I have been something of a lurker for awhile after initially registering, hmmm I think in September. A failing of mine is to leap before checking for shoals,
and after I registered (as Lacey Neal) I got around to reading the info about the intended audience and wasn't sure I met the qualifications. I tried to find the poll results about the proposed rule 6 but couldn't for some reason, and it wasn't 'til Rikki directly asked about it that I learned that rule 6 was not operative. (Thanks Rikki 
) (Sharon, I promise that I am probably more inhibited and conservative in my behavior than you are, but if I should say something in these posts or in chat you take great execption to, I hope you will tell me about it.) By that time Lacey Hadley had registered, and I thought perhaps shifting my name to Carolynn would help prevent future confusion. Thanks to Shannon for helping take care of that detail. I have been coping, not too successfully, with GID for about 53 yrs., through a succession of recognition, denials, depressions, promises to take control of myself, and other attempts to form some sort of "normal" life. I've always detested team sports, and most others as well. I found most young males rough, preferring physical exertion and competition for bragging rights over all. I was always careful of my toys and books regardless what they were, and the surest way to see them destroyed was allow some male, even my cousins, free access to them. I preferred the gentler, more imaginative play of girls from my earliest social interactions according to family stories, though not put in just that way.
My earliest memory of a difference in the way I felt was during my 4th year. I had been having some sort of frequent bladder infections largely due to a tendency for the forskin to adhere to the penis and close or heal over. A local doctor and surgeon encouraged my parents to have me circumcised to stop the problem, and to correct some other unspecified problem that my mother no longer recalls. They explained what was to happen in a vague manner, and in my incomplete understanding, I thought they were going to cut that particular member off and I would then be a girl. I was not at all disturbed by that prospect, and was quite looking forward to it. Imagine my disappointment when I found that only a few bits and pieces had disappeared, and I still had what I had always had, only now it was sore and stuck to some rough gauze. :!: I still remember trying to come down the stairs the first morning after the minor surgery (the bathroom was downstairs), experiencing the pull and hurt of the gauze, and the confusion on seeing things still basically there while sitting on the commode, followed by just the "OH, I guess that was wrong". kind of acceptance of the status quo.
I had my first understanding about whyI felt different in my 7th year. My closest playmate lived across the street, a pretty little girl named Sondra with dark hair and eyes.
We were about equal in size, since I was a bit slow growing, even though there was about 4 months between our births. We played games, swung on her swings, played with our dolls (yes, I had three, two were cloth dolls (Raggedy Ann and Andy), and one was a rubber/plastic doll I called Angel that you could feed and then it would wet, so you had to change her diapers. There was also a third, but I couldn't play with her as she was one that a great uncle had whittled for my mother. I got to hold her in my early years, but only under supervision. (Though the cloth body is now gone, my sister still has the hand whittled components in her things.) Angel disappeared when I was 7, when we were moving. She had been a source of some little contention between me and my parents, and I had accidentally rescued her from the trash barrel behind the house a year earlier after a discussion where it was suggested that boy's my age didn't play with dolls, and I insisted that she was mine and should remain that way. 
It was almost like they thought I wouldn't miss her if she just disappeared. I had a secret place beside the house under some decorative vines you could only enter by passing between two cedar tree trunks and access to a crawl space behind the vines, where I thought she would be safe. I could rig it out kinda like the inside of a playhouse with doll furniture of a sort. Sondra joined me in it some, but her place was just so much better for our purposes. I got a rectangular metal container with a tight fitting lid at my Aunts, made a bed inside with a baby doll blanket, and kept Angel in the secret place and sometimes under the house crawlspace where my parents wouldn't find her. I could check on her, play with her when I was alone, or slip her out to Sondra's house when we were going to play. I was very careful to wait 'til the last minute to recover her before we moved, and when I went to do so, I found the vines cut back, the crawl space had been opened, and there was no sign of the box or doll. We looked hard and I crawled under the house, but no sign of Angel. I asked mother, and she said she hadn't seen Angel in a long time. I wouldn't ask dad, but I was sure it was him, and that Angel was really gone this time. :x I guess I forgave him over time, but even now writing about it, I feel a little angry and hurt that they would treat a kid that way, even though they were sure they were doing the right thing. 
