories a few things seem to make sense. I never thought that I could have memories that couldn’t be recalled but it make perfect sense and I now believe that those types of memories are possible.

My closest childhood friend is gay. I didn’t know that at the time. We were very young when we started mutual masturbation during sleep-overs. We never touched each other until a few years later but then began using our hands on each others genitals. It never seemed gay to me at the time because we only spoke about the girls we waned to have sex with. These stories and hand manipulations were enough to bring about mutual orgasms. This was the case for a long while until one day he suggested that we try to give each other oral. Well, I let him do it to me but I couldn’t bring myself to to doing that to him. I never did and our friendship ended without further sexual relations. Then when I was about 15 I finally found a girl that would let me have sex with her. She wasn’t particularly pretty but she had a tight, killer body. This situation was good for me and felt like the natural way things should be. While I was dating her I met a man who became interested in me. He was throwing money around and buying me things and I didn’t understand why until he began hitting on me. He tried to kiss me and fondle me so I let him fondle me but never felt comfortable kissing. This eventually let to him giving me oral and me returning the favor with a handjob. At least this is how I remember it. My therapist thinks there is more to this story especially since this man took me on a trip with him. I don’t remember anything more than exactly what I just mentioned but I guess its possible other things happened. This man was very crafty and had a lot of money to throw around. I had nothing to speak of and must have felt some power in being wanted this way. I can honestly say that I have no other memories of anything else happening.

Some years later, now in my early 20’s another man showed interest in me. It started out as a platonic friendship but looking back it was another man targeting a young boy. He invited me over for dinner a few times and got me drunk every time. He admitted that he was bisexual and told me stories about many tryists with group sex. As a hormonal young man it all sounded pretty good to me but I never let him do anything to me….at least that I can remember. He was pretty obvious about what he wanted from me but I remember that he was very respectful of my feelings. I wasn’t attracted to him and told him that I couldn’t be sexual with a man. As far as I can remember we remained friendly but stopped getting together after a while.

So after relating these stories to my therapist he suggested that maybe I did more than I remember. Maybe I was forced into something or maybe I did it willingly as experimentation. But because of my upbringing and living in a different time when homosexuality was seen as a sickness, I repressed all of it. Of course this is possible and can explain a lot of my struggles today.

With all of that background out of the way it is easy to see that my gender dysphoria was already in place before I ever had any sexual contact with anyone. The ballet, wearing the tights and desires to be a girl was there years before I ever knew what sex was. But what can explain why I am so confused about what I want in my life today? I know for sure that I am more female than male in the way I feel and think. I very much want to live the rest of my life as a female and wish I hadn’t wasted so many years pretending to be male. But some things are holding me back. My sexuality seems to change day to day. How can I decide how I want to live if I don’t understand my desires? I am very unsure about what will make me most happy sexually. My heterosexual relationships with women have been many and I love the challenge of the chase. All of these relationships have since ended, not all for the same reasons but there is a common thread. After a while I take for granted the physical relationship. The thrill of the chase is gone and I lose interest. I desire something new and different, there is always another woman. And buried deep somewhere is the unknowing that I might enjoy sex with a man. On the surface I am repulsed by the thought. I don’t feel the same attraction as I do with women but still sometimes I feel a deep desire to see what it is like with a man.

The turning point with my therapist came when he asked me what kind of women’s clothes I like to wear the most. My initial answer was “all of it”. And that is true to some extent. I feel warm and comfortable and calm when I wear just about anything girlie. But when he pushed me to answer about what I enjoy the most the answer is sexy things. Short skirts, tight tops, sexy stockings and heels, lots of dangling jewelry and sweet perfume. He asked, “Why those things” and my quick answer was I like to look sexy because that is the most womanly look I can think of. When he asked what do I want to get out of looking like that, my answer also came quickly, “I want to be noticed by men. I want them to want me as a woman.” He asked me to repeat that and think about what I just said. I still didn’t understand so he pointed it out to me by asking another question. Don’t you think this is the same situation as when you were young and had men pursuing you? Do you think that you liked that attention back then and want the same thing now?

Those questions shook me to the core. My entire body went warm and I felt shaken. I knew it was true but didn’t know what to say. I tried to think and make some sense out of it but needed to say something. I tried to explain that it wasn’t the same thing because I don’t want men to be attracted to me as a man. I want men to be attracted to me as a woman. Next he asked me if I thought it was my unconscious that was trying to make my feelings more acceptable, (or something like that, hard to remember since I was so shaken).

It all makes so much sense now but I still have so many questions. What if there are uncomfortable memories in my head. If I was actually sexually abused in my past wouldn’t that explain a lot of my current feelings? My deep-seeded wonder about same sex relations might actually be from a repressed memory of something terrible that happened years ago. Maybe it wasn’t terrible and maybe I enjoyed it but felt so ashamed that I pushed it out of my memory. Now, I wonder if all of this is worth uncovering, if that is even possible. Now I have more questions than before and I am not sure I want to know the answers.