I feel like I have lost sight of who I am. Up until my wife caught me out with my female underwear, I thought I knew who I was and where I was heading. I had the official diagnosis of gender incongruence and dysphoria and a referral for feminising hormone replacement therapy. I had been wearing female underwear full time for three months, was shaving and waxing my leg and body hair, and sleeping in a nightdress every night. I had pushed the boundaries of being visible presenting female by going out in a dress to a lesbian bar and to a restaurant and even hotel breakfast. The latter was a bit uncomfortable but it felt like part of the journey and an important step so that I almost welcomed the stares and unsubtle comments. So I knew who I was. I was Nicola. A transgender woman who was working towards coming out and beginning transition. Then at the end of March my wife found some of my female underwear that I had forgotten to hide. This could have been the crucial...
I commented to a friend yesterday that I had once had a dream that I would run away to New Zealand to live as a woman. This was when I was around seventeen and in the sixth form at school. I still had lots of confusion about who or what I was but had been secretly cross dressing and wishing I was a girl for five or six years by then. I then saw a documentary on television called A Change of Sex, which followed the journey of a “transsexual” man who was undergoing a “sex change” to become a woman. These were new terms to me. I had heard of transvestism and there was an old transvestite in our part of town that everyone referred to as a “tranny” and my mum had explained when I was younger was a “very sad person with mental problems”. So my limited knowledge of gender non-conformity was that a man in a dress was sad, mental and an object of ridicule. I also had no idea that he had any options beyond wearing a dress and being a transvestite. Of course I liked to wear women’s clo...