Sondra and I also tried to play house, but when we were 5 and 6 we had an imperfect understanding of such subtleties of human behavior.
We knew adults got up in the morning, momma made breakfast and a lunch for dad, then dad left to "work", whatever that was. Then he came home, you ate supper, then you washed dishes and went to bed. After a few tries at that, we decided it was pretty boring and decided on tea parties, and making mud pies instead when we could play outside. Of course we had to be dressed up for the tea parties, and it was her idea that I should be her girlfriend for the party, so I dressed up too as it just really didn't matter to me. Her mother thought we were cute and put lipstick on us. When we were in our 7th summer, our parents each were transferred to other locations, my family leaving a few weeks ahead of hers. Sondra and I were pretty cut up about it, but there wasn't much we could do.
The weekend before the big move, my parents had to go to our new town about 80 miles away to finalized the purchase of a house. I would usually have stayed with my aunt and uncle, but Sondra and I begged our way into me staying the weekend, our last, at her house. We played hard, and I spent most of it in dress up clothes or her clothes. The last night of the weekend, really the last night I would be her neighbor, I was lying in my bed thinking about it and it just overwhelmed me and I started crying but as quiet as I could. Sondra wasn't sleeping either and heard me sniffing in spite of me trying to be quiet, and she came to see about me. She crawled onto the bed with me and we hugged and then we were both crying for awhile. We ran out of tears but stayed snuggled together whispering, and at some point in our conversation I told her I had rather be a girl instead of a boy. She told me that was OK, that I would always be her best girlfriend no matter what. (We were 21 when we next met, and I was 2 days from departing to military service in 1964, male mode firmly in place, doncha' know. Sondra had seen my aunt first in the store where both were shopping, and learned from her where I was and slipped up behind me as I looked out the door into the parking lot. She put her arms around my waist from behind, her chin on my left shoulder, and whispered in my ear "How's my best girlfriend?", and I KNEW who I would find when I turned around. The strength of my emotions surprised us both, and me especially since I had been hiding all of mine so well for so long. My eyes overflowed, and hers came along for the flood, and we made our way out the door and into the relative privacy of the parking lot, odd as being more private in a public place may sound, to recover. We didn't have but a few hours, but we enjoyed them talking, shopping with her; she would hold a dress or top or something up to me as though to see how it would fit, like somebody just goofing around, but really getting a feel for my size.
Before I left that day, and I was going from there to my parents home, then to officer training on the coast the next day, we agreed that we would be together on my first leave home. It happened, but not for the weekend we had planned, but only for 36 hrs. Southeast Asia was heating up by April of 1965, and her civilian job at a military base had Sondra on extra shifts on call, and she was called in. We made plans for the next leave, which would turn out not to be until Dec. 1966, and by then she was dead due to a surgical accident. When she was tubed by an inexperienced or inattentive nurse anesthetist her esophagus was pierced and when they sent gas to put her completely under, (she was already out by an injection) they filled up her diaphram with gas, which halted her respiration and there is no way to release that pressure in time. I only got that information a few years ago from her sister who is a nurse herself, and I think I got it all correct. Because of our operations in southeast asia, Sondra was buried for three weeks before I even heard about her death. That was nearly 40 years ago and I still miss her BADLY!
) It wasn't until the summer of my 10th year, about May 16 (I think), 1953, I learned my yearning had a name, and that there was a treatment for it. This happened when Christine Jorgenson made the news as a delayed Movietone-In-the-News clip, about 45 seconds or less long I suppose. I experienced a sensation of perfect clarity and understanding, and sat through a unmemorable matinee three times to see the clip again and again, thinking and speculating furiously during the main feature.
