The strongest and most consistent part of my transsexualism has been my desire for a feminine body and appearance. Desire for a feminine social role has always been secondary, although I have certainly come to appreciate that role very much as well. But for me, this has been a journey in which the body has led the way.

My earliest memory of transgendered experience is standing in my mother's bedroom closet, feeling the fabric of her dresses, wanting to wear them and to be like her, finally pulling one down from its hanger to fall over me, and becoming sexually aroused. I must have been three or four at the time.

By age six, I was playing with girls my own age, wanting to wear their clothes and engage in their fantasy play. The girl who lived next door had a red ballet tutu that I especially admired, but she told me I couldn't wear it, or pretend to he a ballerina, because I was a boy.

I was allowed to stay home alone sometimes after I reached age eight, and I always used these occasions to dress in my mother's clothes. This was very arousing for me, but I hated getting erections, because I didn't want anything to spoil my fantasy of having a girl's body. By age ten, in addition to cross-dressing at home whenever I was alone, I would remove my mother’s panties from the laundry hamper and wear them to school under my boy's clothes. Every night I would lie awake fantasizing that some benevolent adult might learn of my need, find me, and arrange for surgery to remove my penis.

I was a good student, and skipped two, years of junior high school, entering high school (tenth grade) at fourteen. My classmates were two years older on average, and being exposed to the company of physically developed young women was delightful and agonizing. I wanted to touch them, and I wanted to be them, all at the same time. I desperately coveted their breasts, their cute clothes, their long hair, their make-up, and their ability to be with one another in what I dreamily imagined to be intimate, sisterly groups. I fantasized constantly about taking female hormones, growing breasts, and having my penis removed, so that I could join them. But all I managed to do was wear my hair as long as my parents would allow, keep my nails long, and shape my eyebrows.

When I read in the local paper about the opening of the gender program at Johns Hopkins, I wrote a long letter to the chairman, pleading for help; but in the end, I didn’t send it. I knew that he would only contact my parents, who would never consent to letting me be transformed into a girl, and that I would only be humiliated by the revelation of my shameful secret.

But only a few months later, the pressures became unbearable and I did confide in my mother. I imagined that if she saw my agony, perhaps she would help me, maybe even cooperate with my desires. Her reaction was one of concern, but not of sympathy. She sent me off to a psychiatrist for weekly visits, hoping he could "cure" me. This, of course, did not occur.

When I went away to college at sixteen, I could finally cross-dress in relative freedom in my dorm room. This was always sexually exciting, but, incredibly, I never managed to bring myself to orgasm until age eighteen, because I was never willing to touch my penis. Finally I discovered by accident how to climax by rubbing against a pillow with a pair of panties covering my genitals. About this time I first read Harry Benjamin’s book, The Transsexual Phenomenon.

I had been scheming for three years, trying to obtain female hormones, and shortly after my eighteenth birthday, I finally succeeded. I persuaded a chemical supply house to sell me 20 grams of chemical grade diethylstilbesterol (DES). At last I had a tool to feminize my body, but it was very crude. I dissolved my DES in vegetable oil and drank it, or rubbed ft into my breasts. Soon my skin became smoother, my breasts enlarged, and erections became infrequent and even painful. I was delighted, but also fearful- what if someone discovered what I was doing?

I had no plan, no strategy - only a desperate desire to feminize my body. I was then too ashamed to admit to anyone that I wanted to be a woman. I knew from my reading that I would never be accepted into a gender program; after all, I had been successful as a male, I hadn't played with dolls, and I was sexually attracted to woman. Most shameful of all, my fantasies of self-feminization had a sexual component - I would be seen as merely a fetishistic transvestite, not as a true transsexual. I went on and off hormones half a dozen times during my final two years of college, alternating between elation and despair.

