Trying to Figure Things Out

Hi, everyone. It wasn't until a couple of months ago that I started exploring my experience of gender, which seems rather odd to me given that I'm in my late 30s. I was born as a biological male and have learned how to present myself as such (although not very well in my opinion) but have always found myself more "at home" as a woman. I have presented myself online as a woman for 20+ years now, but if asked I will tell people that I am a biological male so as not to repeat past experiences in which I was "found out" and subjected to bile and vile treatment.

My identification as a woman exists within my head, heart, and spirit. My outsides don't match my insides, which makes me sad. I've always identified with women and am more at ease around them, even though I don't look like them. I wish I had been born a woman, but since I didn't get the body I wanted, I've made do with the one I have, even though I don't want it.

I don't experience dysphoria in my physical body, and at the same time I absolutely do not identify with being a man. I use my reproductive organs but would not mind at all if they fell off tomorrow. I don't have a compelling enough desire to go through the scary and painful process of becoming a physical woman - I am painfully shy and would simply crumble under the weight of all the attention placed on me. Some relatives would be understanding and supportive, some relatives' heads would explode, and how would I walk into a garage full of men looking like a man one day and a woman the next? (Not to mention my young children.)

In order to even explore this, though, I would need to talk to a gender therapist, but having recently lost my job and now only working part time, I don't have a whole lot of money for anything that isn't "essential." Obviously, my mental health and understanding what and who I am is very important, but something that exists inside me that other people don't really see (except when I'm online where there are no physical barriers) seems like it shouldn't really take priority over other things.

I'm looking for accurate descriptors for what I am, but I'm fully aware that getting caught up in labels isn't the best thing to do.

 

Thanks for the link. I've been doing a lot of reading lately. I approached gender from a binary point of view at first, thinking that because I don't identify as male despite having a man's body that I must be a woman and want to have a woman's body. I wasn't 100% sure that that's what I want and so I was freaking out about being a fraud and just making stuff up. The only problem is that this is a multi-decade, persistent "delusion" if that's the case - I've been so accustomed to being acculturated as a male that I forget all of the times I've received a negative public reaction for not playing the role to someone's satisfaction.

I was able to get over that and accept the fact that I sometimes feel like a girl and sometimes my attitude is "fuck gender." There are a lot of vocabulary terms out there and I think that "demigirl" describes basically what I feel on a day to day basis. Sometimes I'm a princess, sometimes I feel like nothing. I'm always female online because nobody can see me physically - I would be scared shitless to present myself as such in public to any degree. I wonder if I shouldn't start experimenting at home when nobody's around, because *damn it* I want to look fabulous.