So why not just jump off Beachy Head?

 I had thought to start this blog with something easy like the difference between transsexuals and transvestites or my deep psychological commitment to shopping but I felt that something more fundamental would be appropriate.

Why would I spend thousands making largely irreversible changes to a perfectly good male body to turn it into a reasonable approximation of the female, to throw away a comfortable married life and potentially, put my comfortable professional life at risk?  It is hard to explain.

I put the pieces together in my early teens.  How do you describe knowng that you are female, wanting to be female but trapped in a male body?  To feel this every minute of every day but have to pretend to be the opposite.  I went to an excellant county boys only grammar school, where not to conform was pretty dangerous.  I learned to be a very good actor.

I tried explaining how I felt to my mother in my late teens but her reaction was largely fear of how my father would react - no help there.

I have tried, over the intervening 30 years NOT to transition but how did Sherlock Holmes put it?  "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however implausible, must be the truth."  So it is for me.  I have tried hard, so hard, to be what society expects of me but now I am going to be true to myself.

In my mid-twenties I worked at Eastbourne and thought seriously about transition for the first time.  I also thought very seriously about suicide - Beachy Head was, after all, close by!  I decided, after about 6 months of sef-counselling, that I would make the best of life, whatever it had to offer.  I did not think then that I could transition sucessfully, or perhaps more accurately, to an accetable standard for myself.  Now, all these years later, what has changed?

For me it the prospect of the facial surgery I have booked for the summer.  I pass reasonably successfully as female when carefully dressed and made-up but my features are rather male and the postman bringing me urgent papers at 8.30 would be in no doubt that he was delivering to a man.  Facial surgery should change that and allow me to pass with little or no make-up.  I could never have afforded it 20 years ago and the techniques were no-where near as well-developed.

Such a history does give me an unusual prospect on other events.  Things which other people get worked up over do seem rather peripheral....

So do enjoy the journey with me, it should be an interesting trip.

regards

Moira