That's a Strange Thing!

Relationships

2009-06-02T00:49:00.002-04:00

I have found relationships to be very difficult since I began transition. I know that some of that has to do with my own uncertainty about things sexual and things intimate. I have,though, been able to sort things out for myself in that respect. The key to that was fully understanding that gender identity and sexual orientation are two distinct life issues. In gender identity I am clearly female. In sexual orientation I like women. I have always liked women and that hasn't changed. The difficulty is that the long term relationship I had with a woman (namely a marriage) ended when I began transition. My Ex is stright and didn't feel a deep enough connection with e to endure my changes.

This has left me with the dilemma of now being Gay (namely a Lesbian.) A bit ago I realized that I really had no idea what it meant to be a Lesbian woman. I didn't grow up having to deal with all the things lesbians my age did. There has been a tremendous learning curve and I am still learning. It has been tough.

I am a person who needs a relationship and the best I have been able to manage recently has been friendships. I have alas managed to mess up some friendships. The deal is that I haven't had anything resembling a romance of any kind in a very long time. I am not really sure what the problem is. I know that I am older now but what I fear is that I unconsciously push people away. I know that that is not my intention. I am now sharing some deep reality about me here. I am not really sure how to move ahead. I am not hiding in my home. I am out doing things and meeting people. Sigh!!!

Shel

DSM V

2009-05-28T15:48:00.003-04:00

This is truly the backwater of all blogs. If you have wandered here I welcome you and hope that there is something here that's interesting. I originally started using this blog to write my story, but I have found that to be quite tedious. If it is tedious to me it must be really tedious for you. I now plan to just post thought on living my life. I of course am transsexual, so my life does have some unusual twists to it.

As I write the American Psychiatric Association is in the midst of meetings in it's process of rewriting it's Diagnostic Manual which will be labeled DSM V. The current one is DSM IV. In the current DSM (Diagnostic Manual) people like me are labeled as having a psychiatric disorder know as Gender Identity Disorder. It is, according to the manual, a psychiatric disorder (or mental illness if you prefer.) The strange thing about this disorder is that there is no cure and the major treatment is with hormones and surgery. This is very strange for a psychiatric disorder.

So what is being debated is whether being transsexual is a psychiatric disorder or possibly just a normal variation of the human condition. I can tell you that I have been through a vast battery of psychological tests within the last 8 years and twice before that, similar tests. In all those tests I tested normal in most everything except for the fact that I am a bit more intelligent than average and a bit on the feminine side. In fact there is no diagnostic test for Gender Identity Disorder! People described with GID self diagnose most of the time. The ones who don't self diagnose are too young to do so.

The issue I believe has to do with the origins of transsexuality. This is something that has not definitively been determined. Until there has been such a determination there are many in the psychiatric world who are guessing at the cause and possible treatments. The situation is similar to the situation of people who are Homosexual. No one knows why they are that way, just that they are that way. The American Psychiatric Association gave up trying to "cure" homosexuality and they removed it from their sacred manual. The appropriate treatment for people who are transsexual is to help them live their lives. Often this means self acceptance and finding the appropriate medical treatments (hormones, surgeries, etc.) Pathologizing Transsexuals just adds one more burden to their already difficult lives. It also misleads psychiatric and medical professionals who come into contact with transsexual people. Counseling techniques for such individuals don't focus on cure, but on life management. I guess I am saying that the psychiatric community should remove GID from the manual and let transsexuals be treated by medical doctors and specialty counselors.

I'll get off the soap box now. Until next time.

God's Peace,
Shel

So much......

2009-05-05T16:58:00.004-04:00

So much for big plans! I have been so busy that I have completely overlooked this blog. I am sorry about that. I will try to be more diligent in posting.

I have been living full-time as a woman for six years now. I had the Genital Reassignment Surgery four years ago. My life has somewhat stabilized, though I still have life issues. These issues are now more issues of just living. My marriage of 31 years has been over for five years. My ex and I are friendly, but no longer close. I am close with my children and I have a granddaughter. One son, the one with a daughter, now lives in Arizona with his spouse. I do not yet have any kind of close relationship. I am trying to settle into a Lesbian existence. Gender identity and sexual orientation are two different things. For some who transition sexual orientation transitions also. I thought this might happen with me at first, but I just can't even feel comfortable kissing a man much less anything more. I am Lesbian.

I have been thinking about what I might do with this blog and it strikes me that I might use it to think through some issues of life. I think this might be useful for my own thinking about my life has been and is about - possibly even will be about.
I have encountered all kinds of doubts and fears over the years and it might be a good thing to write some of these down and look back at them at some time. Possibly this also might help someone else going through similar things.

First let me make an observation. Transsexual people are not really very different from everyone else. This may be comforting, but it could also be disconcerting. I managed to survive a good number of years without any one else knowing I was trans. To the world I was "normal" whatever that means. This means that one never knows what lurks in the psyche of another person. We are all more alike in the fact the we are truely known only to ourselves. Public statistics indicate that the transsexual population is extremely small and that there are more male to female individuals that female to male. My experience tells me that this public perception is quite wrong. The populations of male to female and female to male may be equal in size. In addition there are far more gender variant people that can currently be statistically tracked. Most all statistics are based on surveys or reporting by medical/psychiatric professionals. They see only a tip of the situation. It may be far more common to have some gender variance than was ever expected. I believe that this may be behind people's fears surrounding transsexuals. I have no current way of proving this, but I do offer this as something to think about.

I am going to wrap up here for now. I am feeling cold and need to do something to warm up. Until next time, please be well!

Rethinking

2008-11-06T01:04:00.002-05:00

I have been rethinking this Blog and have decided to be more active here. I had originally intended to just tell my story, but now I think I will refocus a bit. This will still be about me and my life, but I intend to make things a bit more current and certainly updated more.

As an update to my whole life I want to say that now I am post-transition (whatever that is.) I guess that I am trying to get across the fact that physical transition from male to female has been completed. As long as anyone is alive I think they are in transition. Transsexual individuals, however, can undergo an intense period of life change generally called "transition." That latter transition is completed and I am now in the process of living my new life.

Join me as I attempt to let you know what living a life in multiple genders is like.

Shel

On and On

2007-10-15T15:44:00.000-04:00

This blog has been for me an occasional project. One which I work at when the spirit moves me. I have occasionally thought some of the material might be the basis of a book someday. In any case, I rarely write in it and it certainly isn't a running daily journal. If you should find your way here please understand that this is for me a kind of remembrance record. I never envisioned that it would be exciting or challenging or even interesting to anyone other than myself. Who knows though.

To keep any potential readers in perspective I am now two and a half years postop and have been living almost four years full time as a woman. In general life is good, but certainly has taken many twists that were unexpected. I am divorced from my wife of 31 years and I have a granddaughter. I am still an Episcopal Priest in good standing, but I am now retired (it's a long story!)

Today I do not plan to forward the time line at all. I did want to give a sense of where I am now. Peace to you all.

Shel

And so it goes

2007-02-06T14:35:00.000-05:00

Life back East was very busy. The Church was very demanding and the Diocesan Camp, though a pleasure was a lot of work year-round. In the parish I began trying to reverse a lot of the damage the previous priest had done. I did a lot of visiting of families, especially families who were on the rolls but not attending. It was tough work. I also tried to get people to volunteer for the many things that needed to be done, like the Sunday school. I met with some initial success, but eventually that would be undermined by some of the forces in the parish. It seems strange to tell, but there were parishioners who worked at thwarting anything I tried to accomplish. Unfortunately that is a reality in the church. The Sunday school was one thing that seemed to go somewhat well. There were several teachers, including my wife. Eventually, the teachers were driven away through criticism, mostly. There came a day when my wife was the only teacher. One Sunday she had all the children and several of them got away to the bathrooms and began laughing and screaming. They were clearly heard in the church and one of the grumpier parishioners went back and blasted my wife. S proceeded to quit being a Sunday School teacher and so ended the Sunday school for a while.

