Going our own way

It took me a long time to figure myself out. 

"Crossdresser" subculture felt somehow immature and sometimes overtly sexual and so I didn't belong there. Similarly binary transsexuals had their own reality which meant I had to find myself on my own outside of these groupings. 

In doing my own homework I felt I needed to stick to trying to understand what my dysphoria was trying to tell me and where it was sourced. 

As far as I remember I have always had it so it wasn't a choice. When my son asked me recently about what would happen if tomorrow all gender norms disappeared suddenly (an excellent question) I told him that the gender variance community would split up roughly into choice versus no choice. In other words, people who embraced variance as rebellion or personal preference versus those born a set of criteria that forced them into finding a solution for their dysphoric feelings. 

Over my life I got to know the archetypes involved whether personally or through internet exploration and got to understand that it was more complex than putting people into sub-groupings. 

Existing outside of groups can sometimes feel awkward but for me became mandatory if I was going to try and maintain an objective viewpoint. Yes, you don't have "my people" to rely on as much so you focus on the idea of a global village and the variability of humans as a whole. 

One of the problems for older transgender people is that their programming was so severe that they couldn't find comfortable points of reference to grab onto and so climbing on to the same lifeboat as someone close enough to you was better than being alone. 

I held the opposite view as someone who for the longest time saw my situation as needing a cure. It wasn't until I started to see I didn't need repairing that I was able to find a comfort zone outside of a subgroup and find my own identity. 

I thus began to think more in terms of a global mosaic of people rather than transgender community even as I don't for a moment knock the need for the latter's existence.