[Pansy-Mae]

Primarily, true, but I've also said quite a bit (though there's no reason why you should remember) that the other factors are age and passability. I would have no interest in being an ugly old man masquerading badly as a female. I'm also governed by aesthetics!

Yes I do remember you saying that and I 100% agree. I always said that I would give up being a TV(!) before I turned into a sad old queen living in the past.

On the other hand, if you had been born more recently, and your parents , having noticed your predilections pre-adolescence, offered you the chance to delay puberty to make up your mind about what you would prefer to be, can you honestly say that you would have reached your current age as a male?

Good question. My interest in feminine things appears to have started when I was about 3 or 4, if my mothers stories are to be believed. I started wearing her and my sisters clothes in secret when I was about 12-ish. I was brought up in a very religious family and I remember praying most nights that I would wake up as a girl in the morning. By the time I reached my early 20's I had sufficient knowledge to know that it would be possible to go the full GRS route and I knew that I had no need/desire to put myself through that and convert to the external appearance of female. Because for me that is the actual effect - GRS converts the appearance, it does not create a female and I am NOT internally female.( although if there was a miracle available to actually make me female I would have taken it, and still would).
So to answer your question, in the malestrom of puberty, I might have taken up the option but it would have been a mistake which I would probably regret for the rest of my life.

So really, it's an unknown, as the stress you experienced, as you say, would have made the gender anxiety invisible. Well, in that case, you may find, as I did, that not being able to express your gender via dressing or ingesting estrogen that you would start to develop the same kind of depressive anxiety that I have had.

Yes, I wouldn't disagree with that at all.

I think we are getting hung up on terminology here. You seem to take the label TS as someone who would normally move on to transition, whereas I am taking as the congenital brain disorder caused by insufficient androgen exposure at the foetal stage, which I think you agree that you also suffer from. The evidence is your ability to ingest estrogen without ill effects.

I suspect you prefer the label TG to indicate someone who is in the "middle" partial transition area and content to stay there, is that so?

It's just a problem with labels. I really don't think there is a difference between us, apart from the mental problems that I have had.

Yes, thats true, but you are still missing what I see to be a vital difference and that is why I am using the TS and TG labels, because I still maintain that the G3 classification is too broad. Sure, it is a continuum so any sub-division will create an artificial boundary but at the same time, if you take away all external constraints there are some within G3 who do not wish to ever make a complete transition and some who can't wait ( and some who would like to go the whole way but are using their rational minds to over-ride their natural inclinations?). I neither want nor need to make the full transition. There is nothing in my life right now to stop me going to the doctor this morning and ask to be referred but nothing is further from my thoughts despite the baby boobs on my chest. I wish I had been born a woman, sure, but I know I am not and never can be.

I think the only difference between me and the other "middle-grounders" is that I have not been in a position to cross dress for some decades now.



Well, that comes back to whether you would go all the way if there were no other personal restrictions? ... and I'm not quibbling either, I think this is a fascinating area for a sensible discussion.

But to ask you the same question that you asked me above, "Would you have taken the opportunity if available back in your teens, when you were footloose, fancy free and assumed you would stay good looking for ever!?"