Fears of Questioning Your Gender and Sexuality – Don’t believe the labels

This post is about my earliest searches for truth about who and what I am.  Hopefully, it may help new subs with similar leanings and questions to get started and slay some of the demons in their heads.

I’ve had thoughts of wondering what it was like to be female from a very early age.  Do you remember the caricature of the silent movie where the villain ties the girl to the train tracks?  I’ve no idea when that image first popped in to my head but I must have been very young.  I identified with that image, no, not the guy in the top hat, I wanted to be the girl tied to the tracks.

During teenage and early working years these thoughts were largely suppressed.  The opportunity to explore them came in the early 90’s with my first access to the Internet.  Yup, the cutting edge of technology provided the office with a Cisco router with a 14.4K dial on demand router.  Since this was pre world-wide web everything was text based, primarily Usenet and mailing lists.

What sort of questions did I want to explore ?

For a start societal convention of the day had me questioning whether thoughts of being female made me homosexual, a very big concern back then.  Then, the rather  mis-directed question of what gender label did I identify with ?  Obviously, the two were quite interconnected in my mind at the time.

I spent a lot of time reading and reviewing the, admittedly small by comparison to today, resources on TS/TV/TG.  The real life stories of TG folks were heart-breaking.  Once I’d worked my way through the emotional turmoil I knew I wasn’t transgendered.  The simple point being that these people were at the point of being monomaniacal to achieve what they wanted most in the world.  No set back or disapproving world was going to deviate them from their goal.

I knew I simply did not have that drive.  A nice fantasy, but not the drive to discard a whole life to make it real.  That realisation made life much easier, now I knew what I wasn’t I could narrow down on being comfortable as a CD or TV.  In fact I spent many years in the happy knowledge that I liked to dress in female clothes, that I could enjoy the ridiculousness of it and not feel my male ego threatened.

The other great discovery at this time was that being CD/TV had nothing to do with being gay.  For the time it was a great relief.  I don’t denigrate those who are gay and the struggles they had in earlier times, but I was heartily relieved.  This all boils down to the label problem.  If someone seeking answers to questions of identity believes the labels associated to it by others, then they are led to a false path.

The attitudes of the time were that any male with effeminate leanings must be a homosexual and a threat.  Indeed, it’s something I can’t discuss with my father to this day.  Perhaps due to his own childhood experience, he is of the common view in his age group that effeminate leanings equates to homosexuality, which equates to uncontrollable urges to molest small boys.

Research shows that a significant number of crossdressers are heterosexual, probably a majority.  Go online and this is not readily apparent.  The sites catering to this form of fetish play on the labels that try to convince you that you are attracted to and need to be used and abused by a “real” man.  Even those that focus on the FemDom aspect usually accentuate the domme as a male surrogate with her strapon rather than her femininity.

For my generation questioning one’s gender and sexuality was akin to social suicide, probably career suicide, too.  These things were not to be questioned unless you were prepared to be tagged as a deviant.  Of course things have changed somewhat.  I can talk about such things here and receive a sympathetic hearing, but I still wouldn’t talk about it to any of my circles of social, familial or professional contacts.

The question of melody’s sexuality is an interesting one.  Having learned that I was not homosexual by default, I was happy to identify for a long time as heterosexual.  As melody properly emerged I modified it to being bi-curious – well, you can’t interact with a domme who uses strapons and talks of renting you out without some modification to sexual identity, can you ?  Today, things have moved again.  Melody is filling out in to her own persona and ego, after my journey through and beyond chastity makes me identify mostly as asexual if anyone was crass enough to insist I stick a label on such things.

Many think of asexual as a lack of interest in sex.  To some extent that can be true but it doesn’t mean a lack of interest in sexuality, beauty, erotica or the deepest sexual emotions. It is far from being the state of a cold automata.

Melody has been through several phases of questioning gender and sexuality.  These questions will probably only get harder.  The current path is predominantly on promoting the feminine in all aspects of life.  Who knows where this will lead ?  Except to even greater changes.