Beeshive

Imposter Syndrome

I think one of the most crippling aspects of my personality is the imposter syndrome that I suffer from.

I have absolutely no idea of what I could have done in life.

But it hasn’t just been my lack of formal education that has held me back.

Yes, I only have grade 8.

But I also obtained my grade 12 GED with absolutely no preparation and no studying.

My marks were in the low 50s. Which is actually quite good.

The final scores on a GED equal the percentage of graduating high school students that your grades were equal to.

On the GED you absolutely do not want 100% as your final mark.

I consider myself to actually be quite stupid.

Yes, I know that there is a lot of shit that I can accomplish, but still my brain is locked on to this idea of how absolutely stupid I am.

And this causes problems at work. Oh boy does this cause problems.

I’m a qualified 4th class power engineer.

I am the Chief Engineer of a 4th class power plant.

I oversee 5 shift engineers, 3 maintenance engineers, an assistant chief engineer, and some casual engineers.

But where my imposter syndrome causes me issues is with the other engineers.

I can do things that are so far above my qualification levels.

The most recent being the replacement of the soft starter on chiller #3.

Chiller #3 has a 600 volt 450 hp motor.

This motor cannot be started across the line.

Originally it had a mechanical reduced voltage Wye-Delta starter that had been replaced with a solid state soft starter in the 90s. Well, that soft starter up and died last year.

The service company came back with a quote of $32k to replace the soft starter.

I found a brand new soft starter for $7.5k, so I decided to go with this ABB soft starter.

I had to guide the electrical department through how to connect this drive to the chiller and interface it with the chiller.

Soft Starter running for first time

Absolutely none of my engineers would have been able to do this. And it’s not for a lack of training or explanation.

And this is where the imposter syndrome kicks in really bad.

If a fucking idiot like myself can understand how to interface the soft starter to the chiller so the chiller can command it and so it can send feedback to the chiller, why can’t my subordinates understand too? We’re all 4th class power engineers. Actually two of my guys are 3rd class power engineer, but still?

I have no special training.

I have no special schooling.

And there was even some eye rolling from the chiller mechanic when I told him what I was going to do with the chiller.

“Bobbie, make sure that you connect the MCR1 and MCR2 relays as they are or the chiller won’t start”.

So I hauled out the schematics for the old Wye-Delta starter and the MCR1 and MCR2 relays were only used with the old mechanical soft starter that had been tossed in the bin in the ’90s. They actually had to be jumpered in such a way just to make them engage so the chiller would start.

This caused ‘discussions’ back and forth.

I’m happy to report that the chiller starts just fine without the useless MCR1 and MCR2 relays.

Originally the chiller used a current donut on one of the 600 volt phases to monitor how much power the chiller was consuming. This went through a little converter board that changed the AC current into DC and then put it through a divider network to obtain a 0 to 5 volt signal. This 0 to 5 volt signal was then fed to the chiller CPU.

I happy to report that the chiller works just fine without this convertor board and that the chiller amp display now matches the actual current consumption of the chiller.

Well Bobbie, why don’t you take training or courses and move up in the world?

I am literally the dumbest fucking person you’ll ever meet. I am not smart. I just read. That’s it. My magical skill is reading.

And this causes me issue.

If I am the dumbest fucking person that I am aware of, why can’t anyone else do what I can?

A few years ago I put together a networked monitoring system for monitoring the temperatures of the refrigeration systems in the kitchens, the pharmacy, and the blood bank. This system just uses a bunch of stand alone refrigeration controllers networked together with RS-485 and some web servers. When I try to show the other guys how to program the system, or change settings on the system, you can see the puzzled looks coming across their faces. It’s almost as if I’ve started speaking in a long forgotten language or there are tentacles popping out of my face.

Again, there’s no coding involved. It’s just logging into a system made from off the shelf components. The webserver is meant to be programmed by supermarket store managers.

Where could I have gone in life without this imposter syndrome?

Who knows?

What causes imposter syndrome?

Apparently having depression and anxiety set one up for experiencing imposter syndrome.

Upbringing also plays an important part in setting one up for experiencing imposter syndrome. Apparently inconsistent parenting and unsupportive parenting place one at risk for developing imposter syndrome.

In the mean time I guess I have to be content with being the asshole who won’t “share” his knowledge with others…….

Saturday May 4th, 2024.

People have asked if I have ever been involved with any type of queer support groups in the past.

No.

No I haven’t.

I don’t do well in groups.

Never have, never will.

I’ve always been on my own.

In Toronto as a kid I would always sneak down to the Pride parade but I would always enjoy it from the periphery.

Even though homosexuality wasn’t an outright criminal offence in the ’80s, the police were still mostly of the old school.

And of course there was the fear that I’d be caught in the vicinity of one of these parades or events.

I guess that I was carrying around the teaching of Terry.

I went to a few pride parades in Vancouver during the ’90s. Again just watching from the periphery.

What I always loved about the early parades was how “in-your-face” they were. It’s like the participants in the parades were wiping off all of the shit that society had thrown on them and were throwing that shit right back in the face of society.

But then the double aughts came.

And the pride parades started to become more corporate, more generic, and less offensive.

2006 was the last parade that I went to watch and the last pride event that I went to.

To be honest, pride events were never too appealing to me because of the overt presence of alcohol.

When my doctor and I first started discussing my desire to transition into something other than male he proceeded to give me a list of groups that I could join.

The thing is I don’t want to join a group.

I have been on my own all of my life.

I function better on my own.

I can’t see myself willingly becoming part of a group.

So…… off I go on yet another adventure.

Transitioning from male to not a male.

Anyways, time to head off and get my nails done.

I’m thinking something of a hot pink shade this time.

This time next week.

Well, this time next week things will be a bit different.

At this point next week I’ll have had estrogen coursing through my body for just over 24 hours.

And for the first time in my life since I was about 12, I’ll be experiencing diminished levels of androgens.

Tiresias transformed into a woman
by Pietro della Vecchia

“Take a little trip back with father Tiresias
Listen to the old one speak of all he has lived through
I have crossed between the poles, for me there’s no mystery
Once a man, like the sea I raged
Once a woman, like the earth I gave
But there is in fact more earth than sea”
From “Cinema Show” by Genesis from their 1973 album
“Selling England by the Pound”.

The goal of this is not to become a woman.

The goal of this is to get as far away from being male as I can.

XY syndrome is a life altering disease and humanity should be searching for a cure for the defective “Y” chromosome.

Through my entire fucked up crazy life there have always been a few constants.

The first is that I’ve never felt like this body is my body. It’s always felt like it has belonged to someone else.

As I said in other posts, since I was young I was always certain that I was going to have breasts.

