Patti, Sammie and Clara, this concerns your posts 112-114 (I don't want to load thing down by quoting them all)-
While I appreciate the legitimacy of your query, Patti, I find myself fully persuaded by Sammie's and Clara's responses taken in their their own contexts which are of course different from each other and from yours and mine. I'm being brought to the conclusion that my innate gender conditioning left me deficient in both male and female pre-programming. So as a genetic male, I became subject at puberty to the hormonally driven effects and urges of testosterone, but without the behavioral programming to deal with those urges. So masturbation was a necessary and indeed natural release, as was an interest in pornography, except that I do always seem to have been endowed with a powerful feeling that sex is a game for two, and solitary activities provided only physical relief to hormonal urges accompanied by a large measure of guilt. Moreover the sensation of that physical relief was fleeting and on its own fundamentally unsatisfying, leading to a belief that the grass might be greener in that respect on the other side of the sexual divide.. Further, there was always this strong urge to feel what it would be like to be a woman, which I tried largely unsuccessfully to satisfy in various ways.
When I finally was able to make physical love to the love of my life, I had no difficulty in doing so wholeheartedly (although right from the start with the addition of a lot more than just the seed planting function driven by T). To echo a previous post, this for me was the 'splendour in the grass', and it was only when the effect of T began to fade that the interest in porn began to re-emerge, to start with to try to reassure myself that I did still have the urge and then to look at alternatives, accompanied by exploration of possible ways of feminising my body. Masturbation just ceased to be a problem or in the end even a practical possibility. The rest as they say is history. Having verified to the best of my ability that the medical profession has succeeded in pharmaceutically destroying my conventional male function, I have been relieved of making the decisions that many of you have to work through, and I at least now have few regrets, while what remains of our physical relationship is the most important part and has I believe been enriched.
What I am now finding interesting and am wondering how to cope with is that, having achieved some degree of physical feminisation, and now being under the influence of (phyto)estrogen rather than T, Annie may be beginning to emerge. This journey is never dull.
While I appreciate the legitimacy of your query, Patti, I find myself fully persuaded by Sammie's and Clara's responses taken in their their own contexts which are of course different from each other and from yours and mine. I'm being brought to the conclusion that my innate gender conditioning left me deficient in both male and female pre-programming. So as a genetic male, I became subject at puberty to the hormonally driven effects and urges of testosterone, but without the behavioral programming to deal with those urges. So masturbation was a necessary and indeed natural release, as was an interest in pornography, except that I do always seem to have been endowed with a powerful feeling that sex is a game for two, and solitary activities provided only physical relief to hormonal urges accompanied by a large measure of guilt. Moreover the sensation of that physical relief was fleeting and on its own fundamentally unsatisfying, leading to a belief that the grass might be greener in that respect on the other side of the sexual divide.. Further, there was always this strong urge to feel what it would be like to be a woman, which I tried largely unsuccessfully to satisfy in various ways.
When I finally was able to make physical love to the love of my life, I had no difficulty in doing so wholeheartedly (although right from the start with the addition of a lot more than just the seed planting function driven by T). To echo a previous post, this for me was the 'splendour in the grass', and it was only when the effect of T began to fade that the interest in porn began to re-emerge, to start with to try to reassure myself that I did still have the urge and then to look at alternatives, accompanied by exploration of possible ways of feminising my body. Masturbation just ceased to be a problem or in the end even a practical possibility. The rest as they say is history. Having verified to the best of my ability that the medical profession has succeeded in pharmaceutically destroying my conventional male function, I have been relieved of making the decisions that many of you have to work through, and I at least now have few regrets, while what remains of our physical relationship is the most important part and has I believe been enriched.
What I am now finding interesting and am wondering how to cope with is that, having achieved some degree of physical feminisation, and now being under the influence of (phyto)estrogen rather than T, Annie may be beginning to emerge. This journey is never dull.