On one excursion to nowhere in particular, the purpose of which was to fill time absent from my father’s sight, I ran into two other transsexuals. [...]
Candice and Joy were out shopping, and stopped to talk with me. They somehow knew that I was a lost soul, and offered to talk with me. They invited me to their home.
They lived together because they were a couple, self defining as lesbians. This was a stunning revelation to me. It was something that opened vistas of wonder to my soul.
When I was first facing transition, I had only one book, Jan Morris’s ‘Conundrum’, and a few snatches of televised information as my entire basis for understanding my plight. I just assumed that I would become a heterosexual woman out the other side, a proper Suzy Homemaker with husband and adopted baby. This was certainly what my doctors seemed to desire me to be, and I dearly wanted to please my doctors, because they held my very life in their hands. I was willing to do anything, be anything, to earn my passage to womanhood. I had little concept of even what that meant exactly, only that that was clearly my goal.
Certainly nothing would stop me in my quest. Not even the truth. My first, early, evaluations by a psychologist indicated that I had a “masculine oriented mentation”, and would not be a safe candidate for surgery. I was “penile fixated”. This was news to me. So I had hit the books at my college library, to find out how on earth such a conclusion could possibly be reached. What learned shocked me. The tests I had been given, the Rorschach Ink Blot Test, as well as other visual tests involving pictures of people and scenes, were not grounded in any rational science. In fact, they are essentially arbitrary, culturally based catalogs of expected interpretations, based on a laughable model of what it means to be female or male of mind.
The rest is well worth reading (though I wouldn’t be surprised if you already had).
Your story (and TheOtherDave’s) reminds me of that of Jennifer Diane Reitz.
The rest is well worth reading (though I wouldn’t be surprised if you already had).
(By the way, Jenny writes several excellent webcomics, and has been seen on OvercomingBias/LessWrong).