When I hit puberty and my hips didn’t widen it felt odd. I know it’s hard to explain, but starting at puberty and even existing to the very day is the odd sensation that my hips are not where they should be.

And the junk that I do have has always felt foreign to me.

And even though genetically I am a male, men have always been a source of fear for me. I have never felt okay around men. And that was well before CFB Namao.

Yes, I did often make pleas to the imaginary friend in the sky to make me into a girl when I was younger.

And there were times as a kid that I wanted to be a girl so badly that it was eating me up from the inside out.

Through my teen years and my 20’s and my 30’s I had always but my desire to me a woman off as being a side effect of the sexual abuse on CFB Namao or my involvement with Terry.

But, as I got towards my my 30s I began to realize that my desire to be a woman and the feeling that I was in the wrong body was not shaped by the sexual abuse on CFB Namao or my involvement with Terry.

These feelings and these desires have been with me for as long as I can remember.

I really hope that things go as smooth as I want them to.

If I don’t have any bad reactions to the androgen blockers and the estrogen I’ll be very happy.

I can’t help but wonder what my brain and what my emotions will be like with the removal of androgen from by blood stream.

What will it feel like to have estrogen flowing through not only my body, but my brain as well.

Will my way of thinking change?

Will my view of the world change?

If everything works out fine I’m really hoping that I can go for bottom surgery. As I’ve said before, I just want to get everything removed down there.

I don’t want anything added to or created.

No penis

No testicles

No scrotum

All gone

Nothing but a smooth scar closing everything up down there.

A small hole to pee from.

But nothing else.

The male curse will be gone.

Banquished

Never to haunt me or traumatize me anymore.

Hopefully the male craziness and insanity are washed away from my brain.

Scooting

I’ve had a Segway scooter for the last year and a bit.

It’s been a fun little vehicle.

I gave up my driver’s licence a couple of months ago just right after I got rid of my motorcycle.

I don’t drive, and I can’t see myself ever driving again.

The last car that I owned was back in 1998.

Except for renting a car in Montreal when I visited Montreal in 2014, I’ve never driven.

Motorcycling was fun, but depression was just too strong of an adversary.

I bought the scooter more out of curiosity than anything, I wanted to see how practical it would be. Well, it has been very practical.

At 90% charge it will give me about 80 km of distance on one wheel drive in eco mode. Two wheel drive and sport mode will eat the batter up faster, but still I get good decent travel from it.

It’s not a small scooter, it weighs 45 kg. which with the suspension makes for a very smooth ride.

The wheels are a good size and width.

And the brakes are awesome, especially with the DC injection braking turned on. DC injection is where the scooter motor controller applies a constant DC current to the windings instead of a chopped alternating current. This causes the permanent magnets to repulse off the magnetic fields which causes the wheels to slow down aggressively.

The sad thing though is I am limited as to where I can take the scooter. And I don’t mean by riding restrictions. I mean due to the complete lack of secure parking for non-automobile vehicles.

one little lock and one little bike rack

For example, I used to be able to ride over to International Village and lock my bicycle up in the secured parking lot adjacent to the parking attendant booth.

Once the mall owners put in automated parking they eliminated the secured bicycle racks as there was no one there to monitor them anymore.

Mall management suggested that everyone simply lock up outside. Sad to say that bicycles and scooters don’t stand a change locked up outside in Vancouver.

But, as long as I can keep an eye on my scooter, it’s all okay.

It’s easy to say that I’m paranoid, but portable grinders with cutoff wheels will make quick work of any u-lock on the market.

Another trick up the sleeve of bicycle thieves is they’ll throw a second lock on your bicycle / scooter so that you can’t ride off, but they can come back in the early hours of the morning to take their time.

And even if the thieves don’t steal your ride outright, they’ll grab parts off your ride and render your ride useless.

Bicycle paths are decent in Vancouver, but this is a city that is still well within the grips of 1950’s Eisenhower Car Culture.

Bicycle paths take up less than 0.001 % of the roads in Vancouver, but to hear car drivers whine and cry you’d swear that cars were banned from the city streets.

And no, “gas tax” doesn’t pay for the roads, at least not municipal roads. Municipal roads are paid for and maintained by the citizens living or renting in the city or businesses operating in the city. Everyone, tenant or landlord, pays property taxes to the city the live in and thus everyone living within a particular city pays for the roads and infrastructure in that city.

Another reason why I gave up my driver’s licence, and why I would encourage anyone else who doesn’t drive and who has never used their licence for driving to give up their licence, is that the number of driver’s licences in circulation are used by automobile lobbyists to push government to spend money on car drivers. The more licences, the more drivers, right?

Vancouver, because of its location in the lower mainland, has a massive amount of car drivers that are just passing on through. Yet these drivers expect the roads that they don’t pay for to be maintained as per their expectations.

Things would have been much worse for Vancouver save for the “Stop the Highway” movement from the ’60s that stopped a major freeway from passing through downtown and through various minority neighbourhoods in a plan to eliminate these neighbourhoods. Freeway building back in the ’50s and ’60s was seen as a way to cleanse “urban blight”. Urban blight was a code word for racial and ethnic minorities.

There really isn’t any place that I can’t go on my scooter. I ride over the Lions Gate into North Van and West Van. I go down to Richmond on it. It’s especially nice when going out to FedEx or UPS to pick up parcels as there isn’t any connecting bus service between the Canadian Line and the parcel pick up locations.

I can’t get a straight answer from Amtrak as I would really love to take the scooter down to Portland and Seattle when I go down for visits.

I would have loved to take the scooter to Iceland last year. Sure, Iceland has rental scooters available all over Reykjavik, but they generally have no suspension and have a very rough ride that’s painful on long trips. And yes, Iceland is the ideal place to grab a scooter to head off on the trails outside of the city.

Unfortunately the size of the battery in my scooter means that shipping it by sea in a shipping container is about the only way it’s ever going to get over to Iceland.

$$$$$$$$$$$

The only thing that I get a chuckle about still is from the owner’s manual for my scooter.

Apparently you’re not supposed to ride this scooter if you’re older than 60 or you’re wearing heels.

Why now?

That’s a good question.

If I had to pinpoint one thing, that would be the teachings of Terry.

Terry of course was Captain Terry Totzke, my military social worker from when I was a kid.

Terry and of course my own father had such a toxic effect on my development.

You gotta admit that blaming a child for their own sexual abuse is fucked in the head, and blaming that child for the sexual abuse of their sibling was even more fucked in the head.

Sure, there were more than likely other kids growing up in the same period of time that I was who had a different gender identity than what their physical body presented.

But I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that they didn’t have a toxic philosophy being rammed down their throats and beat into their heads by a military social worker.