I am getting a bit ahead of myself though. That first year I discovered the reality of doing both jobs. In January I had to begin advertising and hiring camp staff. The church had no secretary and neither did the camp (there was support only for camper registrations and for bill paying.) I did it all and continued my parish work. I worked without taking a day off each week. I had to take my vacation during the winter months because I had to be at the camp all summer. Taking time off was very difficult. My blood pressure went up. I had never had high blood pressure before in my life, but now I had borderline high blood pressure. I was put on diuretics. The diuretics eventually made me feel very irritable and I had to take potassium supplements.

In many ways I was too busy to cross dress, but I did take hormones. On the hormone front it became obvious to me that I was going to have a problem. I had been forging prescriptions. In Kansas it had been easy because the KU Med Center was far from Lawrence and the pharmacists were accustomed to not knowing the Doctors. In Connecticut the pharmacists were familiar with all the Doctors and I had to stop forging prescriptions out of fear of being discovered. I found a natural source of estrogen at health food stores, freeze dried bovine ovary. I found that that source helped me feel better and didn't cause quick breast development. It also didn't interfere with sexual functioning. Once I started using those pills breast development continued, but slowly and I felt much better. The discomfort I felt without hormones is hard to describe, but I felt sort of uneasy in my own body. Without estrogen I felt constantly on edge. I used these pills for years after this.

This was in 1978 and 1979. As a family S and I and my son were mostly happy. We were near S's parents so we saw them frequently. They doted on my son as did my parents. Though some things were difficult most went well. Even the church seemed to make some gains and the camp registrations were at max with waiting lists. Life was pretty good.

As I look back on my life, I think I might have been primed for a gender change in 1976-1979. I had researched transsexuality and I was taking female hormones quite regularly. I had not sought out counseling and I truly did not believe myself to be transsexual. Ironically I was only a short distance from help and did not know it. A priest at the Cathedral in Hartford was an authority in transsexuality and a leader of both a support group and Gender clinic. Several things lead me away from seeking further help, at the time I had no desire for Sex change surgery and I was oriented totally to women. In those days transsexuals were supposed to want male husbands and that wasn't what interested me. Sex change surgery just seemed out of reach. I wanted female sex organs, but surgery seemed impossible. I was aware of some rather profound changes from taking estrogen. Those changes were not just physical, but they were also mental. The risks at that time would have been very great. My denomination had barely accepted female clergy much less trans-female. I certainly would have lost my wife and child along with my jobs. I had decided that I was not really transsexual because I wasn't oriented to men and that would make surgery impossible. I also didn't want to loose sexual functioning. At the time the sex change surgery was still in it's infancy and most post-op trans women didn't have sensation which allowed orgasm. In any case I made due with taking estrogen and cross dressing occasionally.

Back East

2006-04-10T18:46:00.000-04:00

It's been a long time since I last posted here and the last post was sort of out of sequence. Let's get back in sequence. S wanted to move back east to be closer to her family. I really didn't feel like I was getting very far in the University. There seemed to be no continuity from year to year. I came back east looking for a new job and one came up in Connecticut. I took a job directing a Church Summer camp and also being a priest at a small church. Little did I know that the combination would be so much work.

The Camp was supposed to be a Summer position, except for hiring and I would do the parish the rest of the year. When we moved back I had to almost immediately start the camp. I worked with the previous director and S and my son lived at camp. We had to live in make-shift accommodations because the previous director was living in the Director's house. It was hell for S. I loved the camp work but things were very difficult for her with the baby. I also had to start at the parish and they wanted me to do services every Sunday. It was very difficult doing Sundays and the camp at the same time. The stress that Summer was great. There was no opportunity to cross-dress, but I continued taking hormones. S didn't know of either the crossdressing or the hormones and I wouldn't admit to my self what that was all about. The biggest deception is self deception. By the end of the Summer the strain between S and I was very great. I was thinking about divorce because she complained all the time.

Fortunately things got better when we moved back to the house and the work at the church began. There was more a sense of normalcy for all of us. The summer was telling though. I went to the Dr. for a check up and found that my blood pressure was elevated for the first time. I was put on diuretic and frequent trips to the Dr. I had mostly been healthy and I didn't feel bad. I did worry though that so many visits to the Dr. would reveal my secret of hormone use. By this time I had distinct breasts after a couple of years of hormone use. I would take estrogen for a while and then stop for a while. I worried that my breasts would get so large that S would notice and I also worried that sexual function would stop. I continued this way for a while.

Eventually it got harder and harder to get the hormones. In Kansas it was easy to forge prescriptions. Doctors at the University of Kansas changed frequently and weren't well known to the pharmacists in Lawrence. Back east the pharmacists knew the local Doctors. I became afraid that I would be caught forging prescriptions and eventually stopped.

The church was no bed of roses it turned out. I had been preceded by an alcoholic who had done great damage to the church. It also turned out that he had been a pedophile. I am not sure whether the Bishop ever knew about the abuse of boys. It was a very sad thing and the damage had been done. I had my hands full trying to rebuild things. I would struggle with that congregation for 5 years eventually.

Enough for now. Next time I restart hormones and crossdressing of course. Bye for now.

Love,
Shel

Revelations Chapter 2 vs 1.

2004-10-11T09:42:00.000-04:00

Revelations Chapter 2 vs 1.

Well I am back with more stuff. This is a bit out of sequence, but I believe explains some of how I came to the current juncture of my life. It was clearly too long for my other blog. Read and I hope understand.

Somewhere in the mix of everything that has happened to me I have suddenly come to a revelation about myself. This of course is not the only revelation I have had but this is very important. I have two to tell you. One of them isn’t a revelation but something I have long known about myself.
First the revelation, I have been seriously wondering how and why I went so long before accepting my gender identity problems. They were there in my life for the entire span of my life. I have finally realized that I actually wanted to be a man. I never really quite was, but I tried and wanted to be a guy. Cross dressing and taking hormones seemed to be an aberration in my life that was a great inconsistency.

The great irony is that I didn’t start out that way. I as a young child thought of myself more as a girl. I got picked on a lot for it by the other kids. To stop the torment by the other kids I learned how to behave in a way that stopped it. We moved a lot so it was easy to try something new each move. I still thought of myself a more of a girl than anything. I really wasn’t very aware of anatomical differences. I had no brothers or sisters. I became really aware of the differences about the time puberty set in. It was a very disturbing time for me. I wanted to be soft and rounded with a high voice like the girls, but I grew great amounts of dark facial hair and my voice got very deep and I was tall and angular and skinny. I had wet dreams which I hated and nothing seemed right. What did also happen was that girls started to take interest in me and the other boys. I felt real good when I was with a girl dancing or talking and they seemed to like boys who were more on the masculine side. I tried to be more masculine. To a degree it worked. I met girls and got close to some of them and by high school was dating a very nice and feminine girl. I felt wonderful when with her and we were very close and very intimate. We never went all the way and had sex, but we were very close. That lasted into college when we grew apart because we were at different schools.

