First off , thank you for this thread . It's very interesting and thank you for all of the butches/bois/FTM/he/hy/she for stepping out and sharing your feelings ... I just want to NOT offend anyone and before you read this , please comprehend that this is about ME ONLY . How I feel only about ME .

ok I think that opening paragraph clears me

wow , I don't talk about really who I am as a person really , I'm pretty closed down unless you know me very well in real time . This is a big deal that I'm sharing something personal . I have one brother , who I am very close to . It's just he and I as siblings . We are 3 years apart and a few months . He should have been a girl and I should have been a boy no doubt . With that said my brother is not gay , he is a heterosexual married male . We grew up in a very small area and there were about 20 boys all close in age and only one girl my age in our neighborhood. At 3 to 4 years of age is when I can remember things of toys , what I played with and how I was . I can remember being extremely upset that my mom put a dress on me and I told her boys don't wear these and I stripped naked . She said to me " you're not a boy , Blake " ( well she shouldn't have named me Blake right

that's my real name by the way , I'm lucky

) anyways , when she said that , I flat out didn't believe her in the least . I only was around the boys , played with boys toys etc... I was too young at that point to know the anatomical differences . My mom said that she couldn't put any dresses on me because of the scene I made as a young child. All that changed later but that's a story that ill never go into here . Anyways , as I grew older into elementary years I looked like a little boy . I played football , strong as an ox , the little girls chased me and treated me like all the other boys and the other boys treated me as alike because appearance wise that's what I looked like . Well junior high hits and my facial structure changes and my body starts the big change . Except my face which still was the boy face really . My gosh I hated the body change . I knew at this point the anatomical difference between boys and girls were and I was not happy at all. I lucked out in the sence that I have a masculine body structure naturally with how my shoulders , arms , legs , thighs are. I never had prominent curves like the female body structures tend to have so that's good . Where I am from , being so small , we all grew up from K-12th grade . Nobody really viewed me as being a girl nor did I view myself as one even though I was aware that I was born a female . At 12 I was diagnosed with having a gender identity disorder . This was my mothers way of coping with a butch child , to make herself have the clarity that it was nothing she did wrong , and to make it known to me that I had a serious mental problem that needed corrected . At 27 , I paid a visit to the same doctor to diagnose him as uneducated , unsympathetic, and a quack

. I took t shots for some time , had a top surgery alteration as well trying to correct what is flawed with me . I'm now 36 and feel I'm not flawed at all . I'm perfect . I'm me , I dress how I want which is how your typical male dresses , I smell how I do , which is how your typical guy smells , my hair is how it is which is well short , brown with some silver coming in here and there , I soft pack sometimes when I feel like it , I never bind my chest , bc I don't care for one and for a second there isn't much there to bind . Was a born in the wrong body ? YEP NO DOUBT ... Am I upset about it ? NOPE , GOD WANTED ME LIKE THIS FOR HIS REASONS. Do I like my body ? LOVE IT ALL 5 FT 1 IN OF IT

. Do others like my body ? I DO NOT CARE. Have I been called a freak from people on the streets ? YEP OFTEN IN APPALACHIA ,. does that offend me ? I LOVE FREAKS

NO !!!!! its taken me a ling time to be in this mindset but this is something personal about me. Thanks for reading .....RNguy ( Blake )