One of my earliest pictures

Maybe babies in gowns were something that needed to be photographed....I don't know..but I DO look cute here.

Underneath it all is a boy. This is probably a professional picture in a studio, as I faintly remember that there were leather straps and buckles under the dress to hold me in an upright position.

Talk about child abuse!

Earlier On.....

That's me on the right, next to my brother who really became my "uncle" after he moved to my grandmother's house to be raised away from my dad. The facts will become more obvious as the story progresses.

I was raised by my mom who tried to keep me out of harm's way by raising me as a daughter for many years. I was a product of "brother-in-law" marriage, as my dad was lost presumed in the war and declared dead.

He wasn't..and I was born 4 months after he returned from WW-II. Maybe it was a Polaroid birth..but mom kept him at bay by dressing me and raising me as a girl for about 16 years.

That's where my story starts, but I wonder if my life experience is reason enough for me to be here.

I am "platform-crossed" to say the least; have had some therapy and medical intervention that brought some issues to the surface and I have "conditions" that make it harder and harder to conceal every day.

Hopefully I can find a little clarity in my search for emotions that are both male and female, and a body that works as male, but yearns for my female Phoenix 70%.

As introductions go, I guess this is kinda cryptic...but I am never at a loss for words...I just visit the emotional side of my mind and words and paragraphs and pages flow easily from me. I'd like to have some input from those who might have insight to my situation and can help me make good and decent choices.

Having been a lurker here for quite a while and reading many of the posts and questions, I haven't seen anything quite the same as I have experienced...but I am really opening my heart here and seeking information and some support for what I have lived so far. Who knows where this will lead...maybe I am happy as I am and need no further changes, but I don't think so. 70% of me is unhappy..but I can survive if I have to with the conditions at hand.

Looking forward to some answers and probably lots of questions from anyone who might read this, I'll close now and see if I have any responses.....

Where I Am, How I Got Here And Where I Might Be Going

Don't Believe Your Eyes

I had a not so odd childhood...if being dressed in all those little crinolines and bonnets were an indicator.

I was looking through an old photo album with my mom, and there I was...pretty as can be. Pink and blonde, with tiny spit curls in my hair like the child stars of the '30s had in their movies and fan pictures. I think I was even cuter than Shirley and most of the other starlets, as my mother would calmly agree with me: "Yes, you were" all the time.

Born in the first wave of the baby boom...that is the generation that as now is graying and growing to Social Security age...I was on the cusp of a lot of things that I didn't realize at the time, but do, definitely now.

My father, whom I really never remember until I was at least pre-teen, was rumored to have been killed in action with all the other guys on his boat, and my mother had been frantic to continue the "family name" with the birth of a male child. If I could be born within the nine months just after my father's reported death, then there'd be military considerations in the form of paid-for schooling, childcare and medical assistance to survivors and children of deceased soldiers and sailors.

The real mess up was that my father had not died in the war, not physically anyway. He was just reported as that to lessen the possibility that his boat had been involved in some sort of very dangerous skulduggery that to this day, I don't know and don't want to know of.

Suffice it to say, that good ol' mom was a kind of party girl...

.....and knowing what she NEEDED to do was get pregnant and to get pregnant fast, I have since deduced that it was my innocent...(up until that time anyway), my uncle on my father's side of the family who provided the necessary insemination. I suppose a little alcohol was used to lubricate the association a little...mom was a good drinker.

Keeping the family name, at least legally so, the same would somehow muddy the waters enough to make it at least feasible to the authorities..and they had no way that they could legally deny the fact that she was pregnant by her husband, not without spilling some of the beans about the clandestine secret stuff in which the Navy had been involved.

It would take some stretches of the imagination and some serious dot connecting to get to the bottom of the truth, but espionage and spies and double-00 agents are supposed to be able to do that sort of stuff as an everyday thing, so I guess they let it all slide and the maternity and delivery went as normal. I was born in a Naval hospital, where I cannot say nor do I even really know.

As a child, I had the usual things go on...I was raised in a semi-tropical country where the US has a flag on a pole somewhere, and we lived a pretty high on the hog life. Maids, cooks and nannies were common in our home, and they took really wonderful care of me while both my parents made a few cursory appearances from time to time.


