Atypical Transgender Late Bloomer

Six years ago now, I recovered lost memories of beatings and rapes and learning to be the best boy I could to avoid "being in trouble". My story has unraveled and become apparatent in non-linear ways, in hints and starts and later recognition. I've realized I wasn't the pure-hetero I spent 55 years pretending to be. I realized I didn't need to believe in the church that perpetrated the rapes, covered up for the crimes, and conspired to run a local catholic grade school as a rotating supply troop of young boys for the priests to enjoy. I've realized that when I presented myself as All-American to a young woman and proposed marriage, I was suppressing memories of events and desires and made a false presentation. When it all came to a head, and I wan't the man she thought she'd married, and I wasn't the man I said I was, that was the end of that. There was no fixing it. Now, alone and left to myself, I'm growing my hai...

Heard a tremendous NPR 8-minute interview with LuLu Miller , author of Why Fish Don't Exist , about how false or unhelpful categorizations and naming structures lead us into faulty mental frameworks that persist in our perceptions, feelings, and thinking; often these faulty frameworks serve us poorly. She said, imagine there's a lecture hall and the professor displays a slide showing a salmon, a lungfish, and a cow. The prof asks, Which two belong together? Which one does not belong? Most of the audience will say, the two fish belong together; the cow does not belong. And that seems to make sense. Two fish and a cow? Pretty easy to sort out . On examination, the facile answer falls short. A lungfish has lungs and an epiglottis, just like the cow. The cow's heart and the lungfish's heart are very similar. In fact, the cow and the lungfish have much more in common than the lungfish and the salmon. Turns out that grouping them by "which ones are fish" ...