After about a month of pondering, I decided to talk to my mother about it. With my usual impeccable sense of timing, I picked a morning after breakfast after my dad had left for work, during which she was in the throes of morning sickness as my soon to be sister was making herself known. I, of course, had been so completely self absorbed I hadn't noticed anything unusual. She had little time for a 10 year old, and unloaded the opinion that "people like that were bad and going straight to Hell". I stumbled outside (while mother made yet another trip to the john in search of the venerable RALPH) to my secret place (I always had a secret place at every house we lived in until I learned to create it inside me) and cried a little and thought a lot. I decided that since I wasn't bad then I couldn't be like "them", but knew deep down that I was lying to myself about the last part, and maybe therefore about the first too? That was the first time I lied to myself about myself, but not the last.About a year later, a new preacher (Southern Baptist) recently returned from Korea came to our church, and invited the young people to come talk to him if they had a problem. He occupied a house with his family about 4 blocks from us and were within my allowed bike riding range, so seeing him working on a rose bush in his yard, I proposed the question to him of what he knew about men who had their sex changed by doctors. His response reinforced my mother's and expanded it to include the doctors as future dwellers in the depths of hell. He also differed in that he applied the word "evil" in his definition. I tapered off going to church (didn't feel welcome there), and by the time I was 13, I did not attend other than at the total insistence of my parents for special occasions.
Between years 10 and 13, I had another load dumped on me by my need to talk to someone. I chose my Aunt, (mother's sister) as she was always like a second mother to me. When I explained how I felt, she was upset, but more for me and my parents and our relationship, and wrung a promise out of me to not tell them--ever!
The second load came from another aunt (father's sister) a couple of months later. I was spending a weekend with them (she had 7 sons at the time, 3 more later) and I was going through a rough time again. So, not feeling like the society of my rough humored male cousins, I hung around the kitchen with her and just handed her things as she baked and induldged in the light banter she was so good at. In a lull, she asked what was bothering me, and I just told her. Her reaction was to hug me and make me promise to never tell my dad as "it would just kill him". Wow! No pressure! . Neither Aunt was surprised I never married, and never again mentioned our conversations. At this perspective, I am sure that what they thought I was telling them was that I was homosexual, which, of course, wasn't it at all. If I appreciated then what making and therefore having to keep those promises would do to my happiness and satisfaction in life....., well, being the 12 years-old child that I was and raised as I was, I would likely have made the same damned stupid decision. I've never been able to not keep a promise if at all possible. I have spent my life, so far, behind a mask of mostly good humor and jokes, with a positive outlook on most things. The last part does seem to be part of me, and may be the only part that is real that I have shown others. I have people that are friends in as far as they think they know me, and the mask has been successful to a great extent. I developed hobbies (especially some dealing with minatures and models--can anyone say Dollhouse and museum dioramas
?), and a career but with modest goals that have given me a measure of satisfaction. Recently one friend of nearly 30 years spent some time with me at a meeting, and commented that I hadn't changed in all that time (oh, she meant behaviorally, not physically!) 
. I realized that was because her expectation is for the behavior patterns of my mask or shield, and when a mask works, you don't change it much, do you. At least I haven't. :| Though I am mostly positive in perspective, I have periods of depression when I feel that life has largely been wasted.
