Day 1 of 30-Day Challenge - Realization

As part of Transgender Awareness Month, NorthStar LDS group is posting information about GD every day. Posts include blog posts, information about the diagnosis, the Church's stance on the issue, etc. Members of the trans identity group are contributing most of the material. One member in particular wrote a post as part of it. On her blog, she said she's doing the "30-day Challenge". I will do it too.

Day 1 is "When did you realize the term transgender referred to you?"

For so much of 2012, I denied these feelings and thought I could beat it out of myself. I first started going to a therapist in January 2010 as required by my wife at the time. At first, the therapy was to help with my addiction to lust manifest by pornography and compulsive masturbation.  Troy, my therapist asked me many times what I wanted. I remember one session during which we talked about being whole. There are lots of parts of me scattered throughout with varying desires and wants. His goal was "to help me become whole". Whether that meant transitioning or not. At the time, I thought there'd be no way I could even consider transition much less try it.  So we focused on the pornography and I tried keeping the cross-dressing to a minimum.

Then I slipped in June 2012. When I told my ex, she decided on divorce.  I threw everything away, clothes, pills, needles. Everything. But I kept having the same feelings. How I yearned to have a feminine body, to feel smooth, pretty, and feminine. I was tired of supressing who I truly was.  So in December, I got some clothes and wore them once in a while. I wore makeup while at her parents for Christmas which did not go over at all very well.