It all started, for real, a bit over a month before my sixteenth birthday.

See, I'd known for a long, long time, since I was five or six, that I was different from other people.

The problem I had is that my dad is sometimes a bit of a macho prick and I'm his only son. I have three sisters, one older, two younger. Mom isn't a problem, she's quite open-minded, but I would be very surprised if what I want didn't at least surprise her a bit.

So what is my issue, you ask? Well, to be blunt, I'm mentally bi-gender, I'm physically male at the moment, but I want to be female, too.

I'm really not sure how dad might take this, but I guess I'm going to have to start the ball rolling if I ever want to be the real me.

So... last night at supper, I asked for a family meeting to be held this afternoon. It's Saturday today, no school, Dad's home, so is Mom.

I made sure everyone was in there before I entered, taking my usual seat on the settee along one wall.

To put it bluntly, I was quite nervous, and I sat there slumped on the settee for several minutes before Dad asked, "So what is this about?"

I sighed, looked up at him, shook my head for a moment, then stated, "I'm bi-gender, I want to be male and female."

If you could have seen the look on dad's face t that point, it would have been funny. His jaw was hanging down as far as it could go. A quick look around the room at mom and my three sisters, Portia, Ophelia and Juliet, showed they were just as shocked as he was by my response.

Oh, I haven't told you my name yet, have I? Well, mom and dad have a huge thing for Shakespeare's plays, they named me Tybalt Cassio.

Every time I think about my names, I wince. You wouldn't believe the grief I get in school all of the time just over my names.

Even worse, the teacher running the drama club at school seems to think that I am bound to be the next big star in theatres. Gods, no!

Well, Juliet, my youngest sister, she's eleven, was the first to reply, "Can you explain that for us, bro? I'm not sure what you mean."

It seems everyone else was in agreement with her, so I sighed again and took a moment to collect my thoughts.

"Hmmm," I started, "Think of it this way, I'm physically male, right?" Nods all around had me speaking again, "Well, for about ten years now, I've known up here," I pointed to my head, "And in here", pointing to my heart, "I'm also female, or more correctly, should also be female."

Dad was giving me this look like he was about to get all pissy over me supposedly not being his son, but I cut him off right away.

"Dad, let me keep talking, I'm not done yet. I need to explain it a bit more, okay?"

He took a deep breath, then another one, one of his anger management exercises, then nodded for me to continue.

"Dad, I still want to be male, I will never stop being your son, but I also need to be your daughter, this shit is slowly killing me inside." To make it quite clear as to what I meant, I tapped my chest just over my heart and mimed a heart attack, which caused dad to blanch in shock.

"I need to do something, the stress of doing nothing is driving me completely batshit crazy." That brought concerned nods from everyone.

There was a lot more discussion that afternoon and evening, some of it over pizzas dad had ordered for our dinner so we could keep talking. The end result was that they would find a decent psychologist for me to see, at which point I would lay it all out for them to see.

Dad wasn't as comfortable around me as he had been before, but he loved me enough to agree that I should find my own path in life.

I had about half a dozen sessions with Dr. Elizabeth Sampson-Whyte, sessions which slowly brought her onside, wanting to help me.

About three months after the sessions started, roughly two months after I turned sixteen, I started taking female hormones. Dad had asked at some point if I wanted to be on male blockers. My response was to laugh and ask him why? I still wanted to be functional as a male.

So the hormones started, I ended up back in school when the summer ended, and my life went upside down almost instantly.

See, there's two jerks on our football team, Kevin Jacobs and Victor Paulson, who've always given me a hard time because I showed no interest in football at all, even though I was already inching up toward six feet, having reached 5'10" already and weighed in at about 170 pounds.

Nope, my interests, when it came to sports, were more along the line of playing soccer. Yeah, there can be some nasty hits on the field in a soccer game, but you're not being run over by about a dozen guys built like refrigerators on two feet that hit like Mack trucks at high speed.

