First of all, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Second, are you secretly me? Probably not, since there are some differences, but at times when reading this I thought you had somehow ripped memories and feelings and thoughts straight out of my mind with some kinda freaky telepathy.

For the past six or seven years, I’ve been living a double life.

In one life, I am a mild-mannered IT consultant, and I work to improve and digitize the infrastructure of small businesses. I shave obsessively, everywhere on my body that I can reach, because it makes me very uncomfortable to have body hair — physically and mentally. That’s about as far as I go down the ‘transitioning’ route, physically. I have a facebook, and friends, and we talk about guy stuff, and laugh about guy stuff. I’m a huge nerd and a gamer. When it’s seen that I exclusively play female characters when possible, I laugh it off as “do you think I want to spend four hours looking at a guy’s ass?”

In another life, I am a mild-mannered IT consultant, and I work to improve and digitize the infrastructure of small businesses. Only, I’m female. This life I live only on the internet, using a pseudonym I will give out here just as readily as my real name. I always pick female characters in games that have the option, because that’s just who I am. I happen to be attracted to other women. I’m often, and often intensely, sexual. This identity, this alter-ego, is not real, but in being so, it feels more real to me. And between the two of my identities, it’s the least filtered. People who know me as a woman on the internet know me much, much better and more closely than people who know me as a man IRL, save for a couple of my most trusted friends.

As an aside, the username I’m posting with now is neither, but has been used before. Go digging, and you might find a few more insights.

But anyway, some of the experiences you list very closely mirror my own. The difference being, it was anime and games and adult manga and online roleplaying that provided my impetus, my muse, my outlet for transsexualism. And it didn’t really start ’til I was 13.

I ‘cope’ in that I’m able to remove that which is most physically uncomfortable for me (body hair), and I’m actually able to present myself rather well in my first life. But it’s the other one, the feminine one, that is what I am inside. I never mix the two lives; there’s not a soul alive who knows the actual identity of both and recognizes it for what it is. But it’s only because I’m able to be a woman on the internet that I’m so stable as a man IRL. I don’t think I could cope, otherwise.

The final, missing piece of the puzzle, and what spoke the deepest to me about your article, is your thoughts on feminism. I’m a feminist, but I’m an individualist feminist; rather than trying to better the part of women on the whole, I think that each woman should go out and work to empower herself. I’m sex-positive and sex-worker positive, and I tend to react very negatively both online and IRL to SWERFs. One of my biggest awakenings to the issues surrounding feminism and the opinions one is “allowed” to have regarding it was a certain consumer backlash within the gaming community — one of the related subreddits was where I found the link to this article. You articulate the exact same feelings they — and I — have regarding modern leftist feminism. Many trans people within our movement have been left shamed and embarrassed by people on the other side, intersectional feminists, ‘tumblr’ feminists, calling them traitors or their opinions invalid due to not being ‘real women’ or in some cases doxxing / deadnaming them, and I’m not sure which is more horrifying — that, or that I feel I have no grounds to argue with them since who I am IRL does not match what I bring from inside myself to my online persona. And this has happened as recently as last weekend.

So in closing, once again, thank you. You’ve given voice to the frustrations I feel — and I don’t know for certain, but I like to believe there are more of us than we know. I’m very sorry that you feel you can’t shave your body hair. :( It takes about an hour, but it really makes so much of a difference for me. Please, hang in there, and stay strong.