Crossdressers-Haven.com

Hi Everyone.

I'm happy because I found an incredible sense of completion. My feminine life has brought out a more loving, gentle and sensual side of my personality that has been simmering away in the background. I absolutely adore beeing dressed. I also am from a small town in B.C. and have not until now... YAHOO!!... been able to share myself with other girls.
I am sad or perhaps more accurately unsure of the intensity that this life has brought on. I am happily hetero., but I am considering feminisation both hormonally and surgically. Beyond the obvious consiration of the latter, I also realize that this may require a complete change of venue and lifestyle. More and more these ideas scare me less but I would love to get your feedback. Don't be afraid to tell me that I'm cracked!!

Love and happiness to all

Ricci

Some thoughts for you to consider. My hormones are whacked due to a brain tumor and mismanagement of testosterone by my endocrinologist. So I have extensive feminzation though it was not my choice. So let me give you a preview:

1. Breasts are nice but until you live as a female, they pose a problem for men. You can't put them in the drawer at night. So how would you address them at work, in your leisure activities, etc.

2. Hormones play with your mind, good and bad. Good: I feel so much calmer because of the estrogen influence - I used to have an agressive male personality but not anymore. Bad: if you want to stay male, they afffect how you view the world. When I look at a VS catalog, I don't see great women I see bodies I want and clothes I want. If you want to stay male, the libido goes. You sill lose muscle mass and tone, gain a butt, gain very soft skin (good).

Hormone therapy is not very reversible; once you have breasts only surgery removes them. Sex reassignment surgery certainly isn't reversible.

I have no advice on which way is better for you - only you know that. You want to experiement going female more and more and see how that works. I guess I would suggest caution and conservative approaches first.

Good luck.

Ridge

Hi Ridge
Thank you for your thoughts and I hope all is well for you.
I share your concerns. I have a strong feeling that this a good thing for me. I cannot see myself living with a purely male form for much longer, so I will make a slow and considered journey. There are other goings on in my life that would allow for the environment to persue this course.
I am at once nervous but also excited... the dream of living and looking more feminine feels right.

All my best to you

Ricci

Hi Ricci,

I think each of us has a balance point, a point at which our relative male and female energies are in balance, and we feel serene, content, and relaxed. For some, that point is crossdressing at home once every couple of months. For others, it's SRS. For many of us, it's somewhere in between.

I think the concept is important because when you're far away from your balance point, it seems so distant that we may think we want to go "all the way." As we approach the balance point, these desires will vanish. We may actually go further than our balance point in the search for balance, and have to swing back. Of course we want to keep these swings to a minimum, because as Ridge pointed out, a lot of the changes are non-reversible. Hormones, electrolysis, and surgery are expensive too.

I would recommend going as far as you can without hormones or surgery. That way, nothing you do is irreversible. Find the lifestyle that works for you. Mine was a lot further along than I ever expected--I live full time as an openly transgendered woman. And I've never taken a hormone in my life. But this is my balance point, and I'm happy here.

Another thing that I have learned from talking to a lot of transsexuals: A real TS HATES her masculinity. She hates the organs, not just the effects of the testosterone. A crossdresser, on the other hand, is comfortable and accepting of the male organs. A crossdresser enjoys the use of them, and so on. Another difference: A crossdresser may have feelings of wishing to be a woman. A transsexual feels that she IS a woman, just trapped in the wrong body.

In any case, a GOOD therapist, experienced in gender issues, can guide you to the right decision.

Please make the right decision. Take as long as you need to make it. You should be absolutely sure before you do anything that can't be reversed.

RikkiOfLA wrote: Another thing that I have learned from talking to a lot of transsexuals: A real TS HATES her masculinity. She hates the organs, not just the effects of the testosterone.

A transsexual feels that she IS a woman, just trapped in the wrong body.

Question: do you not mean a transgender rather than a transexual. As from what I understand transgendered feel like they are in the wrong skin or body.

If I am wrong then I am sorry.

Jessie

Jessie asks...

do you not mean a transgender rather than a transexual. As from what I understand transgendered feel like they are in the wrong skin or body.

The answer to that depends on the meaning of the term "transgender."