I was interested in and saw a number of girls throughout college, but never had any serious relationship. The one thing I did learn though was that girls like guys and I certainly liked the girls. So the more guyish I became the more girls showed interest.

In graduate school I had only casual relations for the first year. I struggled a great deal with trying to be a man. In the second year I met a girl, young woman, who kind of swept me off my feet. As I think about it she was aggressive to the extreme, but in a very seductive and feminine way. Before I knew what hit I was in bed with her. The whole experience became a nightmare however because she was playing games with several guys. I got real screwed up over the whole thing and doubted very seriously by manhood. I tried counseling, but couldn’t quite ever explain what the problem was. I am not sure I knew at the time. I was so mixed up I tried to kill myself one night with pills and booze. It didn’t work.

That summer I drove to California and back and came back a reborn man. I had several positive and affirming masculine experiences, mainly getting close to several women. There were also some not so good experiences of guys trying to pick me up. It did really bring into focus my desire for women and women only though. After returning to school I had a nine month experience of living with a young woman. It was real intense and real sexual and I really liked it. When that broke up I accidentally met a young woman who I had known from three years before. She was working a a counselor at a church summer camp. I had been on the staff three years before and met her then. After remeeting her we began to talk and eventually began to be intimate. It was an incredible experience. She had a way of just seeming to melt into me when we kissed and held each other. I have never experienced that before or since. She was going to college in California and I didn’t want a long distance relationship so we parted.

Following that my former live-in girlfriend and I got together occasionally always for sex. I had met and become close to several women mostly unacceptable in the long run for me. The other not new thing about me is that I tend to be very moral. Several married women were interested in me and I could not accept that. I was even real interested in a woman, but she was married and I was good friends with her husband and could never try to go further. As I look back I see a long string of women I was involved with, some sexually and some not.

When I met my ex and we began dating. I had a motorcycle and leather jacket and I drank a lot. She seemed to like me and I liked her and eventually we were in bed together. We saw a real lot of each other and the intimacy was great and so in a drunken moment one day I proposed to her. She accepted to my surprise and a year later we married. Now I take things like a marriage vow very seriously. For me it was a life-time commitment, for better or worse. Our life together wasn’t real smooth, but I hung in there. We had one child and eventually two more. Cross dressing and taking hormones dotted my experiences before and after being married. I had a real intense struggle just after my first son was born. Holding and feeding and caring for the baby was real powerful. I actually got into it more than my ex.

There were some real difficulties in our marriage. She could not talk to me without being superficial or if it was deeper she was defensive. I hung in there, both in the marriage and with being a man because I really wanted the marriage to work and I really wanted to be a man.

One day she discovered some of my stash of cloths. In it I had some pictures of myself dressed. She went ballistic. She called me a pervert and wanted to keep me away from the boys. We talked about it and I tried to explain the best I could. I couldn’t accept the truth about myself, but I tried to put her at ease and promised I would stop. I purged and stopped taking hormones, which she never knew about, and suffered for it. Hair started to come out and I started to have wet dreams, at 46. Within months of this my ex had an affair. The details are not so important, but the fact that I decided that marriage vows are sacred kept me with her along with trying to keep a family together for the boys. I was not happy but I stuck to my promise to not dress or take hormones (the last was a promise to myself.) I really became miserable and slipped into a persistent low level of depression. I filled my time by working long hours. We had a friendly relationship without a lot of conflict, but not a lot of intimacy. I met several women who I was very attracted to but my morals wouldn’t allow me to do anything. Let me say it was very difficult because the attraction was mutual. All this time I really wanted to be a man and tried very hard to be one. I never could quite bring it off though. I always slipped back to woman and never could think like a man.

The post affair marriage was difficult. She blamed me for her actions and could never admit that she had been wrong. I found it increasingly difficult to forgive her. Though we had sex eventually that became a chore and she became mechanical and stiff. I wouldn’t have sex under those conditions so we went without. Eventually, the inner struggle to be a man was too difficult to keep up. I began to feel pressure to dress and take hormones with incredible violence. I finally gave in and then looked for some help. In the process I finally accepted the fact that I was more woman than man and that I was transsexual. For a while I still tried to keep up the pretext and my initial counseling efforts were an attempt to hold on to manhood. It didn’t work.

When I finally explained the situation to my ex she immediately wanted a divorce. I tried to keep the marriage going and she became less definite about divorcing. As my face and body began to change she became less accepting and filed for divorce. There was nothing I could do at that point. I accepted the end of the marriage with great difficulty. I also embraced womanhood and now would never go back. If I knew years ago what I know now I may never have struggled so. The fact is that I no longer feel like an alien in a strange body. I like myself as I am and feel comfortable with myself. Of course I have no marriage left and no relationship on the horizon, but time may fix some of that I hope. You never know what the next corner of life may bring.

This is real long and I am sorry to put so much in one blog. This has been eating at me a while and I finally found time and energy to write it.

Peace and Love,
Shel

The daemon

2004-08-20T09:42:00.000-04:00

Life was good. My career was moving along and I was married and S was pregnant with our first child. We lived in Lawrence Kansas at the time. S's pregnancy was very difficult. She bled a lot and continually passed clots. We went to the Emergency room in Kansas City in the middle of the night many times. The pregnancy held, though. S went into labor mid February 1976. I called the Dr and he said wait until the contractions got longer. That evening I started to get really nervous about things so I brought her to the hospital, a good hour's drive. As she got out of the car her water broke and she was taken up stairs while I did the paper work. By the time I got upstairs to the waiting room things had already begun. It was a short but nervous wait. They called me in to see S and she was quivering, but pleased things were over. My first son had been breach and premature. He was delivered by a breach extraction which is almost never done these days. All I can say was the Dr. was very good and very confident. Aside from being small my son was basically ok.

We had an anxious two weeks waiting for our son to put on enough weight to come home. It was very hard for S to come home with the baby still in the hospital. We visited daily though and were able to hold him and to feed him. It was an anxious, but still wonderful time. When our son came home he was very small, just 5 lbs. We had to feed him special formula, an ounce every three hours. We split the duties so neither of us lost too much sleep. I really got into the baby maintenance and nurturing. That nurturance got into me also. It triggered and ignited a storm within me. Something about holding him in my arms and feeding him caused those old female feelings to return. They returned with a vengeance this time though.

I not only began dressing again, but this time I started taking estrogen. S had some birth control pills that would be unused and some unfilled refills. I started with those. I eventually graduated to rather large doses of Premarin. My breasts began to grow and it was both wonderful and frightening. Other things began to happen also and my sexual functioning began to change. The University library was a great place to do some research and I discovered transsexuality and information on what the hormones would do eventually. About three months into taking Premarin I became alarmed at the developments. My breasts were visibly enlarging and I was beginning to loose sexual functioning. I stopped!

Sexual functioning returned, but my breasts didn't shrink. They just got softer and stopped growing. I did much more research and discovered potential surgeries and long-term consequences. The thought went through my mind at that time that I might be transsexual, but at the same time I rejected that. I was able to stop after all, wasn't I? I didn't want to have surgery, did I? Three months later I was taking estrogen again. It would become a pattern of life for me for a number of years. I would take whatever estrogen I could get until I would get alarmed and then stop for a while. I did that even after we move back east. Needless to say, each time I would go on the estrogen my breasts would get a little larger. I also started removing hair from my chest with a handheld electrolysis unit. I was consumed. S never said a thing if she noticed. She found some panties once, but we had had a female student house sit and pet sit while we were on vacation and she accepted that they were hers (of course they were mine.)

