Thanks for sharing your story. My own experience was similar to yours in some respects. There was a brief epiphany one morning in the summer of 1961 (I was 5), when I was certain that my name was Laura, and that I was a girl. But in that era, there was no one that you could safely talk to about such things. No therapists, no school counselors, no doctors, no psychiatrists: no one in the mental health business who was trained properly to treat trans people in any way that would help them. I would have to bury Laura in my subconscious for nearly 50 years before I would reach a point in my life where it would become possible to confront my true self in the full light of day. For 29 of the years of the middle part of my life, I was in a beautiful, supportive, emotionally satisfying marriage, and experienced no gender dysphoria. I loved my wife more than life itself, and it was my honor and privilege to be her husband. She passed away in November 2013, and over the next 4 months, my old nemesis — the severe gender dysphoria that had plagued me all through my childhood and my youth — returned ten-fold stronger. By the autumn of 2015, I thought I was losing my sanity, and I was losing my sense of self-identity. I no longer knew who I was, Larry, or Laura? I was living in women’s clothes at home most of the time, and that was starting to be “not enough”; I wanted to go out en femme: grocery shopping, the post office, everything I did in my life. I was tried of hiding, yet terrified that someone would find out. In September 2015, I started research on the internet to try and figure out what was happening to me, and in this way, I first became aware of the word “transgender”. Oh, I had heard of Christine Jorgenson, Renee Richards, and a few other similar cases in my youth, but had long since forgotten them and had never felt a connection to them in relation to my own identity. Anyway, in January 2016, I joined a trans support group, and started going out openly as Laura-Ann in March 2016. On June 4th, 2016, I had a near-suicidal bout of gender dysphoria, and made the decision to transition. I’ve never had a moment of regret since then, and it has become obvious even to thickheaded “me” that I’ve always been a trans feminine person. That part of myself that has always been Laura is what attracted my wife Lynn to me in the first place, all those years ago (1985), when we started dating. Lynn approached me initially — she asked me on our first two dates, and it was by her invitation that we started eating lunch together at our workplace in the months before we started actually dating. I’ve always been gentle-spirited and non-aggressive, and everything that makes a certain type of guy a “dudebro”, I was the antithesis of. Yet Lynn wasn’t lesbian, or bi, she just was tired of male chest-thumping, and took a chance on me. So in some ways, we share a similar narrative. I lived as a cis-het guy for 59 years, and if Lynn hadn’t died, I still would be. Again, thanks for sharing!
