The Woman Within

Boxes.  Having to live a life in one is a personal dilemma.  Having others exclude you from their world because you don't fit in theirs is yet another.  That latter realm is not something I had even considered as I first started to explore who I was.  To me, there was a great sense of freedom in being able to finally accept who I am and to begin to come to break down the barriers of my own personal box which I had confined myself to live my life within. My own box was the life I created and lived for others.  When you looked at my box, you saw a person who seemed, at first appearance visually, to be a man, but always had a little something odd about him that one couldn't put their finger on.  Women found me to be a sensitive person and not like other men they had come to know.   Gay males saw something in me that suggested I might be a potential catch, but alas, I am not interested in men in that way.  Women tended, for the most part, to like me as a friend, but I didn't

It's so hard sometimes to quantify in concrete terms, what it is like to be transgender and how it is to feel "out of sorts" with the world I live in as the gender I was born as.  I realized this all too well just last evening as I sat in a room and tried to explain this to others who were not transgender themselves. The environment was a support group meeting known as PFLAG, which stands for "Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays".  Although the original formation of the group primarily dealt with support the gay and lesbian population, it has, more recently seen an inclusion of the transgender realm to some degree.  The name of the group however, has remained unchanged. Of the eight individuals in the group, really only one other besides myself identified as transgender.  As we went around the room and introduced ourselves and spoke a little about each other, it became clear as my turn came around, that I was finding myself adding a little bit of extra