Social service agencies and activists tend to use the term as an umbrella that covers everything from drag queens through crossdressers, the intersexed, and transsexuals. A very unscientific poll that I did on the CDDF about a year ago showed that about 40% of crossdressers who responded to the poll considered themselves transgendered. They tended to be the ones who had reasons for crossdressing in addition to (or instead of) a sexual thrill. For example, I consider myself transgendered. I live full-time as an openly transgendered woman. Do I feel like I'm in the wrong body? Not at all. I rather like the body I'm in, though I might make a few relatively minor changes to it (lose weight, change the hair color, etc.) they don't include replacing the sex organs.

Hi Rikki,

About your original question. I can understand the need to want to explore more and I suggest you see your doctor about taking depo-provera. This way you can rid yourself of testosterone without taking any feminizing hormones.

For a couple of months I took another kind of medication that is just like DP and I was testosterone free. It was very enlightening not having a certain part of me show arousal. The biggest side effect was I had zero libido. I did stop and though I may do it again in later years I now have no even further believe I don't want to take feminizing hormones. Having no testosterone was enough for me.

I fear the power of feminizing hormones and I also believe they can alter the mind. Because I "think" they can, I shy away from them. I like my "two sides self" and feminizing hormones (with my experiences with friends) seem to make the split move from 50/50 to 60/40 or higher, after prolonged use of feminizing hormones.

I do want you to know Rikki I support you no matter what you do. You're the best!

Beauty

Hi Beauty and Rikki

It seems we have two Ricci/Rikki's. Hey sister! Thank you so much for your thoughts. I am considering the above very seriously...my head hurts.
Perhaps my feelings are partly from my sense of isolation. I live in a very small town and the idea of going outside en femme is out. Although one late night after a good bottle of Cabernet I did manage to dress and have a stroll. It felt so liberating but confess rather silly as I was the only person let alone somewhat tipsey transvestite walking around in the gloom. This forum has been such a blessing to me and perhaps what I need next is to connect with real people. Although I love to be feminine I still feel like I'm hiding somehow. I envy, no celebrate with you that have found a way to live more openly. Perhaps you can help me with that one, how have you acheived this level of confidence.

Love to you all

Ricci

Ricci:
What I would tell you is you really need to get in touch with yourself to the point of understanding how you feel about yourself as a male. As has been stated those that undergo the SRS evidently really hate their male attributes and want to see them gone. If you are at that stage, forget "balance," you have tipped the scales to a goal you should strive for. If, on the other hand, you can be content to just CD to whatever time frame you are comfortable with then that is the road to take. It takes time honey, so do just that! Take you time to assess where you are and where you want to go. The hormones, for my opinion, are weighted in the decision making and should be left alone until you mentally determine where you are and where you, you without drug induced "therapy" want to go.
You know that we are your sisters in this and will be here for you what ever your decision.
Love, Deborah

Ricci asks...

Perhaps you can help me with that one, how have you acheived this level of confidence.

Dear Ricci,

Well, I'll try. I wasn't always this confident.

In fact, I used to be a "purge queen"--I would see something that I fancied, buy it, try it on, look in the mirror (and usually pleasure myself) and then throw it away in disgust, promising never to do THAT again. A promise I had no trouble keeping--until the next time.

One thing that helped me develop confidence was going into the hospital for angina. That was a little too close to death for me! And I started to realize that my time on this earth was not as unlimited as I used to think. It was high time I grew up, and stopped letting others think for me. It was time I started living my last few years the way I wanted to. My turn!

When I started wanting to dress I was broke. I couldn't afford the whole kit--wig, makeup, and breastforms as well as clothes. So I started dressing androgynously when I could. I started out slowly, one thing at a time. I watched people's reactions to me. I began to discover that reactions were not always what I expected. For one thing, color was very important--certain colors seem more acceptable than others.

Another thing I discovered was that my attitude had a lot of bearing on how people reacted to me. If I acted confident, friendly, and outgoing, people would see beyond how I was dressed, and see me as a real person.

