I've said this before here, I find reading about FTM transexuals far more illuminating than reading about MTF. I think some of this has to do with being a man who has a lot of close female friends. It seems to explain to me or validate to me what some of the differences are.
Now of course we all have our own amount of yin/yang or male female aspects to us. I don't suppose there is anyone without at least a couple of attributes of their recessive gender. What I found so very illuminating was a number of aspects to his personality that faded to small amounts of influence once he began taking testosterone. Often they were small examples such as the fact that physical objects seemed to suddenly carry far less emotional baggage. Some thing that is very true of me. There were others, things I don't remember offhand but at the time they rang a bell of recognition. There were also a great many male attributes that I suddenly thought "that's what I have been trying to explain to women all these years and they just don't understand"
One of the members here, Anita, once said that she thought I had a lot of feminine traits to me. I have been told that by fairly close friends in f2f life also. For a long time I just said these were manly traits that had been mislabeled. But reading this book made me questions that assessment. I might be more likely to describe myself as a man somewhat more balanced towards female traits than many other men.
He also described with some amazement how after several years of living as a man he found it far more difficult to understand women than it was back when he was a woman. He could remember understanding things but could no longer feel it at a gut level.
Of course at another level it's all a question of semantics. I am my own particular combination of male/female and a lot of other dualities as well. But this book far more than anything else I have read seemed to describe so much of me to myself in areas where I couldn't quite find the right words. As if I was a heterosexual male, trapped in the body of a heterosexual male, and caught in some sort of a twilight zone of gender duality societal expectations. Or maybe it's more complex than that
In any event the books a great read.
Absaroka