Prior to working at the hospital I don’t honestly believe that there was a single employer that I worked for in which transitioning would have been acceptable.

And with absolutely no support from home I couldn’t just go shopping around for a job in which I’d feel safe transitioning.

When I started at the hospital, it still took time to ascertain if this would be a safe place. And for the most part it was. Well, save for the outside management company that was running my department.

I had a series of phone calls with my father in August of 2006. These phone calls were the last time I’d ever speak to Richard. After the initial phone call that I made to him in the wee hours of August 7th, 2006 he’d place almost daily phone calls to me. This ended towards the middle of October when I told him of my plans to go after the babysitter.

I honestly can’t remember if I ever breeched the topic of gender reassignment. I don’t think I did. But if I had been talking about the babysitter and Terry, Terry calling me a homosexual for allowing myself to have been abused by the babysitter would have come up.

In 2007 I made the decision to start proceeding down the road towards transition. I started to pick out my new name.

I tried so many different combinations. And there were more exotic names, but they just didn’t work. So Bobbie Garnet Bees was born.

There was the paperwork, the finger printing, the records checks. I got notified in March of 2008 that the RCMP had cleared my background check and that I was cleared to change my name. The rest of the paperwork started flowing in. And in May of 2008 my birth name officially became dead.

I took a change in employment in 2009 due to a previous employer contacting me and connecting me with the new owners of a business that I had worked at.

This didn’t work out, but it did set me up for going to the Supreme Court of BC for an employment matter that we settled out of court.

This settlement convinced me that it was finally time to go after the babysitter for what he had done.

This one decision derailed my desire to transition by 13 years. I can’t decide if this was a wise move or if I had made a very stupid move.

I had absolutely no involvement with the Canadian Armed Forces from the time I was 16 and moved out of the PMQ on CFB Downsview. I had not paid attention to the news stories about the defective military justice system or the rampant sexual assault problem plaguing the military. I was completely blindsided to discover just how big a problem the Captain Father Angus McRae matter had been on CFB Namao from 1978 to 1980, and I was even more devastated to discover the extents to which the Canadian Armed Forces were willing to go to keep the connection between Captain McRae and his teenaged accomplice, the babysitter, hidden and buried in the past.

Who would have ever thought that the Government of Canada would have willingly given the military their own justice system with which the military could use to hide problems and make issues disappear.

Now is the time for my transition.

The government has delayed my ability to obtain medical assistance in dying.

The class action is proceeding. I honestly have no idea of what amount of compensation the Government of Canada is willing to put forth. It’s definitely not going to be anything spectacular, but it will at least be something of an acknowledgement.

I will be able to start to draw from my pension in a few years. Drawing from my pension and taking part time employment will allow me some flexibility to explore different paths.

But, I can’t help but feeling like an idiot for not doing what Richard suggested and just leaving the babysitter matter alone in the past and not gone and stuck my nose into this “shit” as he put it.

Instead of wasting 13 years of my life, I could have transitioned back around 2011 instead of setting myself up to be destroyed by the Canadian Armed Forces for the second time in my life.

I guess I’ll just have to play it day by day going forward.

Is M.A.i.D. behind me?

As I responded to Zuzu, no, I haven’t given up on obtaining Medical Assistance in Dying.

Transitioning is something that I want to get off my plate.

It’s like a dying child using “Make-A-Wish”.

Transitioning, or more appropriately, nullifying my male gender is something that I had wanted to do all of my life.

I have never identified as a male.

I didn’t ask to be a male.

So, at least I’m going to take some big steps.

Start off with the androgen blockers and the estrogen replacement.

I will lose a lot of my muscle bulk, which is good. Mentally my body has always felt much smaller that what I physically am.

Next step would be orchiectomy and then the penectomy.

And that’s it.

The genitalia that I’ve always considered to be foreign is gone.

The body that I have never identified with is gone.

The body that I will have will have the breasts that I always felt were missing. They won’t be much to look at, but at least they’ll be breasts.

The hips that I have always felt should have been wider with the iliac crests for me to rest my hands on will never be there. Male puberty was a long time ago, and some things can’t be undone.

No labia majora, no labia minora, no clit, no vagina, no cervix, no uterus, no ovaries.

A female?

No.

A male?

Thankfully no.

As I discussed in a previous blog post, I never thought that I was giving off signs as to my gender issues, but nonetheless others have picked up on it. These were usually men who were certain that I was gay due to some effeminate traits or signals that I wasn’t aware that I was giving off.

Unfortunately I will now have another faction of people to deal with.

There will be women out there that will despise me.

You’ve never had a period!

You’ve never experienced growing up knowing that you could be raped at any moment.

You’ve never had a pap smear.

Yep, sure.

I’ll never get to become pregnant and have children.

The raped part?

Sure, technically in Canada rape was not a crime that could be committed against boys. But I did spend 1978 to 1980 getting penetrated by my babysitter. I would go on to be sexually abused by men, some of whom were in positions of authority.

If anything I am only following the whims of my genes and my DNA.

I am firm believer in the nature side of the nature vs. nurture debate.

Yes, the male brain and the female brain are identical in build. Autopsies, MRIs, fMRIs, CT scans, EEGs have shown that for the most part male and female brains function the same. But what these scans and tests can’t yet detect is the wiring of the brain.

The human brain has to have some instinctual information hardwired into it otherwise every human born would have to learn the basics at birth.

Breathing?

Instinctual

Swallowing?

Instinctual

Latching on to your mother’s nipple?

Instinctual.

Women don’t have to learn from other women how to engage in sexual intercourse just as men don’t have to learn from other men how to engage in sexual intercourse.

“So how was Henry last night? Did you have sex with him?”
“Oh, sure I did, if you can call it that”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he kept rubbing his flaccid penis against my ear”
“What?”
“Yeah, he said that no one had shown him how to get an erection and he didn’t know how to make his penis hard”
“But why your ear? Don’t you know where his penis is supposed to go you silly girl?”
“My mother never showed me, so I thought that it was supposed to be my belly button, be he told me not to be silly.”

Sexual behaviours are basic instincts. Every human is born with instinctual level knowledge as to how their genitals work.

All humans begin their first few weeks not as a blank slate, but as a fetus that appears to be female from the outside.

This is why most clinics will not tell the parents the gender of their child, it’s not that they don’t want to, it’s that until about 12 weeks its almost impossible to do with anywhere near 100% certainty.

Prior to 6 to 8 weeks all fetuses have labia and all fetuses have vaginas, and all fetuses have a clitoris.

Over the next few weeks things will begin to change.

All fetuses have a pair of gonads in their lower abdomen.

