Transexuality

Well...what do you want to know?

At the most basic level I guess it is simply that the body doesn't match the brain (or what some might call the soul). So I feel strongly that I am female, but my body is male.

 

Okay. The definitions are kind of inconsistent, but I'll see what I can do.

Transsexuals are people who transition to the opposite sex. Lately, this word has gotten a negative stigma among liberals. Personally, I'm fine with the word.
(Post-transition)Trans men are men who had female bodies at one point, and (post-transition)trans women are women who had male bodies at one point.
Transgender people have gender dysphoria due to the fact that their brain sex doesn't match up with the rest of their body.
A gender specialist/therapist/etc. can help a them get a diagnosis, so they can start their transition.
They get hormones (and sometimes surgeries) to help fix that.
When a person gets treatment and basically lives as the sex they should have been in the first place, they are transsexual.

I think.

 

I hear the opposite of this, since I am FtM. Many people cannot understand why I don't identify as a masculine female.

I don't identify as female, because in my mind I have never been female, and I never will be female. The people that say those things are just trying to convince me that I am something that I am not. They are clinging onto the fact that society sees me as female because of my genitalia.

 

Well, how you deal with it varies from person to person.

So for me, I am currently living as a woman. I have a female name, I ask people to use female pronouns (her, she), I wear female clothes. Eventually I will start hormone treatments and have surgeries to be anatomically female too.

I've found that nobody has suggested I might just be gay, because I didn't really act feminine before my transition and in a lot of ways I still don't. I tend to find if someone says anything they just assume I'm wrong and a bit weird for wanting to dress up like a girl.

I seem to notice a lot of trans men (female to male) seem to get accused of being lesbians...

 

Yeah, this has happened to me a lot. That and some rad fem's saying that I'm betraying them because I want to gain male privilege.

I usually just tell people that I'm the one that knows my feelings best, so they should respect how I identify, even if they don't agree with it.

 

"Are people around you comfortable with recognizing you as female and using female pronouns etc..?"

That depends. The people I already know have got used to it by now mostly. If I meet anybody new, they don't really have much of a choice. I'm fortunate enough to be in a position where I don't have to spend much time around people who can't accept me for who I am.

"Also, how did you discover that you were not male..?"

That's sort of a tough one...lots of ways I guess. The real trigger was underwear. For whatever reason I was deep in the middle of a serious bout of depression, one of the worst I've ever had, and I ended up ordering an...item...that happened to come with some girls underwear (can I just say right now it was clean and brand new underwear!!!). It took me a long while to wear, but after I did a whole bunch of things started to make sense. It didn't happen all at once at I didn't really make much of it until last year.

 

It is. It's costly, and it varies by location. I've heard that in some places, you can't get hormone treatments until you've been sterilized. Meaning, if you're MTF, you've had a vasectomy or full bottom surgery, or if you're FTM, you've had your ovaries, uterus, or both removed. I'm not sure about that though.

 

" up until you were 22, you didn't self identify as female..?"

Nope...I never really thought about it. Nothing ever felt quite right with me, but I've spent my life dealing (or more accurately NOT dealing) with serious depression so until very recently I repressed every single emotion I've probably ever had.

As for the second question? I don't know, I'm certainly not a misogynist! I'm all for gender equality and such, so take from that what you will.

 

There's a myth that all trans people have known since they were kids what their real gender was, but the truth is a lot of trans people don't self-identify as their gender until they're more or less adults. I didn't fully realise my own gender identity until I was 21.