When I have considered "coming out" (a term that seems literal more and more), I found the spectre of guilt from potentially disappointing family, or not keeping promises made to well loved family a controlling influence. Recently the guilt wars with anger as I feel the need to BE who I feel I should have been, and this grows stronger as I grow older and see decreasing opportunity and less and less time to find me. Of my family, my mother and sister still live, but I am bound by promises only so long as mother lives. However, she shows no sign of passing anytime soon, and genetics is on her side. Another small load of guilt---I can only live as me when she dies; As I get older, I find myself feeling impatient to get on with MY life? What kind of person does that make me?I finally "gave up" and accepted that I am who I am, and can't change myself into anything like "a real male" in late 2000/early 2001. In 1996 I began what I know now was my last attempt to deny all. I tried to sublimate my need, substitute other things like work, hobbies, and keep myself so busy with them there was no time to think. By 2000, I had gained 80 lbs. and was thoroughly miserable. I have never considered suicide as a viable (
) solution to anything, so it came as quite a surprise to find I had made three subtle attempts on my own life. Two were medical in nature, the weight gain a large part of it. For the other, I travel a lot, and I found I was enamoured of certain bridge abutments that I found on my trips. The spans were long, the drops far to the water below, and I calculated each time I approached just how fast I would need to be traveling to impact the bridge, and where, to cause maximum damage to the bridge, but the potential damage to me was never considered in the calculations- it was a purely intellectual excercise, right?. One day in November of 2000 the blaring air horn on a semi startled me in time that I turned the wheel enough, soon enough to only side swipe the bridge I had been concentrating on, leaving a deep score along the entire side of the vehicle I was driving and paint on the banister. I stopped at the other end, as did the trucker, and I lied through my teeth to thank him for waking me up as I had fallen asleep on the long drive. But I still avoided thinking about a "why".I had skipped my annual physical for three years, and at the expression of concern from some friends I kept an appointment, and was sent the next day to a medical facility for an EKG due to a very high blood pressure. It went poorly with BP quickly rising into the danger range, but there was no apparent blockages, so a stress EKG was arranged and I was sent home with a prescription and orders for 2 days bed rest while awaiting that appointment. So then I started facing what was going on, because there was no physical reason for the blood pressure. It didn't require much thought to understand that the conflict between need and denial was the source; I have had enough psychology to understand how it works and how the mind can affect the body. The answer was waiting at the threshold for a crack in the latest closed door. And I finally looked at the bridge episode of a month earlier. I gave up, and I spent most of that two days in tears and not sure why, but I suppose now in some kind of mourning. Between the EKG and the stress EKG appointments, my blood pressure top numbers dropped 96 points into the high normal range, and was actually 5 points lower at the end of the stress test which I handled easily.
I have been continuing to struggle a bit, and still have not opened up to anyone other than this forum. I have had initial interviews with a couple of counselors, but have felt unsatisfied with the initial contact and not followed up. Not sure if it is just more footdragging, or they are really as unapproachable as they seem (both are male--do I have a bias?).
I have had to make a few accomodations to the inner me to be kind of at peace. Though it is no longer fashionable to do so, especially for someone of my generation, I have let my hair grow to below my shoulders. It is thinning on the crown, and the hairline isn't positioned as I'd like, but I like it this way better than male mode short. My nails are neat and somewhat longer than male norm. I haven't worn male underwear since 2001, and when I come home from work, I remove my work clothes and put on jeans and a top and flats or sandals, unless I am going to friends for dinner or it's my turn to travel to my mothers home to take my turn in caring for her. And I have enough money put back to start electrolysis in January. A technician with an office in her home 8 miles from me and skilled in working with transsexuals will take it on.
Her rates are reasonable, but will still likely eat up the savings pretty fast, so we will be doing what is needful first. Well, this is a long post and likely should be broken into segments, and maybe parts put in other locations. Sorry if it's in the wrong place, and I am not sure how to correct the distribution.
Welcome, welcome, welcome! 
After a particularly grueling time, we set out for some R&R in Singapore, that would bring us to cross the equator. For you non-naval types, the ceremony of crossing the equator is an opportunity for perpetuating sadistic behavior on the uninitiated Pollywogs by the experienced Shellbacks (those who had already crossed). It is a tradition grounded in the distant past, and no longer requires virgin sacrifice---they're just far too hard to find --and now anybody will do! 
umbrella 