Anyway, enough procrastination! Let the saga begin....
The years passed, I didn't like football but got on well enough in other areas being "male"(!) and as puberty arrived my fascination with girls and girly things grew exponentially. Trying on "female" clothes from the washing or from jumble sales etc became more common. I didn't understand then, and still don't, why women in "mens" clothes are considered "sexy" yet men in "womens" clothes are "perverted", it's only materiel... as long as your private areas are covered what's the problem? But I digress! The growing amount of time I spent in fem underwear (normally in my room, paranoid about anyone seeing me) resulted in my Father catching me on a couple of occasions. He could not, and cannot understand or reconcile this side of me and on a couple of occaisions he hit me repeatedly whilst demanding to know "why?". :-(
(I should point out he has *NEVER* struck me apart from these times and has been and is a wonderful parent. This was just outwith anything he is able to deal with)
At other times when he caught me it resulted in me fighting to close my door while he fought to open it shouting "But why?" whilst I cried uncontrollably on the other side shouting "I don't know" between sobs :-(
Told you this was crap/sad in places :-(
Being a Boy/Girl Teenager...
Still, despite the trauma of these incidents I was growing up and girlfriends started to come and go and the whole crossdressing thing started to get mixed up with sex, masturbation etc. If I wasn't confused before I sure as hell was now!!
Sometime about then I remember the topic somehow came up with a friend and he didn't believe me that I dressed, so in a feat of incredible stupidity/bravery one night I put on my "other"(!) school uniform and went down to a dark winters back garden to meet him... It was *very* dark and he complained that he couldn't see what I was wearing so I put his hand on my knee just below the hem of the skirt. He was stunned and speechless and (as a hormone driven early teen boy) started to slide his hand up my thigh... EEK! It was a strange feeling, I could tell he was aroused but at the same time uneasy, I was torn between horror and feeling more fem and aroused than I had ever felt before. Fortunately something broke the spell and we pulled apart before he reached the "laughter line"!! (Old 1940's joke: "once you get beyond the stocking tops you're laughing...")
Sometime not long after this I was sexually assaulted by a man in a position of authority, I am not going to give any details but it made me very fixed in my views of rape / assault etc. :-(
"God I'm so disgusting, I wish I was dead..."
By now I was entering my mid / late teens and study was overtaking most things, I still found it easier to do my homework/study in a girls school uniform... don't know why it just seemed to release the "other" side of me which was more academic and less impatient!?
Various relationships followed and along the way I lost my "male" virginity! (a lot less painful/traumatic!!) I was now in the classic cycle of building up a wardrobe of fem clothes over a period then going through periods of massive depression and self loathing and throwing them all out.
At the time I was sure I was an unnatural freak, becoming a "born again" christian did nothing to help that diagnosis either! (despite the people from the church actually being lovely people).
As I reached my late teens my love of "heavy metal", music (very convenient having natural long hair!!) drifted to bands like Motley Crue, Poison etc, mainly for the opportunity to backcomb my hair and wear *loads* of make up and girly clothes! :) Happy days!
Coming into my twenties I entered a *very* macho profession (denial?) and as a result of my "outlandish" clothes etc rapidly failed to impress the employer who wrote my reports.
"What am I...?"
About this time I found a programme on telly called "Out on.." (Sunday? can't remember) it was a relevation! I'm not sure if it was any good but it did me good!! I began to realise that there were other "abnormal" people out there... lots of them! and they were open enough to go on tv!!!! WOW! I was still going through the depressive stages, added to by extreme loneliness / homesickness but I was gradually coming to terms with the fem side of me. I still didn't know "what" I was exactly but the prospect of "fancying men" no longer scared me to death(suicide?) but I began to realise that tens of thousands of women couldn't all be wrong! ;-) besides, most of the men I knew were either unattractive people or had ugly personalities... easy huh! I had also discovered the Rocky Horror Picture Show and managed to gloss over the fact that I could walk more easily in heels than my girlfriend! Around this time a girlfriend wanted me to fool one of her friends by "dressing" and being a "visiting friend" at a nightclub before appearing the next day in my normal (macho) work gear... scared? I was f***ing terrified! But it was also a *wonderful* experience. (yup I'm a bizarre person)
Wearing earings in both ears and on occaisions a t-shirt with a pink triangle on it was not helping at work however and after a move didn't help any I became unemployed.
Various fancy dress parties were also outlets for my dressing until it started to become too obvious that I always came dressed en femme...
Men
Well, how can I say this without sounding like a female chauvenist?!! My early contacts with other transvestites were all in the most secret places I could find, I was in the countryside quite a lot and soon discovered that there are a network of layby's woods, picnic areas etc where men leave notes to each other, pornography and, most exiting for me, womens clothing. I was soon to discover however, as many a girl has said, "men only want one thing..."! As I was slowly coming to terms with being bisexual this was not entirely unhelpfull to me but it was not in the least romantic and at times rather sordid.
It was also *not* helping me remove the remains of my self-loathing! Despite having a few nice encounters (and a couple of fond (hot!) memories!) I had to stop visiting these places before I embarked on another destructive cycle.