Am I Normal? Mmmm... a question I did ask myself at one stage. And a question I'm sure many of you have asked yourselves... I am probably not normal by current society or cultural values... I've given up trying to understand why I'm a transgendered... I just am... I've learned that no-one knows what creates us; not the psychologists, not the geneticists, not the scientists (I'm sure the religious movements have their view, but they actually have no idea either)... NO-ONE KNOWS... It's no longer important for me to know the reason or cause. It's just who I am. It's taken me a long time to realise and learn this. For years I thought that I must be seriously abnormal ... It's been a long torturous journey with many mistakes and "painful" discoveries along the way. But it's also a journey that has enabled me to understand and know myself better and ultimately feel comfortable with myself. I've grown and developed as a person over the years. And I met many interesting and wonderful people along the way. So where am I now in my TG evolution? I've realised that I'm more than "just a crossdresser" ... It's taken me a long time to get to this conclusion. And I've only got here because I started interacting and talking to other people. One of my favorite pastimes has to be people watching, whilst dining or swanning around the cocktail bars and clubs I frequent, enjoying the social intercourse, banter and debate of others. I love to be dressed in my feminine clothes and enjoy the attention of Large Sized Women and other 'Girls' like myself and sometimes cuddle, its nice to be with those who understand the needs, desires and aspirations of someone like myself. Then came the other challenge for me. Being alone. That was always on my mind for many years and thats the way it was. I just grew to accept it and just enjoyed being me... So this is the way it was off and on up until a couple of years ago and then two things happened. The desire to want to be touched, kissed, fondled was becoming more and more intense... That helped where on the sexual side I started to explore my Bisexual {Lesbian tendicies} where I not only acknowledged and realized that I do enjoy sex with T-Girls, Large Sized Women. I will give oral to completion, receive safe A, I also spitroasting (simultaneous oral and anal), dildo play from females, (where I am sub). One of my favorite pastimes (other than dating as a Woman). I love to give oral to large sized Women and to T-Girls, TV's CD's TG's you name it. When I am with a T-Girl I love to please orally.... I love to receive greek when I am with a Large Sized Woman wearing a strap-on, but please don't ask me to cum...it isn't what I want. Growing up in the 50's and 60's was rough for a crossdresser but even harder when I reached puberty and discovered I was more than just a crossdresser... I think me being gay lasted about a week. in retrospect, it was kind of comical. I remember looking at boys and trying really hard to be attracted to them. but it just didn't work - I was definitely attracted to girls and not boys. and the way that I was attracted to girls was pretty odd as well. when I first began to have crushes on girls, I had these pre-teen fantasies that would always begin with me being turned into a girl. then, only after I had been turned female, the girl that I liked would suddenly fall in love with me and we'd run off together. All of this happened in my head way before I had ever even heard the word "lesbian". so there I was, a teenage boy who was simultaneously attracted to girls and wanted more than anything to be one of them too. Needless to say, I thought I was a complete freak. I didn't dare tell a soul about how I felt. There was no useful information out there for me, I had nowhere to turn for advice and not a clue of what I should do about all of this. at one point, when I was 15, I read an article about a man changing his sex... I decided to get a sex change. It was the only thing that seemed to make sense. but, what exactly was a sex change? and how does one go about getting one? and wouldn't that involve telling my family, friends, classmates, etc., about all of this? needless to say, under those circumstances, the whole sex change idea fizzled out pretty quickly. I fought both dressing and my interest of wanting to change my sex... Looking back I wish I had pursued those much more. I would say that between then and about the time I turned 26, I tried really hard to be a guy. I wasn't super-macho or anything, it's just that I really tried hard to convince myself I was really male and only "wanted" to be female in a fantasy sort of way. I was really paranoid that people would pick up on my secret, so I went out of my way to make sure that I didn't leave behind any clues to give me away. I would crossdress on rare occasions, almost always in private in my bedroom when no one was around. I had built up a little stash of clothes (purchased through mail order catalogs) that mostly stayed buried in my closet. At the time, I didn't find much enjoyment in crossdressing, because when I got dressed I looked like a man wearing women's clothing. That was definitely not what I wanted to see in the mirror. I use to think a lot about going out in public dressed, but I was scared to death of even the remote possibility of bumping into someone I knew - I was still very concerned with maintaining other people's image of me as a male. I also knew that in order for me to pass, it would be necessary for me to get rid of a lot of my body hair, especially on the arms and legs. I was reluctant to do this for the longest time, because I was worried that others would notice it and say something. I always thought "well what if i meet a really cool girl and we hit it off and we get naked and she sees that I shave my legs and she figures out I'm a crossdresser". I know it seems kind of paranoid now, but at the time it was a big deal to me. By 1993-94, my ability to suppress and deny my femaleness had started to take its toll. I found myself extremely depressed and it was pretty obvious to me what the depression was all about: I had spent years suppressing a very important part of myself. I realized that I wasn't going to be able to get by much longer if I didn't start allowing myself to express what I had been keeping secret for so many years. So, I sought out a transgendered support group based in Ontario California (I was