I thought maybe I might share my story because maybe it might help someone else, and maybe other people might have similar experiences.
It took me a really long time to come to terms with my gender. I have always been very, very feminine. I like my hair long. I like wearing “women’s” clothing. I love fashion and makeup and all of that sort of thing. I loved barbies (hated baby dolls, but c’est la vie), and was and am… just fem. I grew up with fairly accepting parents who wanted a tomboy little girl (think Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird… they got me) and two younger brothers (the older of the two, three years my junior and flamboyantly gay, and technically my drag daughter and the younger ten years my junior and bi because my family has fabulous genes apparently). I grew up very very certain of my gender but also terrified by it (I remember my father walking in on me playing at my little vanity talking to myself saying “and I’m really a boy” and him asking “do you really feel that way?” and me, terrified of him finding out, being like “no, no I was just playing!”) because I knew boys weren’t supposed to be effeminate (my brother got some shit growing up for how effeminate he was and is, and his femininity made my father worried for him because he was scared that A: he’d be bullied and B: my father’s best friend was a gay man who he lost to AIDS in the 80s and he’d never really recovered from that lost.)
I also went to a very progressive high school (technically a “self directed learning center” but that’s a long LONG story) and they had a book of trans bodies in the library and a day where they had two trans parents (a man and a woman) and come in, and discuss what it was like being trans. They also let us ask questions anonymously, and I remember writing my little question (I asked if there were as many trans men as trans women) and the man looking at me, and the thoroughly uncomfortable sense of recognition. He was a big, masculine farmer (literally a farmer) with one of those red “I work in the sun” a lot faces who always wore work clothes, and I hate to admit it but I hated the idea that I was anything like him. Despite my femininity I’d always felt very gay and so I started dating a girl who introduced me to slash fiction and it became a HUGE thing for me. I wanted to have sex but found myself only really able to enjoy sex with her when I was pretending we were both men.
I found the term “genderqueer” at like sixteen on Livejournal and started using that term. It got me a lot of shit at my very accepting school (I was going through a lot of various things at the time but this was 2006 and shit was ROUGH even in progressive circles). A psychiatrist told my father my gender issues meant I was schizophrenic. He told her he wasn’t going to take me to see her again (which as my parents have always been the type to panic and do whatever a perceived expert says in times of difficulty was very very brave of him).
When I was seventeen, I fell in love with a very pretty, very effeminate guy four years my senior. I somehow managed to convince my parents to let me move to New York to be with my twenty-one year old rock musician boyfriend. I thought he was the hottest, coolest, smartest, most amazing guy on earth. I lied to him and told him I had slept with men before (I was afraid he wouldn’t like me if I was inexperienced). I found receiving penetration to be painful the first time and bled a bit, and continued not to enjoy it (though I was so intensely attracted to him I thought it would get better and pretended I loved it) and it eventually got physically… not bad.
He didn’t like me discussing my gender (and didn’t like the fact that I’d been with a girl before him, as he was most of all INTENSELY jealous). He began to physically, emotionally and sexually abuse me. It was hell, I wasn’t dealing with my gender because I wasn’t dealing with anything. He got me pregnant and I had an abortion when I was 18. When I was almost twenty I found out he’d been telling people he was single and we finally broke up. Almost immediately I got into a relationship with a rather chauvinistic gal, who I liked because she was socially dominant and thought I was smart and pretty and made me feel like I was with someone who was together and who had a plan (my PTSD at that point was so bad I was kind of a non-entity eager to please anyone who seemed to like me). I started working as a professional dominatrix initially with my girlfriend’s encouragement (though she eventually told me it disgusted her and made her feel like I was selling my soul even though we were both devout atheists at the time. She hated my being genderfluid and I felt disgusting, awful, unlovable and suicidal. Eventually we broke up and I moved back to New England to be with my family, and then in with my business partner after I founded my own dungeon. We had that for a bit over a year, until I met my first husband on OKCupid. He (he uses he pronouns although he goes back and forth on being non-binary or a trans woman) was very attractive and seemed very charming and actually seemed to be attracted to my gender. We fell in love very fast and got married after being together for 8 months so we could move in together (he was from New Zealand). Immigration took nearly a year. He had very severe depression and anxiety and ptsd from a childhood that was essentially a Dickensian nightmare, so I bought a house and supported him while he sought treatment. It was alright at first, but as time went on and he still refused to get any sort of a job I hoped he would pick up more slack on the housework as I was working very very long hours to support us both. He didn’t and resented my not cleaning up after him.
