Atypical Transgender Late Bloomer

I have within the last ten days come to recognize that Something's Going On With Me. It's been there for a while. Now I have the "world enough and time" to ponder and pursue it. I've been growing my hair for a year now. Buzzcuts on both sides, the top grown out. It's an undercut. It's a bisexual bob that still needs to grow out. But I'm growing long hair after a lifetime of military haircuts. I'm wearing earrings. I had a mani-pedi in last fall. I wore nail polish for a few weeks last summer. I've worn a kilt in public a few times. My nipples have become sensitive to eroticism over the last few years. I've nurtured an interest in transgender women online in my circle of people, and then enlarged it to their circles of people. The notion of queering the gender norm is appealing to me. I like the way silky clothes feel on me. I want to feel pretty. I want to try out Femininity. I've been trying out eyeliner. So, even though I...

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...