Life somewhat settled in. My son grew. He had one little inguinal hernia problem which required surgery, but that healed quickly. We enjoyed him and I think we enjoyed each other. We had friends we had grown close to in Kansas and I had my little secret. Several times it dawned on me that I might have a real serious problem, but there didn't seem to be any real available resources. Surgeries were being done far away and even the University of Kansas Med center didn't seem to have anything but the fertility clinic. Well my fertility was a settled thing, much more settled than my gender was. My gender started to become a real problem to me. This was in spite of having an on-going marital sexual relationship with S. In the past, having an active relationship with a girl or woman seemed to stop all gender issues for me. Things had become different for me. It was a difference that affects me to this day. At the time I was 31 and though I did not know the term I was Gender Dysporic as hell! Perhaps I could have transitioned then, maybe I should have, but I tried to keep up living as a man. My problems got worse though and never really went away.

Next time I'll go into moving back East.

Shel

In My Twenties

2004-08-18T22:34:00.000-04:00

I have been away from this blog for a while due to a rather pressing life situation. I was diagnosed with cancer and have had surgery. I am healing now and waiting for chemotherapy. I really can't remember what my earlier intentions were in writing my story, but here goes something.

during the time I was healing from the arm dislocation surgery, I became close with J and M, who invited me to their house frequently. I tended to go to their place and drink too much. As my arm began to heal and I could move it I purchased a motorcycle. J had one and we rode together. The motorcycle I bought was good for learning, but I ended up buying a bigger one. I think I had illusions that I could become more of a man with the motorcycle. I also grew a moustache and goatee. I had very long hair, moustache and goatee and a motorcycle. I was looking to attract some interest of some women. In fact I did, but most of them were unacceptable (already married!) I was not about to break up any marriages for a few nights of sex.

I did wild and careless things. I would ride places on the motorcycle and then get stinking drunk and then ride home (stinking drunk.) It was a very stupid thing to do, but the drinking and the recklessness seemed to help keep me diverted from crossdressing. I still had the cloths, though and still dressed occasionally. Another female that pursued me was actually too young. She was very lovely and she was a High School Senior. I was Twenty-Six and not about to get caught with a too young girl. She wanted me though and she made no bones about it. She got very frustrated with me and herself and eventually went into a convent. I know it sounds so medieval, but it's the way it happened. I never touched her. I did feel bad to see her go off to her convent, though.

About that time I developed a case of kidney stones. I was admitted to the local Hospital and given heavy doses of pain medication. While drugged I eventually felt the stone pass. I was visited by the young woman who was the Hospital Administrator's secretary. I had met her a year earlier casually. She was nudged into seeing me by a mutual friend. We got acquainted and I asked her out. On our first date we went riding on the motorcycle and went to a nearby scenic waterfall. She was overdriven for the day and we joked about it. I took her home and she invited me in. I met her parents and they disappeared, being early sleepers. We necked a bit and it was rather nice. From there it was two dates and into bed together.

I had not planned on such a quick involvement, but we were very quickly seeing each other exclusively. We would have long evening romps in the bed. I had a waterbed at the time. The very same day Mark Spitz won his seventh gold medal at the Olympics I proposed to S and she accepted. As with the time I was with D I had no thoughts of crossdressing, in fact after she found some items of cloths I purged of everything. I told her they were some that D had left. Of course that was a lie. A year later we were married. It was a grand thing, presided over by a Bishop and with two priests in the wedding party and a large congregation. I must confess that I believed that all the cross dressing and my male identity problems were fixed.

At the time we were married I was the Assistant in a large suburban church. It was a new role for me. I had trimmed my hair and fit the image of a parish pastor to the tee. I left that church to be chaplain at the University of Kansas a year after we were married. Kansas was different, but nice in many ways. The job was very difficult, because there was a huge turnover every year in students and faculty. Part of the job was finding one's role.

S and I wanted to have children, two to be exact, but we were making no progress. Lots of sex, but no pregnancy. Eventually we both went to the fertility clinic at the University of Kansas Medical Center. They figured out that S wasn't ovulating. She went on some strong hormonal medicines to start her to ovulate. She had a miscarriage which was very hard on us both. She felt responsible, but of course she wasn't. Eventually she had a pregnancy that took. It was horrid though. She would bleed a lot into the toilet and pass large clots. We would run to the Med Center a lot. She had to be off her feet most of the time.

Next time the birth of the first child.

Shel

Relationship

2004-07-06T23:14:00.001-04:00

I thought I had solved the issue of whether I was a man or not. I now had a relationship with a woman that was meaningful and fulfilling and sexual. D and I had sex in every possible way I think. We often did it multiple times each night. We slept in the buff and the whole relationship was incredibly sensual. The only problem was that D wasn't ready for a serious relationship. We liked each other even loved each other and we made love, but she would not commit. I am not sure what drove her, but I do know that after I dropped her at her parents place in Maine I got a call in New Haven from her explaining that she had had sex with a local guy; a guy I didn't particularly respect, to boot. The phone call was one of the longest I have ever made and it was painful. We agreed to meet and talk things over. We met and went to Cape Cod and camped. We decided to be apart. I went back to New Haven and she to Maine. I worked on my Master's Thesis that year and occasionally she would call and every once in a while we would get together and of course resume our old activities. After graduation I went to work in a Community in Connecticut doing Drug counseling with teenagers. It was stressful work.

About here there was a definite change in my life. It wasn't just separating from D but an old problem recurred. As I moved my stuff out of her parents attic I stopped in her room. I put her bra on. I couldn't explain why I did it and I felt ashamed that I had done that. Later working in the community I started to buy women's cloths. I had everything. I would come home from work at night and dress for the rest of the night. I had very long straight hair, down to the middle of my back. I learned how to make real feeling brests using rice in stockings. I even ventured out of the house occasionally at night. I didn't go into social events at all dressed. I did that until I severely dislocated my shoulder. I had already dislocated it in al,ost every sport I played, but this time I fell on the arm and jammed it into my chest. I had to be taken to the hospital to reset it. There I was given introvenous Valium. Wow! What a high! From then on the shoulder would just fall out of the socket from gravity. I had surgery and a screw was inserted in my arm. Tendons and ligaments were relocated to keep the arm in place. My arm was immobilized for 3 months and it took another three months to regain movement. I stopped crossdressing during that healing time. It was too hard to do.

We need to go back a bit and pick up a different thread and I will do that in the next installment.

Shel

The Great Plains

2004-07-04T00:45:00.000-04:00

The great plains of our West are much like my journey through them. They are monotonous and distinctly undistinctive. The people who pioneered our country and crossed them 150 years ago must have found them very disturbing. They are like an ocean, low rolling hills as far as the eye could see. Once again I could have never dreamed that I would someday live in that country for four years.

What can I say. The drive was long and tedious and nothing exciting happened, at least nothing worth remembering. At the end of the third day I stayed in a mtel at the outskirts of Chicago. The next day I began driving east again. I should have driven only 500 to 600 miles and stopped, but I ended up driving all the way to New Haven. My right hand was swollen fro gripping the wheel so hard with it. That is a rather long ride. As I remember it was about 1000 miles. A long way to go in one day. Whhen I arived in New Haven I was in a sense a different person than the one who left. I left a confused and fragile person who had just tried to kill himself. I had little maleness about me and I left in search of it. When I returned i believed that I had found the male me. My confidence was renewed. I had long hair and was tan. At six foot tall I weighed 160 lbs. I wore sandals, a leather vest and beads. I looked like a flower child and was happy.