By dressing androgynously, I learned a lot of confidence. I couldn't hide behind the illusion of "passing." I began learning how deal with hecklers. How to give teenagers the "cold eye" and to give women that tight-lipped little smile they give each other. I learned a lot of confidence that way. When you're facing a gaggle of teenagers and you're wearing shorts and opaque black tights with a big old purse slung over your shoulder, you HAVE to have confidence! And I also discovered that confidence carries over into work and other aspects of life, too.

So when I started crossdressing, it floored me that I "passed." I didn't look much like a woman. My makeup which I did wasn't very good. Neither was the wig or the clothes. I began to discover that passing isn't fooling everyone into thinking I must have been born female. It's acting like a normal person, comfortable in her skin and surroundings, going about her business. So if anyone makes an issue, it will appear to most people that the issuer has the problems, not me.

Here's an illustration. One day I was at the mall. I passed an unusual family--a drunk, his wife, and their teenage son. Drunks, of course, are not the most perceptive people--they are merely uninhibited about what they say. So as I pass him, I see his little wheels turning. I intuited there might be trouble. So I sped up. By the time his thought process reached his mouth and he said (rather loudly) "Hey, that's a guy!" I was about 50 feet down the mall. It probably looked like he was talking about his hallucination or something. And his wife and son began shushing him up!

Hey, if the drunks could read me, I didn't really look like a woman. Yet as I was discovering, we can alter people's perception of reality by our attitude.

Hi all,

Ricci,

Your experience resonates with my own. I also lived in small town in B.C. for about a year (pop. roughly 3200). It was weird, in a way. Sooner or later, everybody knows everybody else, so I had to be circumspect in my outings as a woman. Yet, at the same time, the streets basically emptied and the sidewalks rolled up at around 9:00 pm, so there was actually nobody there to see me when I took late night strolls. I only met a person once. She (slightly inebriated) asked me for a light and, as she cupped her hands around my lighter, she made a passing comment on my nails. We wound up taking a walk down to the beach (heels in sand don't work) and having a nightcap later on. It was a crossdressing highlight for me; she acted most naturally and never even brought up the subject of my being a man or a crossdresser. It was very strange. I never found out her name. I never saw her again. I suspect she was an out-of-towner. We were two ships passing in the night.

Love,
CJ

Hi Ricci--
You've gotten some great advice so far. It seems to me that you need a testing ground for going out, if you're ever going to find out how you like being treated as a woman. It's a different world to go out as a woman, and it takes adjustment.

So you need to find out if you like the way people interact with you when you're dressed. Whether you pass or don't pass, people will often give you the benefit of the doubt.

So you get to find out what it feels like to be the other gender. It calls for some different ways of thinking and acting, and there seems to be no way to find out how comfortable this will be until you do it.

Besides, other people reinforce your ideas about who you are, or who you want to be. I learned surprising things about my femme self, but it was interaction with other people that brought these qualities out.

Of course you'd have to live full-time before you could take supervised hormones, or even think about surgery. But you don't have to live full-time to begin going out for a day here and there. You may have to drive to the nearest big city and rent a motel to do it, but it will certainly help you see whether you really like the day-to-day life as a woman.

I'm all for anything that will speed up the "should I or shouldn't I" part of this. On reflection, I don't think I've ever read a post where a CD said, "I didn't like being treated as a woman--it bothered me." So the odds are that you will enjoy your time out there.

Excuse me if you've already been out and testing the waters, but I got the feeling from your post that you hadn't done this yet.
Anita

Hi Ricci and all,

Ricci: you started a great thread with a big and important question. I've learned a lot from the replies.

Rikki: I like your idea of balance point. As you say, "when you're far away from your balance point, it seems so distant that we may think we want to go "all the way." As we approach the balance point, these desires will vanish." I like that advice. Thanks so much for all your other posts too. It sounds like you have reached your point of comfort.

I'm still at the experimental stage, so I read these posts avidly.

Live and Love,

Laura

Hello Ricci,

I've been thinking over your statement, " I am sad or perhaps more accurately unsure of the intensity that this life has brought on".

