11th February - I found my answer, so now what?

I have spent the past week trying to answer the question my friend put to me when we were role playing coming out to my wife: what do I actually mean when I say I am a woman. 

It is multi-faceted and has emotional, social and physical elements to it. I need my body to be congruent with how I see myself. I need to be perceived as a woman to readily fit into the social groups that I feel comfortable with. On that subject, I read a post by someone that had bottom surgery a year ago, who said that she had noticed that some women who couldn’t quite accept her as one of them before, were able to once she had surgery. I have a similar feeling that I have to do it to feel genuine but it’s interesting to learn than others may make the same judgment. The final component of it is the physical and why I am drawn to having a feminine body shape, which is impossible to explain in words to anyone else but something that I can feel intensely in rare moments when I glimpse my future and feel so totally right. 

So I am now able to confidently answer that question. Trouble is, I have found some relief in knowing that I couldn’t do the difficult conversation until I had solved this question and that took the pressure off. Now I have the answer my excuses are running out!