"Everything you do is irresistable, Everything you do is simply kissable..."
Why Can't I Be You
The Cure.
One fact of life that I have been taking to heart lately is that we learn about ourselves, in much the same way that others learn about us, or we about them. We observe their behavior, and then make inferences about their character and identity by linking what we observe to the "facts" about human behavior that I have acquired from my family, friends, education and culture. When the actual facts are missing or distorted, I am likely to misunderstand myself. I don't have a special window into my own soul.
Thus when I inexplicably took an interest in my mother's underwear at the tender age of 12 or 13, I had nowhere to turn but books, since I had no other source. (I wasn't about to ask my mother, or my father. I didn't need to read a book to understand that this was not normal, and best kept secret for the immediate future. The books that I found were one's like Krafft Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis. Such books taught me that I was a budding fetishist with little hope of a cure. Even though I was not to masturbate for many years, I accepted the designation, I had no other source of information. Now fetishist was / and for the most part still is a depressing term. Somehow your sexuality got screwed up due to some early sexual experiences. It is easy to assume that the perverse interest I took in mom's panties and slips, was both the cause and the expression of my fetishism.
Today of course there is abundant information about such things. A hundred stories are shared on the internet. A teenager need never leave their bedroom to acquire more knowledge about being trans, than I acquired in my first 50 years of life.
Now looking back, I can see the arc of my fate. Regarding myself as a heterosexual male with transvestite tendencies, I like most of my contemporaries pursued happiness as I understood it. I hid my vices (transvestism, masochism) and launched forth. In retrospect, there were signposts that might have given me pause. While I had a number of girlfriends that I enjoyed "making out" with, I was a virgin until I was 20, and only first masturbated when I was 17. An Irish Catholic perhaps I had no opportunities? Not quite, I once spent a night with a married woman whose husband was in Vietnam, a sort of arranged date when I was 18. I was unsuccessful in popping my cherry.
I simultaneously understand now, that my secrecy regarding my femme inclinations destroyed my first marriage, and yet I can forgive myself now understanding that my story is all too common for transgender individuals of my generation. I have met individuals with similar stories by the dozens, once I found the internet, and the means of meeting my own kind.
Now I can acknowledge that I was always transgender. My very physiology indicates problems with androgen in the womb. I slowly over the years changed the arc and arrow of my sexuality to feminize it.see this for example
I am thankful for learning what I have learned about myself, if envious of the young people who learn it so much younger.
We all need to be humble though. Our knowledge of ourselves and the human condition is limited by the thick walls of culture, and the fog of ignorance. I still struggle with the simple distinctions. Am I transsexual? I took hormones and contemplated more dramatic steps towards transition before illness disrupted those plans. Am I a very repressed homosexual? Certainly I have dated and slept with a few men in the last few years. It is coming down to accepting that I will never be sure about what choices I might have made in a hypothetical life, or what those choices would have meant. At any rate, my children are grateful that I soldiered on. At least they say so. And I am awfully fond of them.