If the fetus has XX chromosomes the gonads will descend into the pelvis where they will become ovaries.

If the fetus has XY chromosomes the gonads will develop into testes and they’ll descend to down to where the scrotum will eventually be.

The timing of the development of the gonads is critical as the gonads will drive major changes in the fetus.

If the gonads become testicles, they’ll start to secrete androgens, one of which is testosterone. The labia majora will close and fuse together, this is why males have that ridge in their scrotum. The labia minora will become the penile raphe. The clitoris will become the glans of the male penis.

If the fetus is XX, the gonads will become ovaries which will secrete estrogen and other hormones associated with female development. The genital features that are in place already will continue on with their development. The uterus will form as will the fallopian tubes.

There is a very interesting condition that occurs when a fetus has XY chromosomes but has Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome or AIS. This whole topic is well beyond me, but basically due to a genetic coding issue the androgen receptors on the cells in their body are unable to bind with androgen molecules.

These people are born with genitalia that looks female. And nothing is suspected until their teenage years when they fail to develop secondary sexual characteristics and they fail to start to menstruate.

A blood test or a tissue test will show that instead of being XX, their cells are all XY. They have no uterus and they have undeveloped testicles in their abdomen.

Other gender variations arise from XO, XXY, XXX, XYY. Even “normal” XY and XX can have a multitude of variations due to variations of genes on other chromosomes.

The idea that there are only two genders if fucking laughable.

The above paragraphs deal with gender. The next few paragraphs will deal with gender identity.

I am of the firm belief that gender identity is hardwired into the brain along the same time the gonads form into either testicles or ovaries. Your brain has to be wired to be able to use the various parts of your body. To say that the human brain is formed as just a billion random neurons with no purpose is laughable. Every human brain, barring genetic defects, has the same sections that preform the same functions.

There has been quite a bit of research done into the development of the human brain so far as it relates to gender and orientation.

Much like the genitals of a fetus require androgens to interrupt the development of female genitals the human brain as it turns out is destined to be “female” unless it is masculinized by exposure to androgens.

Can an XY male that doesn’t suffer from AIS identify as a female?

Why not?

If the human brain is supposed to become masculinized with the exposure to androgens, is it not possible that timing issues or hormone levels or even hormones from the mother’s bloodstream have affected the fetus’s brain?

Is there a brain test or a brain scan that will detect this masculinization to see if it occurred at the right level to fully modify all of the original female wiring.

Nope.

You get people like me who feel like the junk they have is not what should be there.

You get people like me who don’t fit the masculine roles that we’re supposed to fit.

But back to the topic of M.A.i.D..

I want medical assistance in dying because I am tired.

I am burnt out

Will transitioning change my desire for M.A.i.D..

No.

But at least I will for once be able to be comfortable in my body.

Finally, at long last.

Well, it looks as if the Minister of National Defence has finally grown a pair and is stripping the Canadian Armed Forces of its ability to investigate and prosecute sexual offences.

This is great news.

But it should go much further. The CFNIS and the base military police MUST be prohibited from investigating any crime on base in which civilians are the victims. This would officially remove both domestic child abuse and domestic spousal abuse from the purview of the Canadian Forces military police group.

Sadly it’s too late for the kids of CFB Namao to receive justice.

The settlement from the class action will be the only acknowledgement that we will ever receive.

There will be no admissions of guilt.

There will be no prosecution.

There will be no admission that the military justice system outright failed us.

There will be no investigations to see how extensive child sexual abuse was on the bases in Canada and how often these matters were mishandled by the military justice system.

In my matter the police force investigating this matter was guided by all sorts of wishy-washy policies enacted by the various National Defence Acts.

And none of these policies dealt directly with child sexual abuse.

For example in 1998 the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal put order CFPM 2120-4-0 into effect that stated that in the matters of sexual assault that occur on base when both the victim and the abuser are civilians, the matter is to be handed over to the outside civilian authorities having jurisdiction.

One military dependent sexually abusing other military dependents would be a perfect trigger for this order.

That policy was outright ignored by the CFNIS in March of 2011, and it was ignored by the Federal Court of Canada in 2013.

Yes, CFPM 2120-4-0 instructed the military police and the CFNIS that matters involving civilian on civilian crimes and sexual assaults involving civilians be handed off to the outside civilian authorities, but as the CFPM 2120-4-0 wasn’t hard written into the National Defence Act according to the Federal Court, the Provost Marshal in 2011 was free to ignore this directive at will.

The Provost Marshal and the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service can whine and cry and protest all they want.

They fucked up.

Yes, they may have had no choice in the matter, but they fucked up nonetheless.

In 1980 the military police were not allowed by the chain of command to call in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to deal with the babysitter.

Why didn’t the base commander allowed the RCMP to be called in? Remember, the Canadian Forces moved heaven and earth to keep this investigation and prosecution within the military justice system and out of the prying eyes of the Canadian public, even going so far as to move the court martial “in-camera” and sealing the transcripts. The military would have lost all of this power had the babysitter been investigated, arrested, and then prosecuted in the Juvenile Delinquents Court. One peculiarity of the Juvenile Delinquents Act was the fact that the juvie court could find an adult responsible for the delinquency of a minor and issue summary fines and sentences. All of the work that the Canadian Forces undertook in 1980 to keep Captain McRae a secret would have been all for naught if the babysitter went to juvie court.

In 2011 the CFNIS had the 1980 CFSIU investigation paperwork and the court martial transcripts, both of which heavily implicated the babysitter with the abuse of numerous children on the base. In fact as Fred Cunningham stated in 2011, and as the babysitter’s own father stated to me in 2015, it was the babysitter’s abuse of children that triggered the investigation of Captain Father Angus McRae.

Yes, the existence of the paperwork wouldn’t have proved the babysitter’s guilt, but the fact that he had been investigated by the military police and was found to have been sexually abusing children during the exact same time period that I accused the babysitter of molesting me and my brother would have probably encouraged the crown to request a more in depth investigation.

Remember, it wasn’t that the babysitter had been cleared during the military police investigation, or that the charges had been dismissed against the babysitter , the chain of command on Canadian Forces Base Namao prevented both the base military police and the CFSIU from calling in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to deal with the babysitter.

And yes, when I requested in 2017 that the CFNIS question the former base commander of CFB Namao, retired brigadier general Daniel Edward Munro, as to why he dismissed the majority of charges against Captain McRae and why he wouldn’t allow the RCMP to be brought in to deal with the babysitter, the CFNIS obtained a legal opinion from a legal officer in Ottawa that stated that due to the 3-year-time-bar that existed prior to 1998 no charges could be brought against Daniel Edward Munro so therefore no investigation was to occur.