My friend and his lovely bride were married several days after I returned. At the wedding I met the daughter of one of the professors who was living in New Jersey. It was an uneventful meeting and I didn't think a thing of it. After Paul and Kath were married and gone on their honeymoon the opportunity came up to go to a big rock festival. It was to be held in a farmers field in New York State. The buzz was all around about it and the predictions were that a lot of people would be there. A friend of mine wanted me to go with him. I had the memories of the violence at the festival in Califirnia and decided not to go. I was also still beat ffom all the driving. My frind went and I didn't and I missed Woodstock! I have kicked myself frequently since then.

A month later there was an event that would take me back on the road again. A special convention of our church was being held in South Bend, Indiana. With a car full of students we set off to go to it. It was history and we went with the blessing of the whole school. We were there a week and returned. From that point on I had some new status at school. In October there was a party, I can't reember the excuse (we hardly ever needed one.) There was liberal booze and there was music and some dancing. I didn't do much drinking, but the daughter of one of the Professors who I will call "D" was there. She had come up from New Jersey to see her parents. On a whim I asked her to dance. I don't really know what happened or why it happpened but as we danced we clicked. Relationships with women had always been difficult, but this was so easy. We danced and later we kissed and i walked her to her parents house. As we kissed good night she said she wanted me to know she had a boy friend in New Jersey. Two weeks later she was back and we went out to dinner and the movies. We saw Easy Rider. We came back and we went to my room. We spent the night together. The next day she went back to New Jersey and broke up with her former boyfriend and moved in with her parents. We became inseparable from that point on and we nightly had sex in my dorm room. Her parents became worried that there would be a scandal in the school so I moved into their house. D and I live in the attic. She was an incredibly sexual person and we both had sexual appetites that matched. Not only did we make love nightly, but mutiple times nightly. I look back on that time and it is alost as if someone else was there and I wasn't. I was there though. D got a job in New Haven and we settled in to life together. It was an incredibly sexual time. One weekend we started on Friday evening and we made love until 4 pm the next day. I climaxed at least 6 times. At the end we were both raw. That was extreme, but for nine months we carried on together. As it became Spring we moved our activities outdoors. We went to Cape Cod and made love in the dunes. Her parents bought a farm in Maine and we went up there and made love in the fields. I am not going to make a list of every place we had sex, but we did it frequently. I am told that it is rather unusual for women to climax at the same time as the man, but it was the rule for us. I had found my manhood and I was happy.

For every bright thing in life some darkness must fall. Next time we will see that darkness.

Shel

Big Sur

2004-06-26T23:11:00.000-04:00

How's that for a title? Well I drove the coast highway up to San Francisco form Glendale. I went right through the Big Sur but never stopped. By this time I had some time issues. I wanted to get back to New Haven for the wedding of my friends so I had to choose what I did. So I drove right through to San Francisco and to the home of my other Aunt Naomi. In San Francisco I was able to get in contact with those images that moved me so much in the movie the Graduate. In fact the movie no longer has any power over me. I also met with Diana for lunch one day. She was working in a storefront counseling service in Haight Ashbury. The Haight was legendary as the hippie capitol of the world, but it was skid row in actuality. I was by that time as much a hippie as about anyone around and the Haight's romantic days were long gone. The scene was hard drugs and drunks and people living in the streets. It wasn't pretty. I also had rid myself of the Diana demon. We met we talked and I left and never looked back. Maybe I was making progress becoming a man! I visited my childhood home in Pleasanton and our old nextdoor neighbors still live there. I visited a short while with them. I am not proud of it, but I had once swipped a bra from the mother. She was slight and her bra fit me. I of course didn't admit this to her then, I just visited. Back in San Francisco I visited the usual sights and attractions and a few that people don't usually think of. I took a taxi ride up and down the hills. You've got to do it once! I also had a chance to visit some with my aunt. That was the last time I saw her.
Eventually I started the trip home. I came the southern route where highway was still mostly under construction. I went home the northern route. That route took me through Sacramento and then to Reno Nevada. I stopped in Reno because the next stop was a long way away Salt Lake City, Utah. It was a short ride but I welcomed the distractions of Reno. Before Las Vegas there had been Reno. I walked around a bit and finally went into one of the casinos rather randomly. I went to the bar and ordered a drink, a Gin and Tonic I think. At the bar in the bar itself there were slot machines. I sat there feeding the slot machine and drinking a while. Eventually two young women came and sat next to me. They were bubbly and obviously English and we struck up a conversation. It turns out that one of them had been the secretary for John Lennon (I was a little sceptical of this at first.) We talked and they kind of picked me up. They had all sorts of cupons for drinks that they wanted to cash in and they kept feeding me drinks as we moved from casino to casino. I have no concept of what I drank or how much at that point. As it got later the one who claimed to have been Lennon's secretary took us to a club and said she knew a member of a band there. By golly if she didn't really know an elecric guitar player for Louis Prima! She introduced us and then Louis Prima came out and we all met him. We were given a table at the front of the club and complimentary drinks (not that I needed any more.) After the show we went for some food. Earlier in the evening it looked as if things would lead to some sex, but in fact I got so drunk it just ended up with me collapsing into bed and passing out. The next morning early I paid for the whole evening. At 5 am I had to get up and start driving for Salt Lake. Between Reno and Salt Lake was mostly desert and Salt Flats and it was hot and miserable. I was hung over and dehydrated, but drove on in spite of it all. All I could say to myself was "What were you thinking?" I was never so glad to see a place as I was Salt Lake City. As I came over the crest of a hill leading down to Salt Lake there was a thunder storm over the city. It was wet and beautiful. I got a motel room and soaked. Later I drove to see some of Salt Lake City. I had no idea I would years later spend a lot of time there. There was no sleep as welcome as the sleep I had that night.

The Summer of 1969

2004-06-24T22:08:00.000-04:00

When I arrived in Glendale I was expecting to move into the garden house at Billie's place. She moved me into a room in the house proper. Billie was a bit older than my mother and a very large woman. She had a heart of gold. We became friends. Though I had put myself back together somewhat on the drive to California, having a friend at that time was very nice. The idea was that I would look for some significant kind of work. I called around and finally started looking at jobs that were less significant. I had at that time modestly long hair and a moustache. It was neetly trimmed and not very radical. I certainly didn't look much like a hippie. Well I guess looking like a hippie was a relative thing, because the hair and the moustache were issues to some potential employers in Southern California. I ended up getting rid of the moustache but kept the hair. I finally got a job as a janitor in a local hospital. Now I was the only non-hispanic working in the hospitals maintenance department. I was also the only student working there. Everyone else was supporting themselves working there. The job was explained to me and I was shown my area. I started working. I had all my work done in an hour and a half. I had finished the day's work. The head of housekeeping then started to give me additional work. When I broke for lunch I sat to eat with the other janitors. They explained "making time" to me. You see I was expected to stretch out the work to fill the day. Finishing so quickly just made the rest of them look bad. I could understand their point of view, but "making time" wasn't something I could do. I finished a week of work and then had to leave. I couldn't do things their way.
I then decided to just travel and experience Califirnia and then go home for the wedding of my best friend at the time. The first thing to experience was a Rock Festival. It was billed as "Newport 69". There had been a series of festivals that had been held in Newport California and this was the latest. The only thing, I wasn't held in Newport California, it was held in San Fernando valley in Northridge. I should have guessed that there was a reason for moving the festival. I went to the festival. I bought my ticket and went in. By that time I looked more like a hippie than not and I fit right in. Some of the big names were there and that was exciting, Credence Clear Water Revival, Joe Cocker and Jimmie Hendrix were a few of the groups. There were others and some I had never heard of. There was a lot of being high and mellow. Some serious Pot smoking and some drinking and some other things. In the day it was very hot. The evening was more tolerable. The second day when I went back, ticket in hand, I was confronted by the sight of kids fighting with cops. Apparently some of the kids thought they deserved to get in free and the cops needed to bust some heads. It was an incredible scene; kids, cops and police helicopters. I didn't go back for the third day.
I visited with my aunt Naomi in San Diego for a week. She put me up and fed me. She had rows of Avacado trees growing in her back yard and I ate avacado in all sorts of ways. I even brought some great big ones home with me. Her house over-looked a kind of canyon called an arroyo which in turn over-looked the Sports Stadium. I went down to Tijuana with my aunt and bargined with the vendors there. I bought some souveneers and I got myself a leather vest. I wore the leather vest without a shirt the rest of the summer. So there I was, everlengthening hair, leather vest and sandals to boot. I was going native(flower child native). I also found an Ankh and strung it on a leather thong along with some beads and wore that all the time also. When I went back to Glendale I decided to shorten my Summer some so I prepared to go North to San Francisco to visit my other Aunt Naomi. First I did some chores for Billie and a little painting on the house. I was pretty lean in those days and very tan and muscular. I also had a very young-looking almost feminine face.
Next - going North