I'm not star material on the soccer field, but I am fairly good at ball handling and a fair number of my passes to others have resulted in goals.

For the first month after school started that fall, those two jerks used every chance they could get to body slam me into lockers or walls.

By the end of the first week of school, I was covered in bruises from head to toe and they had broken my left arm in two places.

It took another three weeks before anything was done about it, and that only happened because seven kids, five of them from the school's drama club, went into the principal's office, accessed their phones and showed him close-up videos of the assaults that had been taking place.

Twenty minutes after that, the two jerks were pulled from their classes and stuffed into the backs of two police cars, on their way to jail.

I eventually healed from the injuries they had inflicted, just in time for the nubs of my new breasts to become itchy and tender.

By the time Christmas arrived that year, I was beginning to show through most of the shirts I had available, which drew attention to me. It became bad enough that, two days after school started again in the new year, there was an assembly in the gym to deal with it once and for all.

What I didn't know, nor did the school officials at the time, was that there was a news reporter there, and she took notes about what was said.

That was how I ended up as the lead story on that evening's local news, something that was completely unexpected.

"What is Bi-gender? How can a child be both genders when born specifically as one?" screamed the female anchor for the news program.

It went viral so fast my head was spinning. My FB page was overflowing with comments, most positive but a few that definitely weren't.

I cracked under the stress and had to be kept in a psych unit at the local hospital for about a week not long after that happened.

Eventually, the hype about me died down as other news stories claimed the main slot for their all too brief instances of fame and notoriety.

The sessions with Dr. Sampson-Whyte continued, now on a weekly basis thanks to the physical attacks and the news hype. I'm really glad that she stood by me through it all. From what I heard later, more than thirty other reporters were told to take a hike while I was in the ward.

Time continued to pass, and my body began to fill out, eventually assuming the physical proportions of a young, maturing woman.

Three months after the big news stampede had ended, my name was legally changed to Taylor Leslie, both are gender neutral names.

Since I hadn't used male blockers at all, I was still functional as a male, which led to some interesting "dates".

The fifth girl that "dated" me actually cared about my feelings. As for me, I was stunned by her simple yet elegant beauty.

Claudia and I have been together now for almost two years, I'm about to go in for the surgery to create a vagina. Since I intended to keep my manhood intact, they would be using a strip of colon material to form the new vagina once they have created an opening for it.

Why that method? Well, once they "open it", they remove enough flesh to create a passage, but they need the material from the colon to make the inner "skin" that would, once I was fully healed and had done sufficient dilation, enable ordinary sex with males if I wished it.

Yeah, you're right, I could have just done the anal thing, but that just turns on my ick factor and makes me want to puke! No, thanks.

So yeah, they're taking me down to the operating room now; I'm feeling a bit giggly, I wonder what they put in the IV?

The anesthesiologist asked me to count down from 100, I think I made it as far as 93 before the anesthesia took effect.

I woke up a few hours later in the recovery room, Claudia and mom were sitting by my gurney, idly flipping through magazines.

I spent the next few days mostly lying in bed, being helped to the washroom when needed; no way would I use a bedpan!

Not quite three days after the operation, Dr. Kemper, the one who had done the work, removed the packing from my new vagina.

There was lots of talk about what I needed to do to ensure proper functioning of my new vagina, including being given a pack of stents.

Claudia was a huge help as I slowly recovered, often actually go so far as to help me with the dilation. She's soooo awesome!

I graduated from high school just before I went in for the operation. I'm taking a one year break before I start college.

I really didn't expect my sexual interests to change at all, but lately, I've noticed I'm looking at some rather hunky boys a lot.

When I realized what was happening, I had a long talk with Claudia about it. She suggested I pick a boy we could both relate to well.

It's been a bit over six months since my operation, and Claudia and I are on our way to meet with Thomas Lange, a nice young man.

Where things go from here is anyone's guess. I've seen Thomas in school regularly, he's always been respectful to others.