"This Just In..." 30

There’s one aspect of gender confusion that doesn’t make headlines.

I lost touch with him quite some time ago, but an acquaintance once told me a life story that was fascinating – yet quite sad. From his earliest memories, he’d believed he was a girl.

Reading that, the mind will relate it to today’s transgender movement, issue, or whatever you wish to call it. But keep in mind that this person was born in the early 1950s. At that time, there was no media influence, let alone social or peer pressure, to influence his self-image.

After many decades, he could still recall the impact of being severely reprimanded by his parents when they discovered him cross-dressed at about age seven. It was then that he learned the importance of keeping his gender issue secret. And it began a double life that caused him years of mental anguish. He was doing something “wrong”, but he was powerless to stop.

There was no one in whom to confide. He had no resource for information. But the feeling wouldn’t subside.

His teenage years, he recalled, were hell. By then, he’d come to see himself as a flawed male who had an inexplicable urge to be female. Throwing himself into typical “boy” activities didn’t help. And he had no way of knowing that there might be others dealing with the same problem.

The only way to get some relief was to crossdress in secret. That helped, but he lived in a perpetual state of shame.

I think it was after he’d reached adulthood that he sought professional help. It was a psychiatrist, who advised him simply to cut up the women’s clothing. That didn’t help, of course. Later, a sympathetic doctor prescribed a combination of estrogen and an anti-androgen designed not to “cure” him but to mitigate the stress caused by his gender confusion. He told me that the medical intervention had the effect of moving the issue to the back of his mind, where he could deal with it in a rational manner.

With the advent of the internet, he could do the research to figure out where he stood relative to individuals burdened with similar issues. Many were self-described transsexuals, and there were references to the “two-spirit” people revered in many cultures. But by then he was interested only in learning the cause of his mental conflict.

He wasn’t “trans” anything. He just wanted to be a typical guy. His search for a “why” led nowhere. There was, however, a name for what he had been going through: gender dysphoria. Somehow, knowing that made it easier for him to cope. A person of strong will, he began to see it as something he could set aside as simply a mental quirk and not part of his lifestyle.

That’s how he lived until his 70s, when suddenly the feelings entirely disappeared. Could they have been hormone-related? It makes one wonder if others defining themselves relative to gender according to how they feel early in life may later regret having made such a monumental decision.