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Gender questioning: in the beginning - female embodiment fantasies

The term “female embodiment fantasies” is something I have learned fairly recently, thanks to the Internet and the access it gives me to papers on gender dysphoria and transgender issues. 

What I am going to write about here is my inner world as a teenager. A time when I had never heard of gender dysphoria, female embodiment fantasies or even trans gender. I was aware of “gay”, and that everyone at school viewed that as a Bad Thing, but that was all I knew. I didn’t know anyone who identified differently, had never even heard of anyone changing their gender. This was the nineteen eighties and I knew nothing. 

I knew nothing about gender identity but I did know how I felt. 

Please forgive the indelecacy, but as a teenage boy (for so I was), I spent a fair bit of my time fantasising and pleasuring myself. That is normal I guess, but was the subject matter of my fantasies “normal”? 

I am sure I stared at my female classmates just as much as the rest of the boys did. But did I see the same thing? 

I saw girls wearing skirts and the line of their underwear. I expect that the normal boy thing is to see their legs and the shape of their bottoms. I fantasised about the knickers and how it would feel to wear a pencil skirt and to walk with my thighs restrained by it. The school skirt was navy blue, knee length and fitted, pencil skirt style, with a triangle bit at the back with some extra fabric in so it allowed more freedom of movement. If I knew the first thing about fashion I might know the proper name for that, but I’m afraid I don’t so you will have to rely on my poor description. Why do I mention it at all? Because when the girls walked, it pulled tight and then slack again, and the tight the other way, then slack...how did that feel? My trousers didn’t dictate my stride length. I didn’t feel them with every step, like the girls must have. 

Naturally, I observed their breasts too, and that would be normal. Except I was not just interested in them, I wondered how they felt. Through the thin white cotton blouses that were the girls’ uniform, I could see the shape of their bras. From the front, the white triangles of the cups and the thin strap going over the shoulder. From behind, the straight horizontal band, tight around their slender body, with the thin shoulder straps at right angles. The idea of the bra was always overwhelmingly fascinating to me. It was nothing like anything I wore and was part of the special identity of being a girl. In my mind I felt it was like a “contraption” that was fastened around the girl’s body in some sense, but on the other hand, something that gave security and protection. I was fascinated, but clearly also confused! And I was a long way from just thinking about boobs. 

The odd way in which I looked at girls extended into my fantasy world. Although I wouldn’t have been able to describe them as such at the time, not knowing such things, my dreamworld was filled with female embodiment fantasies. 

The obvious things, like wearing a bra and knickers, tights and skirts of course. But also fantasising about having a female body and particularly to have breasts. 

I had no way of realising that sort of dream, or even knew it could be possible to do so, but my imagination dealt with that. 

I imagined meeting a genie who could grant me three wishes. Without hesitation, wish number one would be to be born a girl. It still is. And then I would imagine what my life would be like, about my body and clothing and what my periods would feel like and how much they hurt. 

Alternatively, I would imagine I was forced to become female by some controlling state. Maybe I was captured and wrongly imprisoned and experimented on? Or quite often, I would imagine being locked into an iron leotard that concealed my true gender and gave me a feminine body shape and I couldn’t ever remove it. I think maybe I had recently seen the film of the Man in the Iron Mask and had put my own twist on it. Freud would probably say I felt a need to be seen as female and lock away my male body but needed it to be done forcibly against my will because I was too afraid to admit to who I am. Or something like that. 

Which might be true as my fantasies around that time did tend towards being made to be female by someone else, never by coming out and saying that was what I wanted. 

So that’s a bit of inappropriate sharing from my teenage mind. I’ll end here  

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