This time, I’ll use a lighter tone on this article; the last one was a bit too provocative and not well-enough grounded in academic research, so it might have been offensive to some. I do apologise for that. For this article I’m just pasting together random things, without apparent connection between them. I hope you still enjoy it!
Recently I took a few days off, to a place where there is no Internet access and cellular coverage is at the bare minimum to complete calls successfully. To spend my time in the evening, I engaged myself into a daunting task: to write my own autobiography, since my oldest memories, but relate everything to my gender issues, while still talking about the several episodes in my life that were most important for me. I haven’t finished it yet; I’m just getting to the more recent years since crossdressing became the most important thing in my life.
Why would anyone want to read my autobiography? Well, I have read that people going through transition are expected to do that. Allegedly, psychologists will examine that text to try to figure out if someone really suffers from a gender identity dysphoria (GID) or not. Of course it’s not the only thing they will use to establish GID — it’s just one of many.
I’m not really going to go through transition, but I might still consult a psychologist about my gender issues. They might, at some stage, ask me for the autobiography. Because I seldom have time to write something as huge as that, I thought I could use my spare time without Internet access — so I’m unable to work anyway! — to write it.
Although of course such a text implies some thought, and, as such, it’s an edited document, not something spontaneous, I still noticed something quite interesting as I reviewed my memories. I usually attribute the ‘start’ of my crossdressing to a single moment in time, when I was sleeping over at my eldest (female) cousin’s place one summer, my parent’s home being refurbished. Suddenly I got this impossible-to-stop urge to wear my cousin’s lingerie and went utterly insane with how pleasing the sensation was; afterwards, I felt that I was losing my mind and was full of guilt, regret, and embarrassment — mostly at myself, for having such ‘urges’. Well, the rest is history; almost every crossdreamer has a similar experience in their lives.
In my case, I was an adult, and although still a virgin, I had a job and was working towards financial independence. Transexuals tend to have similar episodes way, way younger in their lives. So for almost a decade afterwards I ruled out transexuality and was content to be ‘merely a crossdresser’.
But if you have been following my blog, you know that I now question my own classification, and have done so for many, many years. The interesting thing about writing about my earliest memories was to remember that many small things that happened in my infancy. Did I wear my mother’s clothes when I was a small child and loved it? Well, the memory of that had been repressed since my teens, because during my teens I had to strongly fight against the fear of being ‘too feminine’ and ‘possibly a homosexual’. That struggle with myself was very strong, specially because I positively hated everything male, I was strongly homophobic (even today, I’m still uncomfortable around male homosexuals), and I couldn’t understand how I could imagine myself as a woman while feeling nauseated merely about the idea of having males around me, much less being forced to kiss them or embrace them. Yuck! I remember in my teens of truly feeling very sick with the idea. I was so scared, so terrified that I was ‘becoming homosexual’ and was going to be forced to give up women and start ‘enjoying’ making love to men, that I repressed most of my existing traits, like shyness, in a desperate attempt to make me more acceptable to females.
During that phase, I mostly ‘forgot’ — or rather, repressed — my much earlier fascination with girly things, and how I felt once about the potential of my mother dressing me up as a girl for Carnival. At that time, I was terrified that she would find out how much I desired that. There are many such episodes, like how I always imagined myself to be the ‘perfect girl’ and that my first orgasm at 11 was imagining myself as a girl. Even today, on the rare occasions that I have sex with women, I usually imagine myself as a woman too, which makes it so much easier, although I tend to feel guilty about my partner because of that…
Still, when reading stories about fellow crossdreamers, the major difference I see is that my own history is one of repressing everything, suppressing thoughts and feelings, even forcing myself not to think as a woman. It’s a story of looking at myself at a mirror and not being surprised that I couldn’t ever get a girlfriend because I didn’t look ‘masculine enough’ and feeling terribly frustrated by that; but, once I started crossdressing, the complete opposite happened: now I look way too masculine for my own tastes, and wish to be different. There is no way to please me!
I wonder what a psychologist would make of that story. Maybe I was right during my teens: I’m just plain insane 🙂