From my past experiences of speaking with many many people within the TG community and my personal lifes' experiences, I have found it very common for crossdressers to find their needs intensify at times to the point where it engulfs them and takes over their every thinking moment. So many people can mistake this new intensity when they reach a new level as a sign they need to transform their body with hormones and surgery. This is always the last stop and be sure, there are no return tickets with this part of the journey if you participate.

I can speak from nearly 4 years of experience with hormones and say they are something not to be taken lightly, it needs serious deep consideration and lots of consultation with qualified people before anyone should embark on that journey. Unless a person was absolutely sure they had a true identity disorder and such disorder was adversely effecting their quality of life, then I would never encourage anyone to start taking hormones.

Taking estrogen promotes the clotting factor in our blood, which can lead to stroke or cardiac arrest, especially if combined with cigarette smoking. I can also tell you that the emotional effects and the resultant effect on my thinking is much more prominent than any physical changes. Although any physical effects takes years to eventuate, such as breast growth can take up to 6 years to complete, whatever growth you achieve after about 12 months, you will retain 60 to 80% for life if you stop taking the hormones, we can also retain the distribution of body fat mostly for the rest of our life too, which does alter the body shape to a degree. They do effect people differently, but some of the effects are good and some not so good.

It's a long involved process before any of us ever get passed to have sex reassignment surgery. It's not available on demand and I know of no surgeon around the world who would perform the surgery without accompanying letters from two independant psycs. The greater majority of people who believe they are transsexual are found to be unsuitable mentally for the surgery and also 20% of those who complete their transition attempt to or do commit suicide within three months post operation. That's how difficult it is to adjust to a complete new identity and lifestyle. Often what we perceive in our mind as to how we would like to present is not how it really is when the change is effected.

I also think that a good test is to be truthful to ourself and really define how we feel, not how we THINK we feel. Can we say emphatically that we feel in our own mind, irrespective of how our physical body looks now, that we feel we are of the opposite sex. Most transsexuals are asexual and it has nothing to do with any fetishistic desires or other paraphilia and there is no sexual arousal from wearing womens clothes. Cross dressing to us is a tool which helps placate the gender dysphoria, but the clothes are not of much importance really, I feel identically the same no matter how I'm dressed, gender identity in a true transsexual is immutable, I believe gender is in the brain, not elsewhere.

Believe me when I say this, I am not suggesting that you are one or the other, I just don't know, but one thing for people to always bear in mind when they are at odds with themselves is this. Crossdressers don't have an identity conflict, BUT it is quite common for some to perceive they do or even exhibit signs they do, where in fact what they are doing is using it all as a screen against their conscience or the fact they harbour a lot of guilt about what they do and the secret they keep. Although it is quite common for some people to have what the professionals call Gender Identity Disorder Non Transsexual, this they identify as where the person has no identity crisis with their genitals and are quite happy to live their life completely in the role of the opposite sex and they have no desire for reassignment surgery, they just see themselves as the opposite sex to how their physical appearance is, but they have no desire to change their body.

I'm not suggesting any of this applies to you, it's all just put forward as food for thought and consideration. We can become so confused at times it's hard to see the forest for the trees.

Good luck with it all, and I would never think you were 'cracked', I've walked through the maze and well know how it all is.

My Kindest Regards.

Sally.

     I feel others are better qualified than I am to respond to your thoughts, but those move me so much that find myself wanting to say something. I feel that you ought to live full-time as a woman for at least several months before taking any other steps. This would give you an idea of others’ reactions and how well you can handle them. If you are still interested in feminization after getting a sense of how well you can handle it, the next step would be androgen blockers. As men age, testosterone levels decrease, so this is not a radical step, at least not compared with taking female hormones. Furthermore, androgen blockers are unlikely to have any negative side effects — they might even reduce somewhat the risk of prostrate cancer. If the physical and psychological effects after at least a few more months are positive — or at least not unacceptably negative — then you might consider going further, ideally under the supervision of a qualified physician.

     I understand the exhileration of crossdressing and the feeling of a sense of freedom to express aspects of yourself that have long been suppressed, but I also agree with others who have recommended caution. Once you do anything that causes permanent physical changes in yourself, there is no turning back. Your bridges have been burned. It makes sense to proceed with caution. I will be thinking of you. Whatever you decide, please write again.