Posts: 614
Threads: 26
Joined: Mar 2012
21-09-2014, 12:56 AM
(This post was last modified: 21-09-2014, 12:59 AM by
AnnieBL.)
When I first registered with BN thirty months ago, it was because I had been pursuing breast growth as what I hoped would be a sufficient substitute for the transition which I had looked intoand dismissed as impossible, not only because of my family circumstances , age and height, but also many years of repression, distraction and sublimation. Being a permanent tweener would I hoped be enough. It wasn't.
What follows is the depersonalized and sllghtly modified text on which my 'coming out' emails have been based.
'I am writing to you together to tell you something about myself that you may need to know, and may be rather a shock to you.
Since my mother died at the end of 2009, an issue which I had always very firmly repressed or hidden before then, because of both my education in a boys boarding school with a particularly rigid emphasis on behaviour proper to a male, as well as the strong influence of my mother, has been gradually emerging in its true nature and now in full force so that I cannot deny it any longer. Initially I only ‘came out’ to my wife, and that with some difficulty until I wrote it all down in a long screed, since when despite her own natural difficulties with the situation she has been far more supportive than I could reasonably have expected. In short, I am and always have been (since the condition is innate and unalterable) transgendered. This is I understand it probably because my mother had German measles during the sixteenth and seventeenth weeks of her pregnancy with me, which is the stage at which it is now known that gender pre-programming of the fetal brain occurs, and that may also account for my height and poor physical coordination. It is of course something I was born with, and cannot do anything to change.
With this new self knowledge and my wife’s support, I may now be able to take steps to overcome the ‘dysphoria’ that the conflict of uncomfortably living in a male shell has caused, allowing, very late in the day, my real self to re-emerge. My mother was very firmly convinced before I was born that I was going to be Annabel, but I arrived with the wrong equipment, and after my father died I became, I think somewhat at my younger brother’s expense, the favoured son who was to achieve all of that of which my father was denied the opportunity; but I was always unhappy in trying to fulfill this role (my mother wondered why the happy, outgoing child she sent to boarding school became withdrawn and unsocial), and at the risk of sounding disloyal, I found my mother highly and increasingly possessive until forty years ago I eventually cut and ran for Canada (and initially she even tried to follow me here). It seems that Annabel really was there all along, although I’m sure my mother would have been appalled by the manner in which she has now emerged. I am recently back from a big transgender convention (SCC) in Atlanta, which as my wife initially and correctly said was everything I would have hated in my male persona. In fact it was an intensely liberating experience which I enjoyed immensely, and I feel that I have got back my real life that got suppressed by that prep school and my mother’s expectations. I had never in the past cross dressed, but presented as Annie (short for Annabel) during the convention, gathered the confidence to travel back to Canada in that mode, and have continued that way ever since, tackling situations as they arise. My height is of course a problem, but one shared by a disproportionate number of male to female transgender people. Another is my bald head. I’ll try to append a few photographs to this message.
I have been extraordinarily fortunate in the strength of my bond with my wife which goes well beyond either sex or gender, and also in that both my step-children have taken it very well, and indeed everyone we have told to date. My wife’s position is that her alternatives were stark: either she left me, which after more than 50 years of friendship and nearly 35 of marriage she would not do, or she goes forward with me in full partnership to do whatever it takes to give Annie the freedom she deserves. I am very aware that this course, while liberating me, also puts constraints on her, her acceptance of which puts me even more in her debt than I always was. She also feels that, emotionally if not legally, she has lost a husband. I feel that while husband may not remain an appropriate term, we certainly remain spouses in a powerful union. I still find marriage an uncomfortable term for non-traditional unions, but it seems now to have passed into the language. Available language in the whole transgender area is grossly inadequate for unambiguous communication, and raises all sorts of conundrums.
So far as the convention was concerned, as soon as I learned of its existence I knew that I must go, and go as Annie, even though it would be her first public appearance, and my wife took the line ,that if I was to do that, then I must at least be a credit to her. So I ended up equipped with quite a wardrobe of which the centre piece was a magnificent gown for the formal dinner on the last night, designed and made entirely by her.
On the health side, some past medical malpractice combined with some connivance on my part has resulted in a degree of feminisation of my body, followed up by some more deliberate action on my own part. A side effect of this has turned out to be a significant rejuvenation. When I recently renewed my passport, I looked at the new passport and the old cancelled passport and thought that I looked at least five years younger rather than five years older in the new one, and indeed younger than even in the passport before that! In one of the photos I am attaching showing a group of convention participants, at least the five who are seated (I don’t know the others well enough) all look much younger than their real ages (and in connection with my comment on height, five of those in the picture, including myself, are 6' 3" or taller). So perhaps there are some side benefits to a degree of transition, although the basic condition, not responded to, causes problems I would not wish on anybody.
I hope that you can both find it in you to accept me as I really am.'
For my part, I really feel that I am getting my life back, although terribly late in the day.