There and back again

2004-06-23T21:11:00.000-04:00

Yes I paraphrased the title of the Hobbit, but the trip to Claifornia was kind of like that. From New Haven, Connecticut to Glendale, California is a bit over 2,500 miles. If you really move you can do it by car in about 4.5 days. In 1969 the Interstate Highway System was still mostly a dream and much of the trip was on rather small roads. Why would I set off on such a trip? It wasn't for fame and it wasn't for fortune. I am sure of that. We need to go back a bit that year to understand the trip. In the winter some friends and I went to the movies together. It was a rather common event. We lived in old theaters and we watched subtitled movies and cheap science fiction and just anything that was there. This time we were seeing "The Graduate". If you remember it is a story of a young man lost after graduation from College. He is discovered by the mother of a friend (Mrs Robinson)who seduces him. Later, he falls in love with Mrs Robinson's daughter. Well the movie has some significance to me since I was very much a lost soul in those days and I was seeking to become a man. I had pretty much decided earlier in my life it was futile to keep the fantasy of becoming a girl. I tried to be a boy and then a man. Like the hero of the graduate I was caught in the web of a woman. Being caught didn't help me become more a man. I was just used and I was pretty much vulnerable. The movie struck a note. It also took place partially in San Francisco and across the bay at Berkeley. There were scenes of Golden Gate Park and the Bay bridge that dredged up childhood memories. I want home and got drunk immediately - stinking drunk. I probably would have stayed drunk for days if I hadn't decided to go to California and visit those places. So, come spring I was off to California in my Mercury Comet. My goal was to drive a minimum of 500 miles each day. In actually I drove some days over 600 miles. I drove alone and for the most part it was extremely dull. I dis have some time with myself though and I really needed that. Each evening I would stop at a motel and soak in the bath tub to ease the muscle aches and wash the grime off my body. I would then get something good to eat. It wa interesting to see what people were like in different parts of the country. They weren't much different where ever I went. The food was different and the mucic on the car radio was very different. McDonalds was everywhere and was often my lunch choice. Dinner was special though and I always went somewhere interesting. Occasionally I would go to a bar and have a couple of drinks, usually Gin and Tonic. Clsoe to the end of the long journey I was driving through the Mojave desert and I stopped in Needles Claifornia. I was very near my destination, Billie's house in Glendade. I went to a bar to have a few drinks. The bar was down the street from the Motel and I drove. When I wen into the Bar it was about 7 pm and the temperature was over 100. It was a small dive of a bar. The sort of bar I sometimes frequented in New Haven with friends. I was alone here though. I had two Gin and tonics and was going to leave when this guy sitting next to me start talking to me. He must have been 55 or 60 and he was talking about going to LasVegas and betting a large sum of money. He went on and on about it and them he tried to convince me to go to Las Vegas with him. I guess he was trying to pick me up. I never have had homosexual tendancies so it wasn't even tempting. It was interesting though. It was the first, but not last time that summer I would have someone try to pick me up in a bar. I left the bar about 11pm and when I went out to the car the temperature was 99. I am sure glad the air conditioning in the motel worked. The next day was a short ride to Glendale, where I met Billie. She was a grand old lady and I often look back to her with great affection. More to come....

Summer not so blissful

2004-06-21T22:06:00.000-04:00

The summer of 1968 I was in a Clinical Pastoral Training program at Westboro State Hospital. It was an old style mental hospital. It had residential patients. There was also a Tuberculosis ward. I lived on the grounds of the hospital and went and visited some of the patients. Every morning during the week we started out with group therapy. The whole experience was designed to make us better able to visit and deal with people in hospital environments. Living in a mental Hospital wasn't easy by any means. You see so much that is so hard to deal with. One of the things I witnessed was Electro Shock Therapy. It was awful. The electrodes were place on the patient and the patient was sedated. The shock was then administered by the Psychiatrist. The shock went through the patient until the patient started to go into convulsions. The patient would convulse maybe 30 seconds or so and then they would move on to another patient. I talked with some of the people who had had shock therapy and it was just as bad for them as it looked to me. Afterward they would have memory lapses and disorientation. I know it was a legitimate therapy but it really seemed barbaric to me. There was a man there who looked like a human Gargoyle. He seemed to afix himself to one of the walls in a hallway and just stand there all day. One of the other chaplains in training couldn't take it and left mid summer. That summer was the an election year and the Democratic convention was being held in Chicago. We watched it some until there were riots in the street. The riots weren't from the demonstrators, but from the police. There were anti-Vietnam War protests and the police started bashing the heads of the protesters. The newscasters were shocked and we were shocked and stunned.
To start the Summer I had stayed at school in my room before going to Massachussetts to the Hospital for the program. It was a good thing I stayed because it took me a week to dry out from all the alcohol that year. I hadn't had significant gender problems during that period. I did spend a good deal of the time under the influence though. I am not really sure what that was all about, but the next year was quite different. For all the drinking and being at Yale I got straight A's that year. Theology classes were a real challange. They were designed to scramble or preconceptions by more than a little. They were successful at that. Theology is more about asking questions than knowing answers. We learned how to ask the hard questions.