They taught me their native language at least as good as a three or four year old could understand. I learned a lot of vocabulary but was, unfortunately short on sentence structure. To this day I slaughter Spanish verbs and conjugation, but that's another story altogether. I surprise myself when sometimes I know the perfect word in Spanish..and I get a kick out of telling it to my Californian Spanish-speaking friends. They think it's quaint that I use such obsolete and archaic words even though they fully understand them. They just don't use those words in their life.

Having faint recollections of a brother has always amused me. Many times I asked my mother where he was, and she'd deny that I ever had one. I remember him very well, but that too is another story.

As I remember it, we lived next to a very famous writer of fishing, hunting and man-sport stories: Papa Hemingway. There are memories of my sitting on his lap in my Sunday dress with the "Rumba Pants" with all the ruffles under my pretty pink and white dresses. Mom would almost always be around me somewhere when we visited him. She wore the customary gauzy lace head cover that was designated as "correct" covering for a woman in that were required in that age and custom, long gone now except in picture postcards of days gone by. I think it's called a Roboso.

Times like these, I had to hold the hand of my bigger brother as we walked with mom to the market for our usual treats for me and whatever small items she wanted to buy for herself. The home was well stocked by the cook and maids, so shopping was not a necessary duty for my mom. She used these times to show me off: her little baby doll.

When I got tired of walking, sometimes my brother would pick me up and carry me in his arms or other times we had the perambulator to carry me around in class and style. It was an olde English pram with the curtains and big white tires and sprung suspension that really worked. It would let the boot out and a child of fairly large size could even stretch out and sleep in it while it rolled along. They were very rich and avant-garde to be used in the Americas. We had a lot of money I think, as things like this were all around me. Expensive and custom accoutrement to life were just the butter on the bread to rich people.

I'd nap a little and when we got home, the maids would gather me up and take me to bathe me, in the sweetest smelling bath salts. Sometimes that is what we had bought that day. Other times I would be trying on the new dresses and shoes and bonnets and such that were bought at the local markets and specialty shoppes. Attention I never lacked.

If it weren't one maid or cook playing dress-up with me or trying to get me to talk in their native language or feeding me treats hot off the grill, then it was my mom doing pretty much the same things to me. I was cuddled and made to feel the position of my social stature by the “subservient” people who catered to my whims and fancy. I never seem to have abused my position though. I wasn't given to tantrums and fits of anger and the holding my breath tirades that I have had with my own children. I think I was a model child. Just ask my brother(s).

Life was a blur and I went from one school and town or city with a fair amount of rapidity for quite a few years. I didn't know why, but looking back I had to change my clothing style from more feminine to more masculine and back a bunch of times. Supposedly, and who was I to say, we had to move often as a condition of my father's employment. I knew better than to ask what it was. We even lived in sequestered neighborhoods with other families who seemed to all “know” the same secrets. We all went to the same military schools, bought foods at the same stores and did all the things that the other families did.

Recreational times were all set up as team events involving families and everyone in the same neighborhood. It was, I later thought, just a way of keeping outsiders, out ,and insiders, in. There wasn't any “shop” talk if you know what I mean. The moms if they ever did talk such things, did it away from our earshot and out of vision to us.

This went on for all my life up until my pre-teen years when we settled in a sunny California area where we still had the “need” to relocate every so often. I have always had wheels under my feet and frankly, staying in one place too long makes me sad in a silly way. I feel there's so much I am missing with being tied down and want to move to a new place and have to start again. I've done that so much that it is SOP with me.

The denial of my brother's existence and the dresses and long blonde hair and the pretty little girl were to me what seemed to be just a dream that belonged to somebody else somehow. If you tell something enough times to someone, they will eventually believe it. The same is true if you DON'T tell something all the time; it withers away and just seems to lie on the fringes of mental awareness.

The cool breezes in the hot tropical areas where we had once lived, as they blew up under my dresses and on my baby legs were just a feeling that I could not put into words. I remember them very well, it's just that I feel it might have been some out of body experience that I was having, but not really TO ME.

My brother, who has at this time been long in my mother's denial is also someone that I can play back in my mind like a poor quality video tape. He was so protective and such a good friend too. I have come to the conclusion to where he went and whom he was.