However the CFNIS failed to pass any of this information on the Albert Crown prosecutor’s office. In fact the CFNIS seemed to have withheld numerous bits of information from the Crown.

This was a tactic that the military police employed in the ’90s during the CFB Gagetown Rape Controversy in which a military spouse was gang raped by numerous soldiers in a barracks on the base. The general consensus was that the military police would give a case to the crown that the military police knew the crown would not prosecute. The military police would then blame the crown for the failure to bring charges.

During the 2012 MPCC investigation of my complaint against the CFNIS, the Provost Marshall willingly withheld the existence of the CFSIU paperwork and the court martial transcripts from the MPCC. In fact the Provost Marshal withheld numerous documents from the MPCC.

Federal Court rules state that an applicant for judicial review cannot enter into evidence any documents that were not before the tribunal in question.

This means that I was unable to enter into evidence anything that the Provost Marshal hadn’t given to the MPCC. Which was a lot. If I had to guess, I’d say that the Provost Marshal withheld from the Military Police Complaints Commission over 80% of the documents from the 2011 investigation.

Even though the 2nd CFNIS investigation was conducted much better as an inspector with the RCMP had set down some ground rules and directions for the CFNIS to follow, in the end the CFNIS basically resubmitted the same brief word for word to the Alberta crown that the CFNIS submitted in 2011. The second time around that CFNIS again failed to notify the crown of the existence of the 1980 CFSIU investigation paperwork or the 1980 court martial transcripts that indicated that the babysitter was known to have molested numerous children on the base during the same frame of time that I had made my allegations against him.

And I know that the exact same brief was filed because when I filed for judicial review in 2013 I was given a certified copy of the documents before the MPCC. In 2019 when I appealed the findings of the Alberta Victims of Crime decision that no crime had occurred based upon the CFNIS investigation, I was given a certified copy of the documents before the Alberta Victims of Crime. This included the 2018 submission to the Alberta Crown. It was identical to the 2011 submission.

See, the problem with the military police is that they are soldiers first and police officers second.

The investigators with the CFNIS must obey the lawful commands of their superiors. Their superiors must obey the lawful commands of their superiors. And so on, and so on.

This means that investigations conducted by the CFNIS can be exposed to political interference.

Children who were sexually abused on military bases in Canada were of absolutely no concern to the brass at NDHQ. And the brass at NDHQ was certainly not going to allow a bunch of base brats sully the public image of the Canadian Armed Forces.

What would the public think if they discovered that children were not entirely safe while living on allegedly secure defence establishments?

What would the public think if the public were to be told that children who lived on bases in Canada prior to 1998 and who were sexually abused by members of the Canadian Forces could not obtain justice due to the existence of the 3-year-time-bar?

What would the public think if the public were to be told that due to the principles of “double jeopardy” military service personnel who sexually abused children on base prior to 1998, and who had their charges dismissed by their commanding officer, could never be tried again on the same charges by either a civilian or military tribunal. I would like to think that the Canadian public would blow a collective gasket if they were to discover that these commanding officers that had the power to dismiss and charge brought against their subordinate had no legal training, no legal background, and prior to 1997 didn’t even have to consult with a legal officer before dismissing charges.

And what would the public think if they discovered that the likelihood of charges being brought against an abuser in the pre-1998 days had a lot to do with the rank of the victim’s serving parent versus the rank of the abuser and ultimately the rank of the abuser’s commanding officer.

A corporal’s demand that charges be brought against a captain when the captain’s commanding officer is a colonel isn’t going to go too far. Especially not when that commanding officer is the base commander and had the ultimate authority over everyone on that particular defence establishment. This would include the corporal, the corporal’s commanding officer, the base military police, and the Canadian Forces Special Investigations Unit detachment located on the colonel’s base.

Anyways, enough for now…….

2 weeks to go

Two weeks from now, at around this time I’ll have anti-androgens and estrogen coursing through my blood stream.

I received the results of my blood test earlier this week. Nothing out of the ordinary. My cholesterol is a little high, but nothing to worry about.

My testosterone levels are on the low side. Probably a side effect of my anti-depressants. But again, nothing to worry about.

I really don’t know how things are going to play out at work.

I have a pretty secure position, but still.

For the most part I don’t think that I’ll have any problem.

I know my life in the great outdoors is gonna get a little more complicated.

But complicated is what I seem to do the best.

To not be male is my primary goal.

As I’ve said, I’ve never identified as male.

But nonetheless male is what I have been.

Was never really masculine enough.

And people have always accused me of not being straight.

Captain Terry Totzke was the first person in my life to accuse me of being a homosexual.

For years after the abuse I had always wondered if Totzke was right. Maybe I got abused because I was gay or because I acted too much like a girl.

School wasn’t too bad, until grade 7 when everyone’s hormones started switching into overdrive, then I was a target for the real boys who didn’t want a faggot in their midsts. I could never figure out what it was. Was it the way I walked? Was it the way I talked? Was it the fact I never acted like horndog around girls and that I never showed any interest in girls?

When I worked for Ed, Bruce, and Dirk at Classic Billiards, Ed was always quick with the gay humour. I got sent to do a service call at the Hotel Isabella by myself with Ed asking me if I got any “action” when I came back to the shop. Ed even sent me off to see a rather interesting promoter in the city. Ed kept asking me if he made any advances to me and if I did anything with him.

In my teen years I would periodically find myself being groped by random men. I never could figure out why I was being groped and no one else was. Like I’d be riding the subway and some dude would make a bee line for me on an empty car, sit down beside me, make some small talk, and then his hand would be massaging my crotch. One time I was downtown at Funland Arcade, I was playing pinball, and the guy wasn’t even being coy about it, he just came up from behind, stuck his hand between my legs, and he wasn’t even coy about it. And as he’s doing that he asks me if I want to go back to his place as he finds me really cute.

I got mugged back in 1995 down at Burrard and West Georgia in downtown Vancouver. The first thing that the investigating officer wanted to know is was this actually a fight between me and my boyfriend or perhaps I tried to pick up a straight guy in a bar.

I had a manger in the early ’00s who would frequently refer to me as “Freddie” as in Freddie Mercury. He would often urge me to use protection when I had sex as he didn’t want me to catch AIDs.

While I was working for this same manager, one of the contractors that did construction projects for the company used to wait until no one was around, then he’d call me a faggot, or a fucking queer. I’d go talk to the manager and he’d laugh it off and tell me that I had to grow a thicker skin if I wanted to survive in the world.

When I first started working at the hospital my department was managed by an outside management firm. I had two mangers that worked for this outside contractor. One of these managers refused to acknowledge me. The other manager, who was the first manager’s manager said that I was far too flamboyant and that if I toned it down maybe the other manager would begin to tolerate me.