living in the high desert community of Apple Valley at the time). For the first time in my life, I got the chance to meet and talk to other people who felt (on some level) like I did. This went a long way towards helping me accept who and what I was. I also threw caution to the wind and began going out in public dressed as a woman on occasion. I learned that I passed pretty easily. It was really amazing! The idea that I could go out in the world and have people see me and interact with me as a female was really mind blowing. at the time, I couldn't get enough of it! I kind of went through a little gender renaissance! I tried to explore and express every aspect of my gender, personality and sexuality as much as possible within the context of having a male body. I probably went out in public dressed about 100 different times and I shared this side of myself with people who I was meeting or having relationships with for the first time. I also began expressing my transgenderism outside of the realm of crossdressing. In fact, many of the new friends I made in the Los Angeles and San Diego area assumed that I was probably gay... In l998 I met Betty Sue, she is far and away the most amazing person I have ever known... Betty Sue identified and was bisexual. When we first started meeting for outings, she thought it was odd that I described myself as a "heterosexual male who enjoyed occasional crossdressing". I started to question whether I was using that phrase as an excuse to consider myself as straight. The more I thought about it, the more obvious it was to me that I was indeed queer.. Betty gave a book "Gender Outlaw", to read... Which I found to be a very thought provoking book. around this time, I began to consider myself transgendered (an umbrella term for all people (crossdressers, transsexuals, etc.) whose gender identity does not conform to their biological sex). I began seeing myself somewhere in the middle of the gender continuum. for a while I even considered myself to be bi-gendered (i.e., having roughly equal amounts of maleness and femaleness in my personality). At the end of 2000 I began to seriously consider I must be a transsexual.. I had reached the point where the sadness felt more like what one feels on the actual day of the big break-up, when you can't concentrate at all and you are totally consumed with thoughts of the person you loved. That's how I felt almost every day: consumed with gender sadness. Literally every other thought I had was about gender, about my pain. I could not get around it. It sucked all of the life out of me. I stopped calling friends, and listening to music, I would go into work and just stare at the computer screen without really doing anything. It hurt as much as any other pain (physical or emotional) that i had ever felt before. And i knew there was only one way to ease that pain: transitioning. The idea of transitioning scared the hell out of me. First, it involves telling everyone in your life that you're a transsexual. then, you spend lots of time and money and you endure a lot of pain changing your body to the opposite sex, while everybody is watching you do it. And then afterwards, no matter how passable you are, the people who know you best will always know what you started out as..
Now I am very comfortable with who I am... and now dress fully as often as possible, venturing into public as Trisha in areas that I wouldn't have done a few years back.. I am open to one on one sexuall encounters, as long as it done with taste and honesty. I am also willing to enter more long term
relationships if the right Woman or T-Girl comes along... I am quite intelligent,
a lot of fun, honest, clean, and a hell of a good cook, among many other qualities... Since coming to terms with my being a Transexual {8} eight years ago, I have made new friends, met many new acquaintances, traveled as Trisha, created this blog site, and I spend what for me is a large amount of time dealing with my life in my preferred gender. I have grown emotionally and intellectually in the past eight years, changes that have come about in large part due to my self-acceptance. One thing is certain. Being Transexual in the context of a relationship is hard. It's hard on our partners and it's hard on me. Success requires constant vigilance, lots of open, honest communication, mutual respect, and maturity. My relationship with my spouse ended long before my I started to transistion, so I was ready. I knew I was ready for a real relationship. At the same time, living alone and sleeping alone were crucial to me in terms of rebuilding my sense of self. It helped me to form boundaries again that would make it possible to enter into a healthy realtionship someday. I learned something very interesting about myself in the past year. Basically, I don't like men. I don't mean their bodies, I mean their behavior, their mannerisms, their frame of reference, their attitudes about themselves, how they interact with the world. It's a challenge for me to remember that I should treat people as individuals and not pre-judge. I realized I could never have sex with a man because I doubt I could ever like one enough to want to. Call me a hopeless romantic, but for me, good sex is a by-product of, and not a prerequisit for, a healthy relationship. Touching, when consentual, is reaffirming to me. I have this need to want to be touched in a caring way, a way that speaks about the person I Am and not the genitals I have, ways that say "I know you, you are familiar to me." If you have ever owned more than one cat, you have seen the sense of well-being and the comfort that comes by the touch of another of our own kind. I need to know my real partner, so that I can hear her, and not just hear the words she says.... I spent many years wanting to be a woman. I couldn't understand it, I couldn't make sense of it, I certainly couldn't even begin to feel proud of it. And how many, many times it would happen that I would see a woman in the street: usually not especially beautiful or glamorous or feminine in the conventional sense, but a woman with something about her that would make me long to be her. That would make me convinced that somehow she was more 'me' than this male sense I dragged around with such reluctance.

Let me hear your comments... I'd like to continue making and developing new friendships as I continue my journey towards living full time....