Trans Awareness Month, Day 1 - When did you realize the term transgender referred to you?

Hello friends, long time no see!

As many of my readers may know, November is Transgender Awareness Month, and this year, I'm feeling inspired by fellow trans* blogger Brin to somehow mark the occasion. Especially given how quiet and lonely this little blog space has gotten!

Brin has a YouTube channel I discovered a while ago, where she covers transgender and bi-gender subjects. This year, she's marking November by doing 30 vlogs in 30 days, answering the questions listed in the 30 Day Trans-Challenge. Even though we're already 6 days into the month, I'm going to try to do the same. So here goes!

1) When did you realize the term transgender referred to you?

That's a good question. First, a detour to the mid 1980s:

I really started actively questioning my gender in my early teens (triggered by puberty, I suppose). But at that time, there was no World Wide Web I could turn to for answers, and the only book in our public library even remotely in the right ballpark was an autobiography of transwoman Renée Richards, who underwent SRS in the mid-1970s. I was fascinated by Richards' story, because up until that time, I had no idea that such a thing was possible (although I had certainly wished it was). But the more I thought about it, the more that path didn't feel quite right for me... maybe in part because I'd been raised in a home with very traditional values, but maybe because it didn't really match up with my sexual orientation and long-term goal to marry and have a family (it never occurred to me that someone could be transsexual and homosexual at the same time, i.e. a male-to-female transsexual attracted to other females).

Besides "transsexual," our family encyclopedia also included an entry for one other term, "transvestite," but I was uncomfortable with that one as well, albeit for different reasons. I occasionally cross-dressed, but it wasn't a sexual/fetish thing, as it seemed to be for transvestites. It was simply something that felt right, and eased my dysphoric mind for a time, before the shame took over (my dysphoria led to some pretty deep-seated self-loathing).

Since I didn't fit either definition, I squashed the feelings down deep inside and denied them for as long as possible. That got me through highschool, an LDS mission, and enough college to find and marry the girl of my dreams.

6 months or so into our marriage, the dysphoria came roaring back, and so began a secretive binge-purge cycle that lasted the next 14 years. Which brings us to last March:

Finally ... I Googled "transgender mormon," and was thunderstruck by what I learned: there are other LDS men who feel the same way as I do, and instead of denying these powerful urges (which never fully works -- they always come back more powerful than ever) or leaving their families and the Church to pursue gender transition, are trying to find a middle ground: embracing their feminine sides in a way that is in harmony with the Gospel!

Can such a thing be possible?

So, I guess you could say that's the point when I finally realized that what I've been feeling all these years wasn't some weird, fleeting temptation, and that I could own and accept this aspect of myself without having to buy into the baggage that comes with those other, more specific terms. I am who I am... I am transgender.