We made friends and joined a local far leftist group. Things were alright for a few years (2013 to some point in 2015) then drama started happening within our friend group and political organization leading to a lot of stress falling on both of us (we had to check multiple friends into the hospital and stay with people on suicide watch and it was just tough). My business got hard to do as he failed to take up the work my business partner had done after forcing him out of the business. I was trying very very hard for some reason to live up to the idea of being a “good wife” and thought I wanted to have children (which my husband said he wanted but not yet). He also hounded me for a threesome in a way that made me uncomfortable with the idea (which I would have been fine with if he hadn’t been treating women like objects). My sex life with my husband was fairly good in the beginning (because he knew how to talk dirty to me) but as that faded got worse and worse and I still didn’t really enjoy penetration. My sex life with men has often tended to degenerate into me giving a lot of blowjobs and not getting off myself.
I fell in love with and dated a girl for awhile (with his permission although we’d been monogamous up to this point, at my request because I’d had previous bad experiences with poly). That turned out to be awful for a variety of reasons and my husband and I both cried a lot, had a few sessions with a marriage counselor (who said something very biphobic) and vowed to do better.
My husband had long been a theistic Satanist of a sort and I sought comfort in religion, initially turning to a sort of Paganism I understood as purely about dealing with my own internal experience, and eventually finding a chatroom for Satanists I joined initially with the idea of joining my husband in his practice. I had a very intense conversion experience during a meditation and threw myself into practice because my life was so miserable.
On the chatroom I ran into a guy I’d known years and years ago in a terrible group on fetlife, he’d become a much better person and we got along AMAZINGLY well. He was also a trans dude, identified as gay but enjoyed doing kink stuff with people of a variety of genders. Very beautiful, very androgynous in the rock n’ roll way I’ve always been into. We completed each other’s sentences, we loved all the same stuff. We fell in love. My husband also thought he was cute. We all met up and had some fairly good sex and a lot of kink fun. I was beginning to realize I wasn’t a woman, didn’t want to be treated like a woman, and didn’t want to be in a relationship where I was very much being treated badly and treated badly in a very gendered way. My husband was emotionally abusive, demanding, and often humiliated me in various ways in front of our friends (and had an increasing drinking problem) but I wanted to make it work. We’d been together since I was 22, I was 27, so the majority of my adult life at that point, but my new boyfriend seemed to improve things for awhile.
Early on in our relationship I realized with the help of my therapist that I was a trans man and frankly, not non-binary at all. As soon as anyone started actually using my pronouns I realized that I HATED being called they passionately (almost more than I hated being called she, because... I'm an effeminate gay dude, I call my desk chair she) and pretty much never felt anything like a woman... or particularly not like a man. I just feel like one of many very very feminine men.
We flew to California twice, and then my boyfriend visited us in Rhode Island. I cleaned the whole house which had gotten hoarders messy as my husband’s depression had persisted and his treatment of me had dragged me down into it. My husband didn’t help at all. I found six month old food on the counters (I’d ceased going into the kitchen entirely as the one chore my husband would do was the cooking and he left the kitchen such a mess I couldn’t really do anything in it without cleaning up after him for a few hours). I begged him for help and worked myself to exhaustion. He did nothing.
My boyfriend and I had had sex a couple of times but it although it had been enjoyable, only I had come, until I visited him while his primary was away on business without my husband. I told him very shyly that I wanted to top him (he’s very much a bottom) and he let me (I had fucked him once before but I’d been very tentative because he’d been sucking my husband off at the time and I was supposed to be very subby). I had had sex using a prosthetic before (twice, but only with girls) and it had been okay, but this… suddenly EVERYTHING fell into place. I was a top. I’m highly, highly sexual but only very very rarely into getting fucked (I have to be REALLY turned on first and I need to top afterwards to finish).
My boyfriend was like “I feel like I really saw you out of drag for the first time” (which was… essentially true). It was an amazing visit. Both my boyfriend and I had gotten more and more deeply religious during this time, my husband would talk about it with us a bit but seemed to resent our devoutness and interest in ritual.
