Notes on Gender Role Transition
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http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm
Some spookily accurate excerpts:
"Group Three (G3) is composed of natal males who identify as female but who act and appear normally male. We can hypothesize that prenatal androgenization was sufficient to allow these individuals to appear and act normally as males but insufficient to establish a firm male gender identity. For these female-identified males, the result is a more complicated and insidious sex/gender discontinuity. Typically, from earliest childhood these individuals suffer increasingly painful and chronic gender dysphoria. They tend to live secretive lives, often making increasingly stronger attempts to convince themselves and others that they are male....
The story is very different for Group Three. In the hope of ridding themselves of their dysphoria they tend to invest heavily in typical male activities. Being largely heterosexual, they marry and have children, hold advanced educational degrees and are involved at high levels of corporate and academic cultures. These are the invisible or cloistered gender dysphorics. They develop an aura of deep secrecy based on shame and risk of ridicule and their secret desire to be female is protected at all costs. The risk of being found out adds to the psychological and physiological pressures they experience. Transitioning from this deeply entrenched defensive position is very difficult. The irony here is that gender dysphoric symptoms appear to worsen in direct proportion to their self-enforced entrenchment in the male world. The further an individual gets from believing he can ever live as a female, the more acute and disruptive his dysphoria becomes....
In what follows I describe five distinct developmental stages, that make up the standard periods of developmental psychology: childhood, adolescence, young adult, middle age, and older adult.
Childhood---Confusion and rebellion
Adolescence--False hopes and disappointment
Early adulthood--Hesitant compliance
Middle age--Feelings of self induced entrapment
Older adult--Depression and resignation"
Since there is no evidence that cross-gender behavior occurs more often in boys than it does in girls, a possible interpretation of this statistic is that effeminacy in boys may be considered by parents to be more upsetting and in need of correction than tomboyish behavior in girls.
Given the nature of the disorder and the ability of some children to conceal it, I believe that most children with gender dysphoria are never diagnosed as such. Those children cope by sticking rigorously to the role expected of them. Privately, however, they continue to go deeper and deeper into a highly guarded parallel world of cross-gender envy and fantasy. Given their propensity to be studious, detached and self absorbed, I have come to think of these children as living cloistered lives. These children grow up to form the core of Group Three.
For cloistered gender dysphoric boys it was in the area of peers and activities, especially sports, that the problem was most noticeable. Unable or uninterested in competing in organized boys' activities and having been shuffled decidedly away from playing with the girls, many became reclusive. To add to their confusion, and counter to behavior typically reported in openly gender dysphoric boys, many cloistered boys actually preferred solo play with boys' toys and had little or no interest in girls' toys. For example I have heard more than one long-time post-op male-to-female transsexual speak fondly of having spent countless hours playing with an Erector Set or a Lionel model train set-up that their father had helped them build. Others described of designing and making detailed model airplanes, race cars and sailing ships. The more academic of this group report little or no interest in sports and rough and tumble play. To avoid castigation from their peers, they report spending a lot of time reading and studying. However, although these children appeared to be normal boys doing what most people would consider some normal boy activities, they may very well have been doing so while secretly wearing their mother's or sister's underwear, fantasizing about being a girl or both if they could manage it....
Another common attempt to "make it"- as a man by gender dysphoric males in this age range is to marry and have children. Unlike their non-dysphoric male peers, these men's attraction toward the idea of family is not the standard one. Some individuals report telling their partners about their life long desires to be female before getting married, but the vast majority do not, perhaps from fear of ridicule or rejection, or because they maintain the fantasy that marriage will provide a cure. Many clients report that they were sure that being a husband would cement their maleness. This logic, unfortunately, gets extended to the idea of having children. Although gender dysphoric males are generally no better or worse as fathers then the next man, they soon come to realize that what they had hoped would be an answer has instead complicated their gender issues enormously.....
For those who continue to struggle inwardly with their gender issues into mid-life, new issues come to the fore. As a time when most people realize that about half of life has been lived and feel the need to make an accounting of who they are and what they have done with their lives, this period can be especially anxiety provoking for the gender-dysphoric individual. Decades of trying to overcome an increasing gender expression deprivation anxiety begin to weigh heavily on the individual. Family and career are now as deeply rooted as they will ever be. The idea of starting over as a member of a different sex has become seemingly impossible. The fact that the need to change sex has increased rather than diminished, despite Herculean efforts, is now undeniable....
Yet when interviewed, those who chose to remain male speak of a clear longing for what might have been. Senior gender dysphoric males typically report they have been waiting, many since childhood in the hope that their desire to be female would simply "go away." Like those who are younger, they say in resignation that if they had known the dysphoria was going to remain such a strong force in their lives, they would have braved anything to face their dilemma decades sooner...
Characteristically these people can be described as sad, depressed and deeply resentful. In treating these individuals, the best that can be done is to help them feel better about cross-dressing and encourage them to have contact with other crossdressers their age. Success of sorts can be as simple as helping someone find the courage to shave off a moustache behind which he has been hiding his gender issues for forty years."
it goes on with uncanny accuracy... well worth a read.
-both paths have pain ahead, but only one of them promises a way out of that pain. It comes at a high cost, but there's not much that can be done about that
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