The next year was much different. We already had had a sort of revolution and more was to come. During the first year we were expected to wear Academic gowns to class and to worship and we were able to remove that requirement. The next to go was a requirement that the male students wear Jacket and tie to dinner in the refectory. Now we had at that time to eat there and we were the only ones eating there at night. We wore such outlandish jackets and ties that the requirement was removed. Eventually I was able to be excused from eating there at all. The food was a real experience. We would be served sandwiches that we called Turkey lung sandwiches. And mystery meat was a common dish. The cook would capitolize on any opportunity to feed us cheeply. A truck carying crushed pineapple turned over on I-95 and he bought it up. We had pineapple in everything. I mean everything.
That year we had the entrance of the first female student. Women students at Yale were very few and far between. If a woman wanted to go and be ordained it just wasn't done then. She was rather frail looking and quite attractive. She wasn't what you would call a beauty, but definately easy on the eye. She was one woman surrounded by a bunch of drooling men. It sure must have been hard for her to adjust at first. As time went on I got to know her. Her name was Diana and we talked occasionally. The seeds of real trouble were being planted. I am the sort of person who is uaually more than willing to help and in this case it got me in real trouble. I don't remember all the details of how it began, but after a class we had together Diana and I started talking. She started to talk about her personal life and the next thing I knew she was crying. I tried to comfort her and then we were kissing. I was hooked and I didn't have a clue. I was totally lost in the experience. I hadn't had any real romantic involvement since Mary and I broke up. We were in bed together before I knew it. She was real screwed up at the time and I apparently was just as screwed up. She couldn't make up her mind whether she wanted me or she wanted her old boyfriend. Then she started to occasionally date a friend of mine. Eventually she actively pursued him, but it was futile. He was Gay. All the while she juggled me and my friend and her old boyfriend with masterful skill. I finally just got the message and backed out. I was real messed up though. I eventually found out that she had tried to involve quite a few of the male students, even some of the married ones. My best friend knew about her the whole time, but didn't clue me in until things were over. She really had me going. I didn't know whther I was coming or going I was so screwed up. I was trying my hardest to be manly and pursue her and it just didn't work. It never dawned on me at the time that it was her problem. My state got so bad and I was so mixed up that I eventually went to the Yale Psychiatric service. I sat in a dark office with a woman therapist opposit me and couldn't put words to what was the matter. As I think back I really believe I didn't know what the matter was. My male identity was very shallow and it's limits had been reached. I didn't really know what to tell her and so I left with no benefit. That was almost a fatal thing. I knew something was wrong with me and I so much wanted to be an assertive male and it didn't work. I was so confused and frustrated with myself I took some pain pills I had for kidney stones. In college I had passed kidney stones. I woke up one day with cramps and thought that I needed to go to the bathroom. The cramps got worse and turned into excruciating pain and I headed to the University Medical center. On the way the pain was so bad that I had to stop and dry heave several times. When I got to the Medical center I found that they were unable to give me anything for the pain until the Dr called. I suffered in the pain for most of the day. I dry heaved and I peed blood. Finally the Dr ordered some pain medication and I passed the stone immediately. My family Dr prescribed pain pills for me to have in case I had another attack. It was those pills I took. I don't remember how many there were but I took them all and then I started drinking whisky. I finished most of a bottle of Seagrams and didn't feel a thing. I wasn't drunk and I wasn't unconscious and I wasn't dead. When I started I really intended to kill myself and put myself out of my misery. My own sense of who I was was all screwed around. I had no sense of who I was and who I was supposed to be I walked the streets of New Haven that night looking to die. It didn't happen. I talked with my best friend at the time and told him what I had done. We talked some and that is when he told me about Diana and the others. Some of the problem was that I was dealing with a very mixed up young woman and I was mixed up myself and I couldn't distinguish one from the other. A lot of guys, and many did, could just was her out of their systems and move on. I was sucked in and crunched and left an almost empty shell. She went to her clinical training in San Francisco the same summer I went to California. I visited her there before I went home. I was over her.
I had another straight A year, who can figure? I almost quit school. I talked with my minister at home and decided to spend the summer traveling. I decided to drive across the country to California and visit my two aunts and my minister's mother. Both aunts have the first name Naomi. One was in San Francisco and she was my father's sister. The other aunt Naomi lived in San Diego and she was my father's sister-in-law. She may still be living. I haven't heard from her in a long while. My minister's mother's name was Billie. She had been an actress in silent pictures in her youth. The base of operation was to be a little garden house at Billie's house. I would pay her rent as long as I was there and I would look for summer work. The plan almost worked. I drove across the country, but my minister's mother moved me into her home and took me under her wing. We became friends ans she wouldn't take rent.
Well I skipped over many things and we need to go back to the trip across the country. I think I was in search of my manhood that whole year and we will see if I found it in the next installment.

Revisited

2004-06-21T08:47:00.000-04:00

Before I go on to the Graduate school years let's go back to 1952. I was seven years old and we had just moved to California. I might just say back to California because I was born at the very tail-end of the Second World War in Oakland, California. My father had been in the Army Air Corps during the war and in the Infantry before that. He was among the first to go out into the Pacific after Pearl Harbor. In fact, he was a couple of days out from Pearl Harbor in an unarmed troop transport when Pearl was attacked. In 1952 he had just returned from Japan where he had been stationed, now in the Air Force, during the Korean Conflict. We moved with him back to California and lived in three different places that year. We lived in a motel while my parents looked for housing and then we moved to a small rental in a community called Pleasanton. It was right near a very large Air Base called Parks Air Base. It was an Air Force Hospital. It received the wounded from Korea after they stopped at another Hospital in Hawaii. Eventually we moved into our own house. My mother was a house wife and my father a Master Sargent in the Air Force. To help pay the bills my father worked a second job at the Air Base and manged the Base Bowling Alley. All these things were significant in my life, but another event happened in 1952 that was pretty important. A young ex-soldier went to Europe and had one of the most publicised series of Sex change operations ever. She came back to the U.S as Christine Jorgensen. She was all over the papers and the radio. We didn't have a television yet so I don't remember anything there, but I bet it was there also. I do remember the publicity in the papers and the painful opening up of the details of her life. Her surgeries were not like the surgery today. She was castrated and then had a penectomy. There was no reconstruction and no vaginoplasty. In a true sense I believed that she had been mutilated. As a young gender confused boy her experience was terrifying. "See what happens to Gender confused men!" It all added to the background of my long struggle with my gender issues.
Several years later there was another very significant happening. It was more personal and more terrifying. I can remember my mother in tears one night and wondering what it was all about. The next day she explained that she had found a lump on her left breast and whe was afraid it might be cancer. Cancer in the mid 1950's wasn't something that was often cured. When she came back from the Dr's office she explained that she would have to have an operation. Later she explained that they would remove her left breast if they found cancer in the lump. Parks Air Base was still a large Hospital and she went there for her surgery. I couldn't visit her there because children were limited from visiting. They had to remove my mother's breast and she was away in the Hospital a rather long time. I did all the chores in the house. I cooked and cleaned and I did the laundry. Doing the laundry in those days wasn't easy. The washing machine was a big tub with a center agitator. After the cloths had been washed and then rinsed in the tub they had to be put through a wringer to remove as much water as possible. The wringer was a contraption attached to the tub with two rollers and the cloths were squeezed between the rollers. To dry the cloths I had to hang them on the line until they were dry. I would then take them off the line and fold them. I hadn't mastered ironing and I still am prety poor at it so I was spared that.
When my mother came home she was still pretty weak so I had to continue being the "woman of the house." I really didn't mind it all that much. In fact there was a certain satisfaction to it. My mother had not only had her breast removed, but all the lymph nodes on her left side and her upper left arm. She could barely move her left arm. She had a tremendous wound on her side. Eventually she showed it to me. It was horrible. She healed though and eventually lived to be 74. She was one of the few cancer survivors of her day. There was no chemotherapy and radiation was so experimental and grossly overdone that it wasn't practical. Eventally my mother resumed her palce as the woman of the house and I went back to my normal life, if you could call it normal. My mother did struggle emotionally though. She felt less complete as a woman. There was no good plastic surgery for reconstruction. A year later I was crossdressing every night as I have already described. When my mother discovered some of my cloths and confronted me I had assumed she had also told my father. I was so humiliated, but very little came of it. I discussed that time just recently with my father and he doesn't remember it at all. Maybe my mother hadn't told him after all. I was always very close to her and we talked frequently. As I grew older the conversations got more adult. Thinking back makes me kind of nostalgic. I miss her terribly. When she died so many years later I couldn't cry. It took me all of 17 years to really allow myself to accept her death and grieve.
In school the girls were changing and beginning to develop and I so much wanted to be just like them. I on the other hand started to grow facial hair, lots of it. It was dark and covered my whole lower face. My father made me shave and I was shaving daily by the age 12. Hair grew other places also and my voice started to change. I had a wonderful high singing voice and all of a sudden I was croaking out a deep base. It was totally shattering and I made up my mind to accept it and move on. I couldn't see any acceptable way of changing things, so I made the best of it.
Back to Graduate school - Yale namely. In college, The Universiy of Rhode Island, I had been one of the smartest and on the top of the class. When I went to Yale I expected to be just average. Either Yale was over-rated or I misjudged my own capabilities. I was at the top of the heep at Yale also. My first masters degeree was Cum Laud and my second was with Honors. The system had changed by my second Masters. Both degrees were in Theology. Undregrad Philosophy and Grad Theology. Not a lot of income potential in either. Those were stormy years, both politically and personally.
My introduction to graduate school was a keg party. Religious graduate programs are called Seminary. So I went to Seminary and was greeted by an alcoholic bash. That year was pretty much an alcoholic blurr. Every evening after chapel there would be a sherry party. Sometimes the faculty would have one and at least one student would have one in their room. As the year wore on the sherry diminished in quality generally and the parties graduated into harder alcohol. I soon discovered that I had a remarkable ability to drink vast quantities. I got terrible hangovers also. I wasn't drunk on a daily basis, but it happened all too often. I also had Migrane head aches. That only lasted a few years, but they were paralysing. I had to retreat to my room and pull the drapes and sleep it away. Star Trek was on TV, the original one. I didn't watch much TV though. I had a few dates, mostly casual ones. Nothing serious or sexual. Near the end of the school year we had a Picnic. I had a date with a gorgeous girl from Albertus Magnus College just up Prospect Street in New Haven. I was excited and I liked her very much. It was our first date. That morning I sprained my right ankle so bad I had to go to the Doctor. It was a bad sprain and I had to walk on crutches. The date was a misreable failure. I was responsible totally. I was such an ass. She was very gracefull about the whole thing and I got drunk -real drunk. I was so ashamed I could never look her in the face again even though she got word to me that she still wanted to go out. As I said I was an ass and didn't take her up on the date.
Next the Summer

