[AnnieBL]

Late as usual. I've been a bit taken up with other things the last few days (spent much of yesterday at the airport in a futile effort to get to Toronto to collect my jeep). I had been thinking that if nobody else did I needed to start a thread in this welcome new sub-forum. Thank you Flamesabers, and thank you everybody else. Between you'll, you've said much of what I'd like to have said, and much better than I could have said it.

A few things though, probably rather confused.

I have been increasingly coming around to the view that I should not be trying to ask myself 'how far is my gender identity female?', but rather"as a male, how far is my GI not male, and what am I not experiencing through not mentally being fully either male or female?'. Some of the answers to the first leg of the question I have known at least subconsciously for a long time, but my attempts at experiencing at least some aspects of femininity were at least until recently less successful, and involved some things that, as noted by others in this thread, that I am not comfortable discussing even here.

Discovery that there was a real possibility of growing breasts offered a means to my end, i.e. feeling like a woman in at least some respect, and that was the mental effect I was seeking. Breast development was however only a means to that end. As it happened, the effect of pharmaceuticals prescribed to me for other purposes has had further physical effects which have destroyed my conventional physical male function so that I am (at least beneath outer clothes) much less male than before, and I am beginning to place much more importance on the wider mental effects of what I am putting into my body, and the physical effects that are manifesting themselves.

I have always been mistrustful of my own perceived motivations, but I believe that I am seeking to bring my physical body more in line with my gender. Although some of the changes that have been brought about by prescriptions for other purposes, I may have somewhat connived in permitting or even wanting what they have done to me in addition to what I have tried to do deliberately. In both cases the mental effects have turned out to be an unexpected major factor, not least through the anxiolytic effects of the natural and artificial substances I have been taking. I can't say that I have got as far as feeling comfortable with expressing my gender, whatever it is, in public, but at least I am not bothered by having become physically a bit different.