I entered medical school at twenty, and tried to bury my feminine inclinations under a male facade. I grew a beard, rode a motorcycle, took up rock climbing and wilderness backpacking. But, inevitably, my true feelings resurfaced. By twenty-two I was back on estrogen. I had a girlfriend in whom I confided, and she let me wear her clothes, and even incorporated my feminine identification into our lovemaking. We broke up when she eventually tired of my obsession. About this time, I re-read Robert Stoller's Sex and Gender, an influential book I now regard as poisonous. Stoller's chapter "Transvestites' Women" caused me deep concern. I believed, and my recent experience seemed to confirm, that if I wanted a lasting relationship with another woman, I would have to suppress my transsexual desire. But that seemed impossible.

Following medical school, I started earning my first real salary, and was able to afford some facial electrolysis. All throughout my residency and fellowship training I wore my hair long, cross-dressed in private, and intermittently took hormones. But I could never take the next step of actually living in role. I feared that if I transitioned, I would never be approved for surgery, and would spend the rest of my life impoverished, friendless, and unloved. Faced with that prospect, I tried to reconcile myself to living as a man.

I managed to do so with relative outward success until my late thirties. Of course, not a day passed that I didn't fantasize about being a woman; but to actually live as a woman seemed no more possible than to grow wings and live as a bird.

Eventually my biological reproductive clock chimed, and I began to explore relationships that might lead into parenthood. At 38, I married a sensitive and intelligent woman, with whom I proved to be deeply incompatible, and together we had two children. To my surprise, something about becoming a parent seemed to reawaken my desire to reach a more satisfactory accommodation with my transsexualism. Perhaps my enjoyment of the nurturing role made me realize how much I truly valued femininity. Perhaps creating two new lives, and watching how quickly those lives changed before my eyes, made me aware that all lives, including my own, were precious but transitory, and that now was the time to live fully. Or perhaps seeing the uncanny way my children's behavior mirrored my spouse's and my own, convinced me that sometimes our biology is indeed our destiny, and that I could no longer avoid mine.

At age 42, I resumed taking low-dose estrogen, and tried a variety of strategies for androgynous expression, short of actual cross-living. For a time, I made transsexual self-portraits using the computer to see whether feminizing a "virtual" body might be enough; unfortunately, it was not. Eventually, I was put in contact with an experienced gender therapist, who recognized my condition and encouraged me to experiment with cross-living for short periods in the protected environment of transgender support groups. This was satisfying beyond my imagining; I even discovered that I was quite passable as a woman. After many months of preparation, just before my 45th birthday, I began living full-time in a female role. I completed sexual reassignment surgery some six months later. Now, with the journey of the body seemingly complete, I find that the satisfactions of the place at which I have arrived are wondrous, but often bittersweet.

By most standards I am incredibly fortunate. I have been able to continue to work in a rewarding well-paying professional practice. My colleagues treat me politely, at least to my face. I have two beautiful children who love and accept me, and I am allowed to see them twice a week. My surgery was successful, giving me a functional vagina and preserving my ability to achieve orgasm. I can pass readily in most social situations; sometimes I am even called beautiful. I do not regret the path I have taken, and I surely don't want to go back. But for me, as for nearly all transsexual persons, transition and surgery have been only palliative, not curative. I still cannot put aside for long the terrible alienation and desperate loneliness at the core of my condition, nor deny the wounds they have left. Like most transsexual women, I remain deeply wounded.

Naturally, I am proud of my new womanhood, and of my ability to share that common bond with my non-transsexual sisters. But while I may call myself a transsexual woman, in my heart I often feel that I am not really a woman, any more that I was once really a man. In many ways I am of an alien species, with only my transsexual sisters as kin. That is why, for me, community seems to offer the only salvation, the sole redemptive possibility. That is why the transsexual women's community remains my focus, indeed my obsession. Only among my transsexual sisters have I thus far found real understanding, and the prospect of genuine love. Among them I can, for a time, feel unashamed of my transsexualism. When I see the incredible, undeniable beauty of their faces, some of that beauty reflects back, allowing me to see myself as beautiful too. And when the darkness comes over me, then, most of all, I need the palpable embrace of a true sister: someone to whom I need never lie, who knows my truth without my saying it; someone who will unflinchingly lick the wounds from which I still bleed, the iron-salt taste as well-known to her as to all of us who have bled in this bodily journey. If there is such a one for me, and if I can do this also for her, then perhaps our wounds will slowly heal.