But through all of this, never once did I feel “gay”.

I just never really was attracted to women.

And actually, I was never really attracted to men either.

Since I was a kid I was certain that I was going to have nice breasts. Not big ones, nothing like Dolly Parton or Jane Mansfield. Just nice ones.

All the other stuff I wasn’t too concerned about because I really wasn’t aware of the other stuff yet.

Around age 5 on CFB Shearwater, me and three of my female friends were playing in the garage attached to one of their PMQs. I can’t honestly remember how it came to this, but the three of them were tying to help me push my penis back inside because the consensus was that I must have peed too hard one time and that’s why everything popped out and why I didn’t look like them.

But the differences down below never really caused me any issues until later.

In the years that I lived on CFB Griesbach in the aftermath of CFB Namao I really despised what I had between my legs. I didn’t like it and I didn’t want it.

Even though I had been sexually abused for 1-1/2 years, I’m certain that the disdain that I felt towards my junk wasn’t because of the abuse.

About that time I had started going through the early parts of puberty.

And I really didn’t like what was going on.

The feelings of phantom breasts were becoming more intense. It’s like I felt like these should be developing, but they never did.

And at the same time it felt like my hips were supposed to be widening, but they never did. It’s an odd sensation that still persists to this day.

I used to cry myself to sleep every night hoping that I’d wake up as a girl the next day, but childhood hopes can’t overcome physical realities.

It was just after we moved to CFB Downsview in Toronto that my nipples started to secrete a milky white liquid. Finally! I thought that I was finally going to get my breasts. Nope.

Apparently some boys experience this leakage and it’s quite normal.

Transitioning isn’t something that I just decided to do on a whim.

I legally changed my name back in 2008 as a first step in the process.

Bobbie was supposed to eventually become Bobbi.

I even wrote my father a detailed letter explaining what I wanted to do and why I was doing it. He never wrote back or called after that.

And it’s not like he didn’t know what was coming down the pike. In August of 2006 we had an in depth conversation about the events on CFB Namao in which he blamed his mother for hiring the babysitter and that I just had to understand that none of it was his fault.

I told him that I wanted to go after the babysitter and Richard cautioned me against doing that as I might not like the way the shits smells.

After we had that initial telephone call he called me on a daily basis for almost 2 months, but then the calls just suddenly stopped.

I think maybe I had mentioned the verboten topic in casual passing in one phone call.

When I got my name change in 2008 I was so geared up towards taking the necessary steps, but then in 2009 I got an offer of employment that would steer me off course.

The new job disappeared due to a dispute between two factions of shareholders that owned the company. One faction wanted to keep the business operating, the other faction just wanted to sell the property and get the money and get out of there.

I ended up taking some of the shareholders to the Supreme Court of BC. Took a few months of legal back and forth but we ended up settling out of court.

Armed with this, I decided to take on the babysitter.

That was a fucking mistake.

I could have transitioned years ago, but instead I got ensnared in the shit my father warned me about. For 13 years I got derailed on my gender adventure by a military hellbent on keeping their dirty laundry out of sight of the public.

They lied, and they lied, even though they knew the truth.

They called me a societal malcontent with an axe to grind against the military.

The Minister of National Defence accused me of being a scammer looking for a quick buck.

So, here I am waiting for two weeks.

Two weeks for me to get my first dose of anti-androgen meds and my first dose of estrogen.

I won’t truly be a woman, and I’m fine with that.

Just so long as I can no longer be considered a male, I’m happy with that.

If this works and there are no adverse effects, then I do plan to have all traces of my male genitalia removed. No penis, no testicles, no scrotum. Just nothing.

I’ve often wondered what it would be like if humans were born genderless and then had to choose a gender on the 16th birthday, what gender would I have chosen.

The sad thing about being a human being is having to endure other human beings that “know more”.

“God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” blah, blah, blah.

There’s only two genders……. blah, blah, blah.

Boys are supposed to have sex with girls, not with other boys (Totzke said this)…… blah, blah, blah.

You can’t have a penis and testicles and long for your phantom breasts and phantom hips….. blah, blah, blah.

I’m not a brainologist, or a genderologist, or a sexual attractionologist, I’m just a XY that’s never felt like an XY or identified as an XY.

The Justice System in this country is in shambles and is horrifically broken if you’re the victim

The justice system in this country is broken, of that there is absolutely no doubt.

And sadly, it’s the victims of crime that get the proverbial boot to the balls.

Most, if not all, victim assistance programs are geared towards victims in which a conviction has occurred or where there exists the likelihood that a crime was committed.

But what if the police department that is conducting the investigation is compromised?

What if the system that you are ensnared in is not set up for dealing with civilian victims?

If you’ve followed my blog you’ll see that I’ve been engaged with the Canadian Armed Forces and the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service since March of 2011.

March of 2011 is of course when I decided to deal with the babysitter.

Yes, I had from 1980 to 2011 to deal with the babysitter, that is true, but if you’ve followed along with my blog you’ll realize that from 1980 to 1983 a military social worker was blaming me for allowing myself to be abused and for allowing the babysitter to molest my brother.

In March of 2011 I was finally ready to deal with the babysitter against the wishes of my father.

I made my complaint with the Edmonton Police Service. The EPS passed the matter off to the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service.

As the certified tribunal records illustrate, that investigation was an absolute joke. But that wasn’t surprising at the time as the military police were being dragged through the mud for their inability to investigate sexual assaults involving women in the military.

And if it hadn’t been for a series of questions that Master Corporal Christian Cyr asked me on May 3rd, 2011 I would have never put 2 & 2 together with respect to the babysitter and Captain McRae, the base chaplain. Nor would I have known that the babysitter had sued the Minister of National Defence for the sexual abuse at the hands of Captain McRae.

The investigation concluded on November 4th, 2011 with Petty Officer Steve Morris calling me and telling me that the CFNIS couldn’t find any evidence at all to indicate that the babysitter was capable of what I accused him of.

In December of 2011 I filed a complaint with the Military Police Complaints Commission. The MPCC conducted a ‘review’, but during a review the MPCC relies solely upon documents submitted to it by the Provost Marshal. The MPCC is not allowed to subpoena documents. In fact, during an MPCC review the MPCC cannot administer oaths.

In 2012 I filed my first of many FOI requests to obtain the court martial transcripts of Captain McRae.

In February of 2013 the MPCC gave the CFNIS a solid TWO-THUMBS-UP for a very detailed investigation that spanned 30 years.

