"Many others have joined relatively macho professions or attempted risky behaviors, such as reaching the summit of Mt. Everest for the first time on Coronation Day in 1953. Their purpose was a form of self-administered reparative therapy.
"This self-repair can be cloaked in a religious vestment, as was my experience, or it can be completely secular in nature, but the key point lies in the attempt to cure oneself of the feelings, the profoundly intimate knowledge that you're female, even though everyone else perceives you as male, or vice versa. The process usually proceeds for years, often decades, before the erosion of one's resistance to the truth has been completed and you're left with nothing but the raw truth. At that point, should you reach it, you either engage with your truth or take your life. Some people never get to that point and are able to run and hide forever; others come up short in childhood or adolescence. The majority have made it to adulthood, with all the trappings that that involves, before the executive decision must be confronted."
-- Dana Beyer, 2013-08-19
[Personal note: SF fandom partially short-circuited that crisis for me, by providing me an opportunity to start acknowledging and exploring my identity early, before I hit that do-or-die point. But the pressure she describes, the erosion of resistance, is familiar to me even if I never hit that absolute crisis point with it. I was fortunate.]
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