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Cyran0 said:
Thanks again Samantha.

The real issue that's left over for me, and really the issue I've dealt with forever, is that thoughts and feelings are one thing but outwardly I'm male. So no matter how much I identify one way or the other, that's how the world sees me. And no matter how much I wish I could, I'm never going to get to really know what it's like to be a woman. I can't have that body.

So what to do with those thoughts and feelings?

Years ago I did a fair amount of cross dressing. Sometimes for theater, sometimes for film projects, and sometimes just to go out. I really enjoyed it. I loved having smooth legs, wearing makeup and putting on dresses. It was an insane amount of work but it was great. It felt very natural to just be this female version of myself for a time and then when the clothes came off, I was male again, and that felt good too. At the time I treated it as a goof or at most as a turn on, but looking back on it, I just enjoyed what I saw then as "taking on" that role. Lately I've been thinking that maybe it wasn't that I was taking something on but letting something out.

Ah but things were different then. I wasn't married, didn't have kids, and was about 50 pounds thinner. I suspect that, much like my homosexual urges, these feelings and fantasies and emotions will be dealt with quietly, by myself, without breaking any vows. Because even though my wife knows I'm bisexual and knows I used to cross dress and has heard me wish more than once to have her role for a time, we're still married.

Cyran0

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Actually "dressing" is a perfectly normal thing, and many, many people do it without ever taking an irreversible step like surgery or hormones. These days, more an more people are blurring the lines between genders, so it isn't the trauma it used to be.

Spouses and children are also taking it better and even accepting it fully.

Beleive it or not, in some ways I kind of envy your ability to take everything off and just feel like a guy again. I never felt like a guy even when I wa trying so hard to pretend to be one.

Me, I'm a country girl, a farm girl, and like the clean, wholesome look. Jeans, t-shirt, sneakers/boots/sandals, hair pulled back and just the sun on my face. Closest I've ever gotten to makeup is a touch of sheer, colored lip that doubles as a moisturizer. For me, getting all dressed up is a nice blouse, slacks or a skirt, and something different with my hair. Makeup? Nah, still really only gloss and maybe just a little powder. I grew up on a farm in the country, and never really got into the whole glam thing myself.

For me, it was never really about apperance, clothing, makeup or any of the trapings of femininity. For me it was the social roles, the differences in thinking, feeling, communication, and relationships. For me it was always all about just being one of the girls. Mentally and emotionally since before I knew about sex, gender, orientation or any of the more complex things society adds on after the fact, I always have been a girl.

So after all the years of pain, confusion, exclusion and not fitting in, I took thesteps I needed to medically, surgically to be me. It's been great for me, I finally fit into the world and am free to just be who I am, not the person I was told I had to be.

As to being male on the outside... Used to be. Honestly I used to get mistaken for Jonathan Frakes who played Riker on ST:NextGen. Now, I look nothing like him, and that makes me really happy. There's no mistaking me for a guy, and frankly people who never knew me find it impossible to believe because I'm so clearly female. Curiously enough the only surgery I've had was in a place most people don't get to see.

Gender isn't nearly as fixed as folks might think it, and I went in the space of a face short years from looking like Riker, to looking like my Mother. I put off transition for more than a decade because I figured there was no amount of surgery in the world that could make my body correct and female. Well I was right, cause the only surgery I needed was the place so few people ever go. So trust me, outsides can change. Insides however not so much...

So if that is the only thing, maybe, who knows. I just wanted to say, it's not nearly as limiting as you might guess, or even I suspect, believe.

Blessings,

Sam