"The time has come," the walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax - Of cabbages and kings - and why the sea is boiling hot - and whether pigs have wings."

--Lewis Carroll

Where to begin...Well, I guess my first memories of wanting to be female were around the age of 3 or 4. Yup, that early. My parents used to keep some of my sisters clothes in the closet in my room (it was much larger than hers) and I had this strange desire to try them on. I'm not sure exactly what my motivation was, but it just felt right. I can remember when I was really young, before I had started school. Even though I was never left home alone at that age I would wait until everyone was outside in the summer or until I thought I had some reasonable privacy and then I would relax, take down the facade I had already begun to build, and just be me. I had quite an imagination as a little child and I think this is the only way I was able to survive back then. Somehow, even at that age I knew that people would not understand why I wanted to do the things I did so I kept it all to myself.

I continued wearing girls clothing on and off throughout my youth whenever the opportunity presented itself. Looking back I also tended to gravitate toward interests that were generally not always acceptable for boys. I dropped out of things like little league (though my parents tried hard to keep me involved there) and spent a lot of my time doing crafts, reading, writing stories, playing games in my head where I could be me. I would even stay home from school sometimes (pretending to be sick) to get a chance to become the girl I wanted to be and avoid being treated like a boy at school. It was difficult to understand as a child and I spent hours wishing I was just a "normal kid" or that God would fix me. Eventually everything came to a head when I was in 4th grade, about 9 or 10 years old. All the gender dyshporia finally caught up with me and I had had enough of things. I stopped eating and I got pretty ill. Somehow my parents were oblivious to it all but eventually my 4th grade teacher brought it to their attention. So for the next two weeks they pulled me out of school and took me to see all these different specialists to try to find out what was wrong with me. They thought I had mono, they thought I had lime disease, they thought I had cancer, but they never thought I had GD and they never took me to see a shrink or even asked if I was depressed. *Sigh* Well, finally when they couldn't find anything wrong, they were getting really worried about me. I hated so much to see them distressed so I sucked it up and pushed my GD way way down inside until I could pretend it wasn't there anymore. I started eating again and got better. It wouldn't be the first time I had hidden it and by this time I was pretty good at pretending to be someone else.

Around the age of 13 I was starting puberty and things were looking pretty bleak. Obviously changes were occuring that were not in line with what I wanted. I tried thinking of a million different things I could do to stop what was going on but I didn't really know what the options were at that point and I certainly didn't have any readily available to me. Right about this time was when I got my first access to the internet. Thank you pornography sites for showing me what a disgusting person I was (at least that was my thought at the time). I didn't feel like I had anything in common with much of what I saw on the internet at that time so I started to believe that if I embraced my GD rather than fighting it then that was what I would end up like. It made me sick. There were very few resources available online in 1993 (at least that I could find) for transsexual individuals so my initial education was seedy and appalling and probably pushed my transition back several years. At this point I started to cut off my involvement in things and lost most of my friends. I knew I wasn't like everyone else and it made it that much harder to relate to others. I rationalized that the closer I got to people, the more obvious it would be to them that I was a terrible person.

Unfortunately, I never felt comfortable revealing my feelings to others, so I went through highschool faking who I was. Like many, I thought maybe if I tried hard enough, I could control my feelings. That if I just worked at it, all my GD would go away. In retrospect, this seems silly. I met some good people and forced myself to fit in for the sake of acceptance but I still think I came across as really fake. I did my best to stay active, hoping that if I just did enough, it would keep the GD off my mind. At one point I was even captain of three different sports teams, but that didn't fill the gaps inside. At this point I gave up for the most part on dressing female in my spare time as it wasn't really giving me any release and was starting to feel kind of fake in it's own way. I was trapped between my boy life which was built to placate the populous at large and my female persona that I was trying to live out by superficially transforming. Neither idea was very appealing. I didn't feel real in either presentation and I was still struggling with the desire to keep my GD repressed and avoid what should have been rather obvious to me at the time. That I needed to make some drastic changes in my life if I wanted to be whole and happy with myself.

After highschool, I went to college and experienced some freedom, but I was dating a girl who was uncomfortable with who I was. I really felt that the two of us had a great connection. We had similar experiences, liked alot of the same things and I found her to be a very beautiful person. After we had been together about 2 years, I tried to explain to her what I was feeling, how my GD was constantly with me. It didn't go over all that well. I think at that point I hadn't really spent the time to fully understand what it meant to me so it was extremely difficult trying to explain it to her. She was really good about it but definitely didn't understand what I was trying to say. I let it drop. We kept dating and eventually got engaged. Again, this was prolly an escape mechanism. I was convincing myself that if I did enough guy things, had enough guy committments, that I would make my GD go away. Obviously this didn't work at all. Eventually we broke up (not due to my inner conflict), leaving me free to explore who I really was.

At this point, I realized that my GD was following me everywhere no matter what I did. Nothing made it better and even though I could put it out of my mind for periods of time, it always came back worse afterwards. It got to the point where it was on my mind almost 24 hours a day. Finally I said enough and decided that I would sit down and really consider this for what it was for the first time. I had been on the internet for years and knew what the possibilities were. I had convinced myself in the past that I was just a crossdresser and that I could control everything if I tried hard enough, but this obviously wasn't the fact. I thought about how difficult it was for me just to leave my apartment and be considered a guy by society at large. I was actually becoming a bit of a shut-in and all of this finally struck me head on. So, half way through my first year of grad school I decided to stop fighting the inevitable and move ahead with transitioning. I started hormones and had some electrolysis completed and thought it would be useful for me to keep track of the changes that occur and offer those experiences to others who find themselves traveling the same road, i.e. through my website. So I guess that's where I am. If you have any questions, feel free to email me. I do my best to answer everyone. :-)