My boyfriend adapted a ritual found in the Compendium Maleficarum and self baptized. I did the same about two weeks later. He broke up with his primary boyfriend and was so devastated I flew him out to see me and my husband. It was a wonderful visit, though my husband was increasingly dismissive towards me, and misgendered us both quite a lot often saying things like “As a man…” (when my boyfriend is… although very pretty, taller than my ex-husband, very broad shouldered and having been on T for a few years… frankly, looks like what he is, a dude. I could understand the slip when it came to me, but when he did it to him I was horrified). I was supposed to have a group baptism with my husband and boyfriend but after my boyfriend and I got all ready he decided he “wasn’t in the mood for a ritual” and just wanted a walk in the woods. We took a long walk into the woods to a cabin my family has, as we were all visiting my parents at the time, which he tried to insist on bringing a gun on (which made me very nervous). He was pouty and mean spirited the entire time. On our way back from the cabin an intense rain started and he got even grouchier as my boyfriend and I delighted in the rain. We ran down to the house and he baptized me for Satan as my name (Vincent) in the rain, while my husband sulked. My husband also ruined my boyfriend’s birthday by inviting a transphobic “friend” he’d met through gun culture into our home while my boyfriend was there and repeatedly referring to me as his “wife”.
That visit ended tensely, and shortly thereafter I went to visit my boyfriend to work out what to do as things had gone so wrong. My boyfriend had decided to apply to seminary (there’s a multi religious seminary that would accept a Satanist here) so he could found a church. I felt intensely called to go join him, but I had a husband and didn’t know what to do.
On that visit I told my boyfriend how my husband had actually been treating me (I hadn’t wanted to undermine his relationship with my husband and was afraid he wouldn’t believe me) and he was horrified and said my husband had been accusing me of emotional abuse behind my back, and he’d taken the accusations very seriously and tried to observe our dynamic closely but with what I’d said he was like “Now everything makes sense.”
I determined I needed to get a divorce. We decided to move in together in his place in California. When I got home I told my husband I was leaving. That was in September. I visited my boyfriend more and had some amazing mystical experiences. By January I was moved in and it was amazing. People called me by my name, and I continued presenting as I always had (like a drag queen).
I had experimented with more masculine or androgynous presentation when I was younger. Wearing suits, cutting my hair very short, I didn’t like it. I got a binder. Wearing it made me more dysphoric because I just thought about how much of myself I’d have to give up if I ever wanted to pass, and how I was shaped in such a way that I’d never look the way I wanted to. None of that worked. While I was with my husband (in 2014) I had gotten breast implants and that actually helped a lot with my top dysphoria, not having to think of them as “real” or “natural” made things so much better. Because I have a tiny tiny waist and very broad hips and EXTREMELY narrow shoulders all the work I’d have to do to pass just makes me feel more dysphoric, so I do a ton of work before I go out to “pass” as a woman, so when I get “she”d by randos I don’t feel that bad because, hey I’m wearing five layers of padding, caked on makeup a waist cincher, my hair teased up to god and the whole nine yards.
Ever since I moved in with my boyfriend, things have been amazing (I won’t say perfect, because life is tough sometimes) but I’ve felt so at ease in myself and realized how much I am very simply what I am, a very effeminate, very gay man in permenant drag. I realized why I always felt gay but never at all at home among the lesbian community and related to gay men (though always felt uncomfortable among them because they didn’t recognize me as one of them). Sex was finally fully enjoyable to me. I’ve started doing actual drag, and can actually quite comfortably pass as a cis drag queen (out of drag there’s no way in hell, but in drag aside from my voice being a give away, I look, I think, fairly indistinguishable from other queens). Our church is amazing. My new friends are amazing. Our home is delightful and I love California even though the Bay Area is the absolute worst cyberpunk dystopia. I feel so spiritually in tune and alive.
This has been a long, rambling, weirdly religious story about my life and (sort of) transition. I’ve never been on T because idea of hairloss terrifies me, and I don’t want the increased body hair, or to deal with acne, and because bottom growth would actually probably make me more dysphoric rather than less. My prosthetics are my dick, I can feel through them as intensely as I can through my physical dick, and they’re massive and make me feel smug.
The vocal changes’d be nice, but also I am not sure if I’d like how it’d affect my face/body overall as well.
tee hee
Always, but ...
