Intro Post and Question

[thaddeusdagan]

Hi, all! I'm Tad. I'm 33 years old, born female and married to a straight man. I've only very recently admitted to and started to deal with a gender dysphoria that's been present at least since I was a teenager and which has been much worse for the past three years or so. I'm not sure if I'm genderqueer, bigendered or FtM, and am in the process

Comments

[thaddeusdagan]

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. Your first paragraph is something I suspect and fear myself, but I'm trying to keep an open mind about what I need vs. what I just want. Right now it's so early that we have a lot more questions than answers and I think that's as stressful as anything else.

What is my husband afraid of? All of the above, I think. He's not homophobic, thankfully, and he's even suggested finding a gay hangout in a nearby city to go to with me in guy clothes, but all of the support groups he's found online for people in his situation seem to be aimed at "transguys and the guys who love them" and they tend to emphasise a more effeminate, fabulous type of expression than he's happy with. He's worried that I'll change physically - that I'll smell different, have a lot of body hair, have a less appealing skin texture, etc. - and that he won't be able to be physically attracted to me anymore. And he's worried that hormones will change my personality, make me less expressive or unfamiliar to him, or make me decide I'm a straight guy and I don't have any interest in him anymore. He's trying to support my identity in private - he's started a journal, too, and uses my preferred pronouns and names there, he's said that he can't imagine stopping loving me and that he's not planning on it even if I do transition, he's even helping me figure out how to look/act more typically "masculine" in order to pass better. I'm really incredibly lucky, and I don't want to make this any harder on him than it has to be.

And right now, since we don't have any definite answers about what's going on with me - am I strictly transsexual? Am I bigendered or genderqueer and have been stuck as a girl so long that I'm backswinging temporarily? Am I having a hormone imbalance and this will go away if I get it straightened out? - we haven't really come out to many people. Especially his brother, with whom we live, who is a homophobe and who, as a sometime lover of mine, is likely to freak the *%#! out. I'm really hoping to find a therapist who's knowledgeable about gender issues and figure out enough to be able to come out to the important people.

Thanks again, your post has given me good food for thought. I'm sorry to write a novel in reply, but answering your questions has helped clarify some things in my mind, I think. Good luck with your transition, and with your partners' transitions.

[hobbit_cogs]

Reply-novel is not a problem. <3 I'm glad your husband is so supportive, though it does sound like the situation with his brother has the potential for a lotta awkward.

As for changing your personality--as someone who's gone on hormones, it hasn't changed my personality. What it was changed is the way in which I am allowed to interact with the world, which changes my responses to it a bit. Since I now read as male sometimes, I no longer feel invisible and miserable, which has freed up an incredible amount of emotional resources for other things. It's made me like my body a whole lot more, appreciate sex much more, and feel more confident that my partners are attracted to the real me. I got much calmer and more confident over the last nine months (since I started T) which, I suppose, could read to others as me becoming more assertive, since I no longer waste my emotional energy hating the way I look and second-guessing everything I do. I now assume that I'm worthwhile and interesting and attractive rather than the opposite.

As a trans guy friend of mine put it, testosterone is both a diagnosis and a cure in some cases--sometimes you won't know if you like/prefer the way you feel on T till you've tried it for yourself. It did wonders for me, because it showed me there were other ways of being me that felt much more comfortable and natural to me.

And as for the trans/genderqueer/bigender thing.....T actually helped me sort some of that out, too. For me, there are parts of being a woman that I really loved, and to which I may want to return someday. I love and value my femininity but I can't live as a woman socially. I had to get far enough away from my physical femaleness to be able to feel safe expressing my internal femininity, if that makes sense. Being femme and female felt wrong. Being femme and male feels right and comfortable and fun. I identified as fully male when I started T, and now I'm starting to feel more and more genderqueer the longer I'm on it and the more I pass as male. This does not disturb me and I don't feel like the testosterone is in any way inhibiting my genderqueer self, but rather is helping me get to a place where my body reflects me. For me it feels like I had to get to a comfortable middle ground before I could even start thinking objectively about being either gender, because as a woman-reading person, my desire to be male was so overwhelming that anything I valued about being female vanished under the dysphoria.

[thaddeusdagan]

Thank you so much for your thoughtful reply. I'll pass your take on personality changes with T on to my husband. I think that if I do get on T I'll have a similar experience to yours in that it will actually be easier to express my femme side. I've always been very defensive about any typically female likes or pursuits, in a "but that doesn't make me a girl!" way (which, btw, was very confusing before I finally realised/admitted this trans stuff). Now that I'm self-identifying as male more and more, I'm not feeling as defensive about them to myself.