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14 Aug 24 - a beach is challenging to my vision of myself

A beach is informative as a gender questioning person. Obviously I wish I could be there in a swimsuit or bikini and not being able to gives me pangs of envy. It’s difficult to envisage me looking female enough to be able to walk along the beach in a bikini though. I’m likely to only ever manage tiny breasts and I have no waist or hips and am too old for hormones to alter my skeleton so that body shape is fixed. I might be able to disguise this in clothing but there’s no hiding what I am in swimwear.  

I do get the argument that passing shouldn’t matter and I do acknowledge that I am a trans woman not a cis woman and that is a different thing. I am fine with that and I am actually proud to be trans and probably would always describe myself as a trans woman not a woman.

But in my head, my imaginary self is a cis teenage girl that I never got to be and that is my idealisation of myself even though it is wholly unrealistic. I worry that starting out with a wholly unrealistic and impossible expectation will only set me up for disappointment.

I think that being trans and wishing I was a girl has always been a part of me. However, with it having begun around puberty (like almost four decades ago, what have I been doing all this time!) my mental image of myself is stuck there.  Doing puberty at fifty isn’t going to make me the girl I never was. 

Although as I’ve said, I’m accepting of trans being different to cis, all I really want really truly is to magically be cis.

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