The first

2004-06-20T20:49:00.000-04:00

I guess I might as well start with the inspiration for the title. When I was nine or ten, I can't remeber the exact date my mother spoke those words to me. What inspired them was the fact that my mother had found a stash of girls cloths I had been wearing. I was born with male genitalia and was raised a boy, but it didn't stick. This encounter with my mother is just one instance of how being a male didn't stick. What my mother found was some cloths I had been using occasionally that were in a gym bag. Why she looked in the gym bag I'll never know since she died seventeen years ago. What she didn't know was that was the tip of the iceburg. Every night for a long time I went to sleep as a girl. I taped falsies to my chest and wore a bra and panties to bed. She never found out about that.
What drives a boy to do such things? I certainly didn't understand it at that age. It wasn't the beginning.
I remember before I went into the first grade, dressing in my mothers cloths. That's not so special in itself, but the feeling I remember having was special. It felt so good and natural that I remember it to this day. Right along with that memory I have one of me dressed and accidentally locking myself in the bathroom. A neighbor had to climb into the bathroom window to unlock the door. I remember embarassment from that. Just before the first grade and during that year I was picked on by the kids both older and my age. My father was in the military so we moved frequently. By the second grade I had figured out that being a sissy wasn't a good thing. I was never picked on again.
I am describing the experiences of a person who was born with a male body and a female brain. When I was young it was very hard to figure out how to be. No matter how hard I tried to be just an ordinary boy, it didn't quite work. I was always a little out of step with the rest of the other boys. I was clever enough to keep from being tormented, but I couldn't solve the issue. Well my mother solved the issue for a short time. I was so embarassed and so afraid of being further found out that I disposed of all the evidence and stopped. Yes, I stopped. I had cured myself. Well what actually happened was that I started to grow facial hair and my voice changed and I got tall. This all happened when the girls around me were getting softer and rounder and they weren't growing facial hair. More embarassingly I started to have nocturnal emissions (wet dreams.) This all said to me -"you are a boy so stop the foolishness." I tried to be a boy. I was a Boy Scout and played baseball. I ran track. I played war. My father even taught me to box and to use judo. I rode horses and lifted bails of hay. I was a boy, right? Not so fast. I still had some hurdles to deal with; dating and girls.
Now girls were a definite turn-on and they still are. The problem was that I couldn't be agressive. I struggled with my sexuality and I was in the midst of adolescance. I ocassionally would sneak into my parents room when no one was there and dress. I would do it for only short periods and only occasionally, but I did it none the less.
In my Junior year of High School I met a girl I eventually dated. We were both in the Drama club together. At first we didn't get along very well, but as time went on we hit it off. I think she was my first true love. Her name was Mary. She was intelligent, talented and above all feminine. I would walk her home everyday from High School. It was a long way out of my way home, but I loved just being with her. We talked on the phone until my parents or hers made us hang up. I had no thought of bing a girl or dressing in those days. I basked in her femininity. We were an item for several years. We spent as much time together as we could and we got just next thing to having sex. She was Cahtolic and I am Protestant and she wouldn't. We wqouldn't have been able to use birth control even if we had and with my luck she would have gotten pregnant. Condoms were illegal in Rhode Island in those days. The pill just didn't exist yet.
We went to different Colleges after High School. I went off to study chemistry and she to study design in New York. We kept in touch and saw each other during breaks. We kind of grew a little distant I thought and I was beginning to think that things were over when I got a letter from her saying "I love you. I need you." It floored me! I was thinking things were over and then her letter came. I wrote her a love letter back, but never sent it.
I guess I chickened out when things seemed to be getting serious. During Christmas break I planned to see her and apologise. I even bought her a gift. You guessed it, I chickened out then too. As I think about it I probably saved that dear sweet girl from the grief that was sure to follow.
The rest of College was a real nothing. I hung out with the artsy crowd and was one of the stranger fixtures on campus. Years ago I had switched to Philosophy as my major. I took as many minors and credits as I could. I was a Bohemian. I developed some friends who were female and I seemed to feel more comfortable in that environment. That worked until their boy friends started to complain about them being close to me. I just then hung out with a small circle of friends.
It was the beginning of the Viet Nam war and young men were being drafted. Being in College gave me an exemption. For the first two years of College I had to take R.O.T.C. (Reserve Officers Training Corps). Some of my friends stayed and took two more years and ended up in Viet Nam. It was a strange time. I could have finished my undergraduate work midterm my Senior year, but I might have been drafted. I therefore took extra courses. I ended up with six minors. On top of that I had two jobs, one for the Philosophy department tudoring Logic, and one for the music department managing the band. I also took Greek on the side. I had to get tutored in Greek because the University didn't offer it.

The Summer after graduation I worked in a Summer Camp. The girl counselors were very hot and horny. The problem was that they were for the most part still in High School. That was a real test in self control. I was ready to exert some maleness, but that Summer wasn't the time.

Next off to Yale for Graduate School.