Mental regression is a term that has had it's heyday in the tabloids and as a pseudo-science, has in err been used to acquit and confirm the guilt of people charged with crimes, especially in crimes that happened to the victim. It's pure bunk I believe if it's performed like a parlor trick to amuse a jury or a judge in court. In person, however, if you allow a lot of little niggling thoughts to come together with some dot-connecting, can come to a fairly accurate account of a happenstance. This time, the happenstance is my life up to now.

I was never a sport-o guy. I was slight, under 150 lbs, under 5'10” and had a softer side than most of the jocks in school. I had won a few honors as in artistic capacity-type work with oils and bronze sculptures. Attending a prosperous arts school (who shall remain nameless here) in New York, set me into the artsy-crafts-y crowd easily. There are a few of my oil paintings in larger buildings in New York, and I don't think any of them suffered from 9-11.

I have a co-created set of sculptures on a campus at one of Southern California's Junior Colleges near Los Angeles to this day. You see them when you drive by the campus; they are near the street.

Running in gym class got me onto a cross country team, which is not a contact sport, not legally anyway. I could run like the wind and by accident found “the wall” one hits after the glucose is all burned up and you start calling reserves from your body fat to keep running. It was like a Twilight Zone thing. You could run forever without any effort at all. That ended for me when a very good friend got run over by a double dump eighteen wheeled gravel truck. He was to say, ruined for sports...and a whole lot more than that after it was all sorted out and all.

Excelling in Literature and fine arts, I had set my education to move toward a simple doctorate in Dentistry. After I got to college, I found that many...no make that: all the students were after the same major if not a real-estate degree of some sort. Seeing there was something really wrong with this scene, I chose to think about my final decision for a while...preferably the rest of my life. After all, how many dentists and real estate agents did the world need anyway?

About the same time as I had dreams of a different and disturbing and also softer life, I began to experiment in seeking what I thought was missing in me. I had no idea that for years before I had actually been the little girl who had lived in my dreams and recollections. The dreams were so real, yet I knew it couldn't be me. Little did I know that I was being fed drugs by my doting mother.

She had seen the Christine Jorgensen story and I think she went tilt at that. Here was a way to keep her little girl out of the military and out of harm's way at the same time. Here was a way to have a child to cherish and keep away from her revealing her sin as to my conception.

Let's flash-back a little first.

By the time I was born, my father had the inkling that there was a “Nigerian in the fuel supply”, to quote W.C. Fields, and he grew to hate me vehemently. Unless Polaroid was making babies in 1946, there's just no way I could be born less than four months after my dad returned from the war. The fear I had and still have for that man are real. He hated me from the day of my birth, but could not make too much of it all as it would reflect badly on his ever-so-secret-clearance in the military. He kept quiet. He took it out on me with hate, disgust and denial of the things a father should have done for a son or even a puppy. Even to this day, he tells me he wants nothing to do with me or my bastard kids...a Freudian slip if ever there was one.

Once in times way back, I had come as a passenger with my parents and my sister, who was four years junior to me to my uncle and aunt's home in central New Jersey somewhere. I never fully understood the conversations until much later when I could put it all together into a neater package.

My uncle and aunt were asking me all sorts of disassociated questions, but not at one sitting. The questions came in spurts as if I wasn't to know that they were plotting all my answers together into a mental notebook.

It went along these lines: “Where do you like to sleep?”. “What do you eat for breakfast?”, “Do you have any really good friends?”, “Do you like showers or baths?”, “Where do you sleep at home?”, “Do you do well in school?”...and on and on......

We visited for about five or six hours, and by this late date I have figured what it was all about: They were trying to give me away to my aunt and uncle, and they in return were asking me all sorts of questions to see if I was to be too much of an imposition to them.

They were a childless couple after all, and were being “entertained” into accepting me.

Now here's a revelation to me: In keeping with the honorable Irish-Catholic tradition of brother-in-law marriage, I think my mom had gotten my uncle a little drunk and she led him to pastures that he didn't remember. Now was the payoff. He had to take me back as I was his child in the first place. The argument fell onto deaf ears or at least never got off the ground, as I went home with my “parents” whom I had sort of known for all my life so far.

