Submission 2.

Basically, I had feelings from an early age. I can’t tell you when, I don’t remember much from before I was twelve. I remember a girlfriend who was five, and the only reason I was attracted to her was because of her toys. She had a bicycle with a horse’s head on it, the saddle was very girly, and I was really attracted to that. I think that’s when it was.

I knew my father was very negative so I suppressed a lot of it and tried to live the way he wanted me to. I tried to live a whole life trying to please somebody you never manage to, no matter how much you give in.

When I was twelve, I started to actively cross-dress; first time I had the opportunity. But I did not acknowledge anyone that felt that. I thought I was the only one. In those days there was no information. I graduated high school in 1969 before Stonewall. The only information on Transexuality or Transgender would be pornography.

I lived in a small town. There was no way I would be able to get into a porn shop in my town without someone seeing me and telling my parents. That was completely out of range, the library had nothing on it. So, up until the day I discovered the Tiffany club when I was 43 years old I thought I was the only person like me. The only other examples I saw was jokes on television. Always something people laughed at, nothing I wanted any part of.

1994, I was on AOL, I found a chat room. Inside were a bunch of guys talking about their finery. I knew they were men because they each talked about their cross dressing. After about an hour I signed out and created “Joanie”. I started chatting on line and someone told me about the Tiffany Club, a social support group for cross-dressers right here in Boston. I went a few times, didn’t do too much because I was trying to work up the nerve. After a few weeks I left work early and stopped in at the cross-dressers boutique downstairs from the Tiffany Club. Some make-up, wigs, I had some clothes already that I had bought through catalogues; just a small stashes I had kept since I was 12. And I started dressing like a woman. Of course I was a mess at first, I didn’t have a clue about it; no one ever taught me how to dress like a girl. Within the week after that, I did some of the dressing at home, completed my make up at a rest area on the way to Boston.

It was just too much trouble after a while so I started dressing completely at home. And at that point I didn’t do a very good job at it, I got red-faced all the time, people were always pointing and laughing, it wasn’t a pleasant experience. I started developing a thick skin really quick; you either do that, or you go back into hiding. You can’t learn how to do it without exposing yourself the humiliation. That’s a drawback of cross dressing and being transgender, you don’t have that official puberty period to learn what you are doing. It was an adventure.

My full transition occurred in 1997. Transition is different for everybody, for me it was discovering the feeling I had which went further than cross-dressing.

(...to be continued)