Confessions of a Female-to-Male Transsexual

Dio* (not his real name) had something of an unusual childhood, one the average boy wouldn't dream of having. He was born a girl. Since his earliest memories, he felt a feeling of 'misalignment' within himself that estranged him from his body and has since followed him through young adulthood. As a child, he didn't really dwell on elaborating the feeling, only keeping close a knowledge that he was somehow different, and a certainty that he wasn't female from a very early age. By the teenage years he had come to believe he was a gender-neutral person who identified with a male body and a masculine identity. He was distinctly uncomfortable within his female appearance and through he could interact well enough with peers, felt exceedingly lonely and detached from people of all ages.

"I had always been very aware that what other people saw on the outside of me didn't match what I felt I was on the inside, but at the time I didn't know there was any way to get a male body, and hadn't yet considered the possibility that I was transsexual," Dio says, remembering. He had until then only heard of male-to-female transsexuals and although he identified with the desire to align the sense of self with physical gender, he certainly wasn't one of them - not only had he been born a woman, but he knew in his heart that he was anything but female.

Around age sixteen, he came across something that wasn't just a pipe dream he had long since tried to give up on. Although becoming a female-to-male transsexual looked to be costly, it did seem doable, and, after extensive researching, he found it was not nearly as pricey as he had expected. "When it really occurred to me that I could actually do this, it was like I finally had something hope for," says Dio, "It was such a relief. Before, I felt like I had been in limbo for most of my life, and I always felt like I was sorely missing something. I basically felt like, 'was this it?' But finding out transitioning was possible was like a renewed reason to go on."