Question 1

The following is a question by Madeline H. Wyndzen to help explore transgenderism. 

Imagine you could start life over, right from the moment you were born. Knowing everything you know now, you get to choose which sex you are born. What choice would you make? Why did you make that choice? What might be better about your life as the sex you chose? What might be worse about your life as the sex you chose? 

This question really got me because I haven't had the best life ever.  It's pretty good now, but it hasn't always been.  Also I find that a shrinks diagnoses of me wanting to be someone else has clouded my thoughts on my gender for a very long time.  If I chose to have been born the boy I feel I am, which is gay and somewhat effeminate, I doubt that my young life in the 70's and 80's would have been very pleasant.  On the other had, it is likely that I would have escaped the sexual abuse that happened to me on two occasions. 

Being transgendered led to depression and frustration until I knew what I was.  Even as a teen, knowing who I was for a short time, faced with leaving friends and family behind at the prospect of living my life as I felt it should be lived filled me with fear and apprehension at the same time as it filled me with hope.  Then 20-odd "lost years" while I was trying to be a female, during which I had no direction or ambition and almost no will of my own.  After my son was born, I got my act together a bit, but that was for another person, not myself.  Now I live with frustration and confusion.  I feel like I have a secret and no one really knows me.  I think that I would prefer to have lived my life without that if I didn't know about this life because I could not give up my son and husband for anything.