However, what the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal failed to hand over to the Military Police Complaints Commission in 2012 was the 1980 CFSIU investigation paperwork and the transcripts from the July 15-18 courts martial of Captain Father Angus McRae. I know about this paperwork because an investigator with the CFNIS would later inform me about the existence of this paperwork and that it corroborated everything that a retired military police officer had told me on November 27th, 2011.

After the MPCC review was over I quickly assessed my options. I tried to obtain a lawyer with federal court experience, specifically experience with dealing with the Military Police Complaints Commission. The clock ticks pretty fast when one wants to file for judicial review. You literally have 90 days from the day the findings of the tribunal are released to file your application.

The lawyers that I was speaking with all wanted retainers in the neighbourhood of $15k to $20k.

But more importantly, most of these lawyers were hung up on why a civilian wanted to have the federal court quash the findings of a military tribunal.

Something doesn’t make sense.

You’re not telling us the truth.

You’re hiding something.

The military never investigates child sexual abuse

The military police never investigate civilian on civilian sexual abuse.

You should get the RCMP to look at this matter

You should get the Edmonton Police Service to investigate this matter.

So, I ended up representing myself in Federal Court.

When I received the certified tribunal records from the MPCC it was very obvious that the CFNIS and the Provost Marshal had excluded a vast amount of documentation and records from the records that were given to the MPCC.

Could I introduce my copies of these documents to the federal court? Nope. Well, I could, but I’d have to put the federal court matter on hold and appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Any lawyers willing to take that on?

Nope, not a single fucking lawyer wanted to look at this. Retainers for this were quoted around $20k

So in the end all of my documentation was excluded and the justice could only take into account documents that were before the MPCC and not documents that were withheld from the MPCC by the Provost Marshal. So the justice found in favour of the MPCC. The DOJ sent me a bill for about $2k for wasting their time.

In 2017, during the second CFNIS investigation into my original complaint against the babysitter, the investigator the with CFNIS let slip the existence of the court martial transcripts and the CFSIU investigation paperwork both of which heavily implicated the babysitter and both of which verified what Cunningham had told me in 2011 and that Cunningham was in a position to know exactly what he was talking about.

I started new FOIs for the CFSIU investigation paperwork and the Court Martial transcripts.

In 2018 the 2nd CFNIS investigation was concluded, so I filed a request for a MPCC review of the 2nd CFNIS investigation. The Provost Marshall objected to this.

Due to the MPCC requesting copies of the court martial transcripts and the CFSIU investigation paperwork, DND could no longer refuse to give me a copy. It took some bad publicity from David Pugliese with the Ottawa Citizen to finally get DND to cough up the documents.

What did the documents show:

The babysitter’s molestation of children is what triggered the investigation of Captain McRae
The investigation of the babysitter occurred in his family’s PMQ and was conducted by military police officers Mossman and Clark.
Much like what the babysitter’s father told me in June of 2015, the military police had received complaints from numerous parents.
The babysitter had forced anal intercourse with three 10 year old boys behind the recreation centre.
The babysitter was known to have had sex with children much younger
The babysitter was receiving psychological counselling for his attraction to young children.
It was colonel Daniel Edward Munro’s decision as to what charges Captain McRae was charged with, this shows that the summary investigation flaw in the National Defence Act had very real world consequences for child sexual abuse matters.
The court martial transcripts also proved once and for all that the Canadian Armed Forces could and would conduct courts martial for child sexual abuse matters.

The MPCC released the review in October of 2020. And they observed a few things.

The babysitter had more criminal convictions for child sexual abuse than what the CFNIS indicated in their documents to the crown.
The CFNIS relied on the Crown’s reluctance to prosecute on insufficient evidence as their being “no evidence”.
The CFNIS didn’t inform the Crown of the CFSIU paperwork that showed that there was an investigation of the babysitter at the time for sexually abusing children.
When Master Corporal Christian Cyr kept telling me on May 3rd, 2011 that the babysitter was only 12 or 13 at the time of the abuse, he was obviously getting this wrong age from the CFSIU paperwork as that is the only place the error occurs. The babysitter was born in June of 1965 and was 14 in the spring of 1980 and was fully within the jurisdiction of the RCMP and the juvenile delinquents court. But more importantly, the fact that Mcpl Cyr was quoting the wrong age showed that the CFNIS did have these documents from the start of the investigation.

It was only after I received the court martial transcripts and the CFSIU paperwork and the October 2020 MPCC findings that I was able to finally obtain a lawyer willing to take this matter on, and on a contingency basis.

But this isn’t the way that it should be.

No one in this country should have to square off against a tax payer funded agency like the Canadian Armed Force on their own.

No government agency should be allowed to use the short timelines provided by the various tribunals to stickhandle complainants.

I think the most significant reason why lawyers were willing to take on my matter so far as it related to the CFNIS and the MPCC is that these lawyers make a metric fuckton of money representing military members. When these ex-JAG lawyers represent members of the Canadian Forces, their bills are guaranteed to be paid. And paid at very well-off rates. A piss-ant civilian like me? What the fuck can I offer them?

And believe me, when you are going up against the Canadian Armed Forces, the Department of National Defence, and the MIlitary Police Complaints Commission, you need a lawyer not only with federal court experience, you need a lawyer with a very good and detailed understanding of military law and the various iterations of the National Defence Act over the years.

To this day I still get lawyers who are outright adamant that the military could never investigate child sexual abuse and the military courts sure as fuck could not conduct a courts martial for child sexual abuse. This even though I have Captain McRae’s court martial transcripts, and a good dozen decisions from the Court Martial Appeal Court of Canada in which service members were appealing their charges of child sexual abuse.

So when the military law lawyers can’t even get their shit together, what fucking chance do I stand?

None.

Does the justice system work?

Nope, it’s fucking broken.

Victims are left on their own to navigate the systems, systems that quite often do not work.

Victim rights are often an afterthought.

Legal aid for victims? Doesn’t exist.

Pro-bono assistance with federal court matters? Nope, doesn’t exist.

Civilian lawyers set up to assist civilians with navigating the Canadian Forces justice system and the peculiarities of the National Defence Act? Nope, doesn’t exist.

The fact that the babysitter doesn’t even have to apologize and in fact gets to keep playing the role of the sole victim while I’m condemned to the role of the bad guy is what irks me the most.

Car driver willfully runs a red light, causes a collision, and kills a 2 year old on the sidewalk and the judge is practically tripping over themselves to absolve the driver of any fault because the driver didn’t intend to kill the baby even though it was his foot on the accelerator and his hands on the steering wheel. And our fucked up no fault insurance system ensures that the parents are only getting about $20k for the death of their child.

Another car driver runs over and kills a police officer in Toronto and a jury of 12 people with no legal training and no legal back ground decide that a car driver shouldn’t have to be aware of their surroundings and that if someone “fears for their life” it’s okay to run anything over.

