After spending about four years on line as a lonely primary digging at late emergers in a sometimes confrontational manner that I was used to because of consciousness raising/criticism/self-criticism but most of them were not, I managed to arrive at some answers as to why I came out at 21 and they were coming out in middle age.
It wasn’t Androphilia/Autogynephilia. When one stripped away the bullshit it came down to several factors.
One of the main ones was the ability to hide having been born transsexual.
I’m reading Donna Rose’s Wrapped in Blue and there it is in her own words. Being afraid of ridicule and loss of relationship coupled with the ability to mask it with sports and body building.
Being attracted to women and settling into marriage early with the belief that if she performed the expected male role her transsexualism would vanish.
The details differ but her story has a great many commonalities to the stories of others who come later in life.
Fear of losing some one you love not autogynephilia. Ability to pass as male not autogynephilia.
As for those of us who come out young. It isn’t because we have relationships with men. It is because those relationships don’t produce children and tend to be more supportive of us living as women.
The looking more like a girl than a boy and passing as female simply by putting on women’s clothes. Looking forward to an adult life as full of abuse as childhood isn’t much of a motivator to stay male.
Now I don’t particularly obsess on why I am transsexual. Maybe it is because I pretty much accepteed that as an explanation as a teenager. Even having Dr. Benjamin, dr. Fisk and Dr. Laub tell me that with me it was physical didn’t much cause me to obsess on being some how or other intersex. I just didn’t become physically masculine. Maybe I wasn’t really very androgen sensitive, maybe I didn’t make enough. Does it really matter?
Seriously… Why should I spend my life looking for an explanation? The simple explanation of feeling like a girl/woman trapped in a male body is quite adequate.
It isn’t like the religious freaks with their faith based bigotry are going to treat me any better if they found a string of chromosomes that were present in all of us. If anything it would probably cause the religious freaks to decide to make an exception to their total ban on abortion so they could prevent us from being born.
The faith based psychic establishment created GID so they could continue to torture kids who were potentially gay, lesbian or trans* in order to prevent gay, lesbian or trans*.
If children are really lucky they have parents who advocate for their right to transitin even as a child.
Before the Reagan/Thatcher neo-fascist right wing backlash stuff like that fell under an enlightened idea of “Children’s Rights”
I wasn’t female prior to having SRS or sex change surgery. I was transsexual assigned male. They changed/surgically reassigned my sex on an operating room table.
I don’t need a bunch of word games to justify my being. The more complex the game get the less satifying they become and the more they start sounding like, “I had XYZ therfore I am more female than you are.
If we had this operation we may differ in achievement or in appearence. Our ability to assimilate sure varies but Cybele’s Knife is the common leveling factor that got us to this point. Even those of us who are crazy and trash other sisters.
As far as I am concerned transsexualism is about agency in changing your initial sex assignment. If you decide and you demand reassignment then you have transsexualism. All the stories are part of your biography but if you have agency and get on that table and get your sex surgically reassigned becaue you were miserable with the original assignment then that is transsexualism.
If you notice I’m in a some what pissy mood this morning it is because of reading some of the stuff I found floating around.
