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This is my journey.

It's not a hard journey, and it's not a struggle, and I've written about it a bit so let me explain.

The struggle we know, the story of every trans person everywhere is well-documented and it's important that everyone knows the story. It has some variations, but it goes something like this:

Broken by feelings we didn't understand since day one, we were beaten daily in school and abused by our family. When we came out as transgender we were out on the street, jobless, friendless, and disowned. But we persevered because it's who we are, and we came out the other side as the person we were supposed to be. For an alarming number of us, the story still ends in suicide. For way more, murder. A precious few end in tear-jerking sweetness.

We need that story, because that's the story of oppression for all disenfranchised groups, and it's how the privileged learn to understand what means to be oppressed. These individual stories humanize us to those who hold the power of life and death over us.

So those stories are the important ones to tell, but I'm going to tell mine because, even though it's not a story of struggle, it might be a story shared with other transwomen. Maybe some of them don't know their story is out there, and knowing it's out there helps.

I never had confusing feelings about boy or girl clothes as a child. I didn't see clothes as a thing you picked out, just as something that was. By the time it would have occurred to me to think about that sort of thing, the social roles were already ingrained. For all of my childhood, really up until I started getting into the weird and wild world of fantasy and horror as a teenager, the very idea that all the stuff I know about society - the whole underlying foundation - might not be all there is was just not present in my head.

For those of us who had the feelings from the start, this might seem anathema, and it's very hard to articulate. It's not lacking awareness of gender roles, it's just that society is built into the psyche of every human alive. For many of us, it's built in on such a fundamental level that it's impossible to venture outside the boundaries.

Obviously I broke some of the programming (the aforementioned reading material), but a lot of the damage was already done. I don't know if it's quite so bad these days, but growing up my image of the transwoman was the guy with a five o' clock shadow, make-up like a clown, shitty wig, etc. Ridiculous, a horrorshow parody. My constant nightmare.

Thinking on it for a minute, I probably owe a huge debt of gratitude to Clive Barker for the huge mix of sexualities and genders running through a lot of his books at the time.

Anyway, back on the point, it would run me another decade or so before gender identity entered into any state of flux for me, and it came through sexuality. It was those first fluttery feelings of wearing women's clothes being a thing. In the context of that social foundation, maybe in retrospect it fits in with this notion of the male gaze, and the conflation of femininity with objectification and sexuality. This makes sense now, because this happened.

But then, this hadn't happened. It was one hundred percent fetish, zero percent identity, as far as I knew. I'll circle back to this, but part of the story is that it might have ended right there. For some people, some cismen with some genderfluid tendencies, it does. Lots if the stats are right.

Now brace yourself for a cliche. I saw Rocky Horror in college and it was a revelation. Okay, I'll give you a few minutes to cringe and groan and get that out of your system. So, okay, I had my head exploding moment in the most hackneyed possible way, and I went out and got some lady pants and a blouse and spend hours shaving (side benefit, my douchey first year roommate fled and left me with a huge single for half a year). Everything was going quite well until I brought up wearing women's clothes to my mom.

To my liberal mom. To my mom, who I had a great relationship with. Who I felt comfortable enough to talk about everything with. Mom with actual medical training to deal with all walks of the human psyche. Her reaction was something along the lines of, "If you want to do that, you're on your own."

So that stopped, because that was just how I was and there was still no connection between "hey, maybe this thing is some other thing." The pendulum swung back and forth for awhile, another ten years or so and a few years into being married for various reasons the topic came up in the bedroom and stage one resumed. As a sidebar, this is my marriage to Mrs. A, who has always had relationships with genderfluid folks and had thought for many years I wasn't one. I knew this, but my head was so thoroughly wrecked by the preconditioning and single (very mild) bad experience, that telling her about this thing was almost physically painful. The "talk" was mostly me trying to explain why I hadn't broached the subject despite knowing her dating history.

Still, I was pretty determined it was a fetish thing, for awhile, until I started dressing in women's clothes during the day. And then I started exercising. And then I started exercising specifically to try and get a more feminine body shape. Now, being as this was just a matter of a few years ago, by this time I was well aware of the whole deal with the gender spectrum, different gender identities, and I was really thinking hard about my sense of self.

Nevertheless in my mind I wasn't transgender. I was a crossdresser. I thought long and hard and talked about with my wife and decided that I definitely did not see myself as transgender. I'm going to circle back like I said because once again, that might very well have been completely true. Why I'm coming back to this is for two reasons. First, because I see arguments that all crossdressers are just transwomen in denial. It makes me feel there is an unfair pressure on any cismale who has some fluidity to commit to a gender binary by identifying as transgender, and on top of that it's exactly how I went, so I think it's vital to acknowledge that it can be both ways.

I was pretty strict in my identification and I've seen a lot of crossdressers who are just that, 100% that, and nothing more or less. And that's OK.

The second side is because I expect many more crossdressers are more than that. I expect plenty of people who have that flutter about women's clothes and think it's one thing just have no idea it could be something else, which is part of why I'm writing all this out. Because maybe there are other people who haven't had a struggle or a feeling from day one, and they just never thought about it more.

This means for awhile I was crossdresser. It seemed more or less about the right speed, except after awhile it wasn't. It wasn't a fetish, and it wasn't just a hobby devoted to mimicry of the feminine. It was a thing that felt like the right way to be. It was looking in the mirror and seeing a girl and feeling like that was correct, versus seeing a boy which was clearly incorrect.

This wasn't an instant process. This was a slow transition of self evaluation and thinking about my identity which ran for about a year before I concluded that transgender was the right thing after all. Concluded is also important here because it wasn't something I struggled against and accepted, nor was it something I hadn't understood until I finally recognized it - it was a process of consideration, evaluation, and conclusions.

Why. Why am I writing all this? Do I sound impassioned? Because I'm not. I hope this sounds conversational. The point of this long, casual stroll through my very average life is to speak to transwomen who never had deep sense of self which drives them, fulfills them. To me, those stories of drive are the important ones which speak to me, but don't really define me. Reading them gives me hope, but it's not my experience.