I just wish that victims had this much sympathy from the justice system.

Sure, locking up the wrong person is never a desirable outcome, but letting everyone walk because of the most tenuous of plausible arguments is absolutely wrong as well.

We seriously need to revamp the justice system.

No more jury trials. Juries should be replaced with panels of lawyers. Trials should not be left up to the whims of people with no legal understanding who are easily manipulated by the appeal to emotion. Anyone could have run over a bump on the ground……

Courts should be allowed to find guilt or assign guilt, without having to assign a sentence. If incarceration places the bar of evidence so high that the International Space Station is at risk of crashing into it, drop incarceration.

If your hands are on the steering wheel of a car that ends up running over someone, you shouldn’t be able to skip out of court scot-free.

Did my babysitter molest my brother and I and at least four other kids that I am aware of? Yes. The odds of probability lean very heavily in that direction. It’s not like I made my complaint against someone with no criminal record. And it’s not like I had access to the courts martial transcripts or the CFSIU investigation paperwork. The babysitter was under investigation for molesting children and the only reason he never went to juvie for what he did is that the base commander refused to allow the RCMP to be called in. So it wasn’t that the babysitter was innocent. Other issues at play allowed the babysitter at the time to escape responsibility. The problem with that is the Canadian Armed Forces chucked us under the fucking train.

Anyways, that’s my rant for now.

Growing up Queer in the Canadian Armed Forces.

There’s nothing that starts up arguments better in the base brat groups on F-book than discussions about what it was like to grow up queer on a military base.

The strongest counter argument that most former base brats can come up with is that it wasn’t easy to be queer in the civilian world so why do I concentrate on the military world.

I didn’t grow up in the civilian world, I grew up in the military world.

I lived on military bases from the month I was born until just after my 16th birthday.

By the time I was 8 years old I knew the following terms:

Homo
Faggot
Queer
Cocksucker
Pansy

I was taught that women were inferior to men and that girls were inferior to boys.

It would be an understatement to say that the military was a very misogynistic and homophobic environment.

The Canadian Armed Forces had a very strict policy against homosexuals and other sexual “deviants” right up until 1994 when they were ordered by the Supreme Court of Canada to ditch the homophobia.

This policy was CFAO 19-20.

And as I’ve said before, yes, the policy didn’t apply to military dependents. But each and every member of the Canadian Forces would have received basic information on this policy as they were expected to rat out fellow members if they suspected those fellow members of being gay, lesbian, or exhibiting any other sexual “abnormality”.

I think this is one of the reasons that Captain Terry Totzke was so hellbent on making me understand that I was a homosexual because I had sex with the babysitter. In Totzke’s mind I must have been a homosexual as there would be no other reason why I’d let a boy twice my age put his penis into my rectum on various occasions. Totzke’s training in the military must have fucked up his common sense beyond all belief.

And as study after study has indicated, military personnel were very prone to bringing their training into the homes on base.

This is one of the reasons why domestic abuse was always a problem in the military community. In the military you do not under any circumstance question or disobey the orders of your superiors. In the military home the male spouse would often view themselves as the commander of the house and everyone in the house was his subordinate bound to obey his each and every command. And there would be hell to pay if commands were not obeyed.

All I can say is that I am very thankful that Richard never caught me crossdressing in my early years on Shearwater or Griesbach. Actually, I’m very thankful that no one else caught me crossdressing.

I cannot imagine, even in today’s world, growing up trans on base, or even just gender non-conforming. Being gender non-conforming on base is dangerous.

For the longest time I had always assumed that my desire to not be male had something to do with the abuse from 1978 until 1980.

No, the abuse was not the source of my desire to not be male.

Yes, in the aftermath of the abuse I really wanted to be a girl. But I had always assumed again that that was due to the abuse as well as the teaching of Captain Totzke and nothing more.

I had always written off my desires to have my own breasts and my own hips like the girls at school was just me being fucked up due to the abuse.

All the abuse from CFB Namao did was set me up for further abuse on CFB Downsview.

It was the military’s attitude towards gender non-conforming people, and the military’s opinion that gender non-conformity was a mental illness that caused me to bury my desires.

Yes, I realize that switching hormones isn’t going to be easy, but at least today’s civilian world is far more accepting than the homophobic and misogynistic environment that I grew up in.

Yes, I do expect to encounter boneheads who think that what I am doing goes against “god’s will”.

Tough.

Yes, I do expect to encounter women that will accuse me of wearing “their” gender as a costume.

Tough.

For the most part my gender identity and my sexual orientation were formed in utero. The brain is literally hard wired for sex. If the human brain, or any other animal brain for that matter wasn’t hard wired for gender identity and sexual orientation, reproduction would have never worked.

Sex is a basic instinct.

There is no such thing as a female brain or a male brain.

But how the brains are wired very much depends on what hormones the fetus is exposed to in utero as well as the levels of those hormones, and the timing of the exposure.

Genes and chromosomes also play heavily into gender identity and sexual orientation.

Humans start developing as females even if they have XY chromosomes. However, once the fetus’s gonads develop into either testicles or ovaries and start secreting either androgen or estrogen the the fetus will either keep developing as a female or the development as a female will halt and the fetus will start developing as a male.

Persons that are born intersex prove that gender is not a simple binary male / female choice. We’ll never know the true prevalence of intersex persons throughout the entirety of human existence, but it would be safe to say that ever since mammals started determining sex via the presence of a second X or Y chromosome that intersex persons have been with us.

One type of intersex are persons with XY chromosomes that are born presenting as female. XY is supposed to be male, right? Well unlike what the bible thumpers would love for you to believe, due to Androgen Insensitivity intersex persons are often born with testicles in their abdomen, a vagina, but no uterus, all external genitalia presenting as female. These people are usually not detected to be intersex until they become teens and fail to go through puberty.

Their testicles are in their abdomen because due to the androgen insensitivity they failed to descend towards the scrotum. Basically the gonads stayed where they would have been had they developed into ovaries.

They have a vagina and external female genitals as both male and female fetuses have these until the gonads become testicles and the female tissues are repurposed for their male counterpart.

Males have mammary glands and nipples because they form before the gonads develop into ovaries or testicles.

How and when the brain starts adapting its wiring is anyone’s guess. Researchers know what the various areas of the brain do, but the exact wiring patterns that form and how they determine the characteristics of the fetus are still quite a few years away from truly being understood.

Trans people and queer people and gender non-conforming people have existed all throughout human history no matter how hard the Abrahamic religions have tried to erase them. To say that human beings are either genetically male or female, identify as male or female, and are only attracted to the opposite sex is quite laughable.