Thank you!

Both to you TheOtherDave and lucidfox for this great article which has addressed so many of my own doubts regarding my gender identity.

From what I've suspected and have learned from lucidfox's article is that I myself have learned to restrain myself due to my own transphobia. Not that I hate trans people, au contraire, I love my girls, but I've feared to be thought of as a freak, ultimately, being afraid to be me; even though one of my earliest memories is confessing to my mother I had wanted to be a woman, crying -- no -- weeping when told that such thing was not possible even after having pressed if there wasn't some sort of surgery or if God would make things right in the New World.

I am no longer religious. But the reason I share is because even for someone who as long as she can remember has felt inadequate in the body she was born in, the social construct and taboos can still be so strong that they can make you question and invalidate your own sense of being.

Much like lucidfox, I've also ran the "fake or not" argument in my head countless times, and much like her I also consciously rediscovered my gender identity at 21 after years of nearly successful hiding of my "terrible secret longings" from everyone, even myself.