Maiden’s Journey

Suppose I choose a day, could be any day, and decide that is the day I do something about starting my transition and/or come out to my wife.  I am pretty certain that I am trans and that I really truly want to actually become a girl and that means transitioning.  I have felt this was since I was eleven although I couldn’t frame it as transness back then, I have dressed in female clothing in secret my whole adult life. It may only be in the last few years that I have discovered enough to be sure of who I am and what is possible but this is not a midlife crisis...or if it is, it’s been going on for thirty five years and started really early!  I know that I want to transition to female and that has been my wish ever since I saw a documentary about gender reassignment in the eighties when I was in my teens and saw for the first time what was possible. But I didn’t have the courage to do anything other than dream. I feared rejection and losing everything.  Now, that’s not...

I read on Twitter recently a question about whether recognising that your feelings towards a woman are as much about envy and a desire to be her as they are about fancying her affects how you feel about crushes and attraction after that.  My off the cuff reaction was that I have both body envy and attraction at the same time. I assume that if I transition that I will continue to like girls and be a lesbian so I feel both at the same time.  Having reflected on this for a while I wonder if it is that simple.  I have written before about my early memories of first attraction. On a family holiday when I was eleven a girl wearing a green crop top over a black swimsuit. I thought I fancied her but my abiding memory is of fantasising about wearing her swimsuit. At school in the drama studio wondering what it felt like to wear a leotard and leggings set.  Seeing the outline of a bra through a girl’s blouse and wanting to feel like her and wear a bra myself. Tights, skirts, l...

 I haven’t written for a while because I had convinced myself that the whole idea of being trans and transitioning was just an impossible dream and that I should give up and forget about it.  And this feeling came over me pretty quickly after having finally got my head around and accepting that I am trans and I do very much wish to fully transition and become a girl. These are things that I was scared to write down, but am now able to. This is me, I am Nicola and I am a girl and I want my body and life to fit with that.  But....and there is always a ‘but’ right? But how can I transition to Nicola in my life? I will lose everything. I am married and she doesn’t know that I am trans. I have total confidence that if I tell her, that will be the end of our marriage. And with that I will have to find somewhere else to live, not see our son, get divorced, etc.  I work in a pretty conservative profession and I have to do sales and win business. If I transition I will throw ...

Not something I had really thought about until today but I was responding to a question on Twitter about what the online trans community means to me and I had this realisation of how lonely it can be if you are trans.  I am not out except to one close friend and ally, and I have only had them for about three years. Prior to that I had no one to whom I could share my thoughts and feelings.  The life of a closeted trans person is lonely because of the secrecy.  When I first started to realise that I was looking at girls to imagine what it was like to be them, there was no way I could tell anyone that. At my school in the eighties that would be to invite more bullying. And who would understand anyway even if I could talk about it? When I first started experimenting with wearing my mother’s clothes in secret I had to hide, not risk being seen, cover my tracks. I was finding out about how I felt when dressing and what I liked, but I had to keep this to myself.  When I fel...

I guess this is another aspect of my questioning whether I am “trans enough”.  I can only apologise for keep going on about this, but it is a multifaceted problem so there are many things to say! What it comes down to is this: I didn’t think I felt dysphoria, so I thought that meant I was not trans.  What do I mean by that?  I suppose I was starting from a limited understanding and the assumption that dysphoria was the cliche of “I feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body”, which probably no one in the real world has ever actually said. But growing up with almost no knowledge about trans issues, that was the full extent of my understanding.  I don’t feel trapped in the wrong body. I don’t really have much anxiety about my maleness at all on a day to day basis. So I sort of assumed that I don’t “have “ dysphoria and by extension, that I wasn’t “proper” trans.  Except that I do have dysphoria.  I just took a while to realise that was what it was.  Dysph...

 My last post was entitled “to be a girl or to be like a girl” and was about how I obsess over this question in trying to work out who or what I am. It’s similar to the “am I trans enough?” question that I (and many others) also grapple with.  Sorry to have wasted your time dear reader, but only now do I realise that I have been going around in circles asking myself completely the wrong questions.  Well, it’s not entirely the wrong question, more that I have been conflating two questions into one and that is why I have never managed to escape the circles of my own wants and fears.  My mistake is in mixing “what do I really want?” with “can I go through with that?” It is hard to be clear about what I really want when this is always thought of together with my fears of consequences.  What I have realised is that I have to deal with the two questions separately.  I suppose that people pay therapists to point these things out and get to the answers more quickly...

if Hamlet was trans? Not exactly.  Do you mind if I continue with the theme from my last blog about whether I am trans enough? Like I said, that seems to be a very common question for people in the trans community but I wouldn’t say it is quite how I characterise the issue in my own head.  The question I grapple with is: do I want to be a girl, or do I want to be like a girl?  What do I mean by that? To be a girl, I mean going the whole way and transitioning. To actually fully become female. Or is that I want to be able to be like a girl when I want to be, which does not involve major interventions and change, just being able to dress sometimes, grow my hair, have female friends and be seen as “one of the girls”.  Those things are all nice and have served me well over the years. I could continue with occasionally being like a girl and never go any further and that would probably be fine.  And yet there is a part of me that wonders what it could be like if I actu...

 This is a question I ask myself all the time.  And having spent some time reading posts from the trans community on Twitter it is clear that I am not alone in wondering this. In fact, someone tweeted that their therapist had quipped that it is such a common question among trans people that it is practically a symptom of transness.  So why do we all keep wondering this?  It is partly Imposter Syndrome for sure, doubting whether I am qualified to be part of the trans community. Others have said similar, so that seems to be a common feeling too.  The usual response from the community to someone questioning whether they are trans enough is to say that if you ask the question then you are, and it’s not for anyone else to say how trans you need to be.  I don’t think that quite nails it though.  They’re right in so far that if you’re asking the question then you are certainly somewhere on the trans spectrum, but that doesn’t deal with the “enough” part....

First contact with a real girl that is.  Apologies that this post will contain some reference to mild sexual experiences but I will try to be delicate.  As I have mentioned in other posts, in my teenage years I was as attracted to girls as the next boy, but I was also very much attracted to the idea of being them, although at the time I had no idea this was not “normal” and maybe signified something about me.  Unfortunately I had little to no success in getting a girlfriend. Ok, let’s be honest: no success. At all. Maybe I wasn’t masculine enough! Hmm.  I was fourteen before I first kissed a girl. We met at the ice rink, skated together and chatted and then before she had to go home, we “snogged”. I had zero experience so had to follow her lead and she was rather vigorous in her kissing. Forceful even, and pushed her tongue well into my mouth. Frankly, I feared she might eat me. Nice to get a score on the board, but I cannot say that I enjoyed the experience. You hav...

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...