This little scene has played in my video tape files for years, and like I said, only makes sense to me as I put the rest of the tapes together.

As for my “brother(s), I also have this figured out too.

They were my uncles, both younger than my mom, and living at the time at my grandmother's home. If this is another piece in my puzzle, it's one that I haven't quite fathomed yet, but there are a few scenereos that fit well enough.

1)My mom had to remove me from our home when my dad was there, and that's why my reference of him as slight if even existent at all.
A).I was probably dressed female and that would incense my dad and this female garb might have been a tool to keep my dad
a) from remembering who I was, or
b) he wouldn't harm a little girl

B) I was in disguise to hide me in plain sight.

2.I was a reminder of my uncle and his brother and what he and mom did while he was away
3.I should not be in his sight as he hated me for all the above.

Any or possibly all of those scenes fit well enough.

My mom wanted a girl, and as my sister, who when later born was a preemie baby and was not expected to live, I might therefor be the girl she never would have.

I was being dressed and had pictures taken of me at those time when she was most proud of me and all mu finery to look at now. I made a fetching young baby girl even if I say so myself. I was cute and blonde...but I've already said all of that.

As to our moving all around: I thought it was the military way, but actually it was my mom's idea, as she could try me out in various schools as male and female purges to her conscience led her, and if I were to stay in one school during one of these “sex changes” it would have been hard to explain why I was a little boy one week and a little girl the next.

That makes a lot of sense to me now as I look back on other things that made no possible import at the time. Dreams are one thing, but nagging memories are something else. I had been so confused by the changes that were taking place in my life, but adherence to my mother's demands meant that I wouldn't get spanked, which happened quite regularly to me although my sister was never so touched.

About my tenth year, I was given estrogen in the form of first, birth control pills and later on as Estrogen in the form of Premarin. The little purple tablets were making some changes in the way I felt, especially in my strength. I couldn't run on track any more. Not that I even wanted to as I got to develop some pretty large breasts that only amplified my sexual confusion.

At this same time, unknown to me, my mom was getting me ready to avoid any military duty by making me sexually “vague” and therefor I would not be draft-able at all...she thought..

The treatment didn't go on too long as she saw the results were very fast and obviously she could pick them up any time she wanted to. She had initiated me into a situation that I would both enjoy and hate at the same time.

This time was devoted to dressing me as a girl, full tilt!

I had dresses and lingerie and training bras and all the things a young girl could ever need. If this didn't work, then my sister could just inherit the things if I didn't turn out as she wanted me to.

Mom took my sister and me to church, Mass actually at the Catholic Churches in whatever towns we were in at the moment. I remember going great distances to another town to go to Mass, as it would not be good to be seen in our local town by people who knew me as male.

Dreams of things from a long time ago started to surface again...the frilly feelings and softness of the female gender. I wore all girl things very happily again as I experienced a joy in the freeness of a skirt and dress and the softness of my hair on my neck and shoulders.

Hair was a primary concern to me and especially to mom. If I looked good in the hair department, then I guess the charade was easier to pull off. We spent hours looking through fashion and hair magazines for just the right coiff for me. We found that a Page Boy was best, but I really wanted the long hair that I could swish around like I saw all the pretty women do.

Learning makeup was rather easy for an art student. Patience with brushes and paints followed naturally into doing my face, and I got good at making myself pretty and girly without going over the top to trampy.

She waited for another move for me to go full time as a young girl, now a teenager wirth svelt hips and a good complexion. My breasts had a bounce to them as I guess the estrogen had a slow down effect that took a little longer to stop all the changes that were going on to my body. I just continued for a while developing and getting curves and smoother.

Fortunately, I never developed a hard set of boy-pubic hair or got much of the natural (for a boy anyway) growth of my testes and penis.

I had the normal triangular pubic patch over what developed into a nice Mons area...the fat pad that girl;s get over their labia and vagina. This is what creates that nice bulge in tight jeans and a bikini.

From this point on, it was clear to me that I was going to be a girl...even if I had some deeper doubts that it could work out. Not that I didn't WANT to be a girl...I had distinct ideas that I should have been one by now..talk about NURTURE, not NATURE!

The problem was that I never looked at guys as interesting to me. I still liked girls, or at least I strongly believe that I still do.