The effects of having lived as a male for sixty years.

Probably the most difficult problem I have now is that I look like a male in my face and have developed a vast set of reinforcements for expressing the male gender. I have seen that these lead nowhere, so it doesn't basically influence my decision making, but nevertheless it makes for a hard transition.

I didn't grow up with a constant desire to be a woman. My desire was for having sexual arousal and orgasms while crossdressing and the rest of the time I just went along for the ride, doing what was expected of me. But this produced a dysfunctional man, unable to realize his most profound desires. The key ingredient, of living as a woman and having female orgasms, was absent from the world that was given to me, and consequently I didn't have before me a set of choices from which i could assemble a wholesome career and family life. So what then happened? What the hell was I to make of all this? Part of what was given to me was that I was being loved and nurtured by my family, and being educated for a useful life by the educational establishment. My duty was to believe in this, and my psyche was considered by my parents to be less important, or they wouldn't have considered my unusual gender identity an obedience problem.

The educational establishment had one chance to rectify all this. As a freshman at Yale I recognized that A) I needed a good outside opinion, and B) I was in a place where I could get one. I went to the University Health service, got an appointment with a conselor without stating what it was about, and showed up not really knowing what I needed to say or ask for except to just state I had a history of crossdressing. The counselor, after I made this statement, said something that seemed compassionate but she didn't have any questions for me. I said I understood that she was telling me that crossdressing was not a problem. I was centered on that issue rather than the larger and more urgent questions of just what I needed to do at this point. My parents had instilled the idea that I was an obedience problem in this matter and if I could get the counselor to commit to a judgment that it was not a problem then it was not an obedience problem and I would be relieved of the need for self-chastisement. The counselor answered my statement by rushing in to say she didn't mean that crossdressing wasn't a problem. It was at that point that my memory of the session ends. I left completely unsatisfied with the outcome and without any idea where to turn next. So I turned nowhere and five years later was in a mental hospital after sufferring an acute psychotic break.

For this reason I consider that Yale did me a disservice by the remarks of the counselor I saw. My openness to counseling was quashed and I never attempted to get more help. Well, perhaps negligence is hard to prove here, I don't know. I'm just not happy about Yale and what it has done for me in life. But that said, what can I expect from them now? These days, not much. It's not a happy story. Maybe I'll come to better terms with it with time. I am able to see, though, that my displeasure with Yale is based in my male complications and my female identity is basically patient about his.

Considerable rethinking awaits me, that's for sure, if I don't instead just throw out the whole male bag and accept truth as a female.