Hello. I am Tayoh Dey.
I’m also Wepwawet Vvulff.

---

I don't have gender dysphoria.
I don't think I was born in the wrong body.

I have gender euphoria.
I am happier when I see myself as a trans-woman than as a cis-man.

I enjoy being a girl!
It makes me happy!

To understand who I am,
you need to understand how I became.
Let's look at some of my history:

As a child, I didn’t particularly identify as a boy or as a girl.
I didn’t associate gender with my body.
I wanted to be either Superman or Wonder Woman as the occasion demanded.
The physical apparatus didn’t strike me as particularly related to my body,
but rather to the task at hand.
Most tasks didn’t involve gender,
but for those that did,
I wanted to be changeable.

I have three gender states.
Sometimes I feel male, sometimes I feel female,
but most of the time I am agender
because gender has nothing to do with what I’m doing.

I only become male or female when it mattered.
Most of my life has been spent without a gender.
In younger times, I lived as a male
because that was what was expected of me.
So, I became male.
As a child, I didn’t understand
most of the world
was either male or female.
Like most children, I thought everyone else was like me on the inside –
sometimes a boy and sometimes a girl.
I didn’t realize how different I was.

From an early age, I could see all my relatives
and all my classmates
lying about everything.
I didn't lie because
I assumed they could see the lies too.
It took me a long time understand they
couldn't see.
I learned not to trust anybody –
I became emotionally isolated.
I don't know why it only affected
my male personality
and not my female personality.
I don’t think my female personality
was very developed then.

It was this same projection of my own feelings
onto others that meant I didn’t understand
most of the world was different.
Like most children,
I thought everyone else was like me
on the inside.
Since I didn’t understand people,
I was drawn to machines.
Machines don’t have feelings.
Machines were predictable.
My analytical intelligence developed long before
my emotional intelligence.

I grew up in a household with a viciously
man-hating grandmother
and a father who was present as little as possible to avoid her.
She was a nasty old lady who constantly disparaged men.
She hated men (so I was told)
because her husband went off and left her with 3 small children
of which my mother was the eldest
Obviously, that’s not where her hatred started,
but her hatred is probably the reason
her husband left.

She constantly denigrated my father and all men.
She accepted me only because she was convinced
I was really her granddaughter
disguised as a grandson.

My father never defended himself.
My mother never defended my father.
My father worked late every night to avoid her.
I was taught by the family environment
that because I was male,
I could never be “good enough.”

I was the one who was forced
to beg her to take her medicine
while I wished her dead.
She died.
I wasn’t “good enough” to save her.

Effectively, I had no male role model.
I learned how to get along with women,
but never how to get along with men.
I learned to dislike men
although I wasn't aware of it at the time.

Sometime around adolescence,
I started cross dressing.
I’m guessing at first it was the fetish variety,
but eventually I discovered
I was happier when I cross dressed.
My male personality is emotionally isolated
and depressed.
My female personality is emotionally connected
and happier.
In short, I don’t have gender dysphoria,
but I do have social dysfunction.

I enjoy being a girl. It makes me happy.
This is an opinion, not a diagnosis.

Back then, the words didn’t exist for genderfluid.
I have three distinct personalities,
<DeadName> who is male,
emotionally isolated and depressed,
“Wolf,” who is agender,
and has nothing resembling
human emotions,
and me, Tayoh.
Wolf was present most of the time.
<DeadName> was present when necessary,
I was present as a cross-dresser
occasionally.
I am emotionally connected and happy.

It was 1958, my Junior year in high school.
Bell, Book, and Candle was my favorite movie.
I fell in love with Kim Novak.
Actually, I fell in love with the idea of Magick.
But mostly, I wanted to be Gillian Holroyd.
If I ever have a cat, it will be named Pyewacket.

It was 1959. Fidel Castro was fighting for
freedom in Cuba.
I grew a beard,
celebrated “Veintiséis de julio,”
and drew the red and black flag
of the revolution everywhere.
I didn’t understand communism then.
Castro was a hero,
who fought passionately for a cause.
I had no good male role models.
I needed a hero. Castro was “romantic.”
Che Guevara didn’t do anything for me.
I still have the beard.
I gave up on Castro a long time ago.

I now understand the beard is
a “gender resonance” activity
to hold my personality on the male side.
When I want to be a girl, the beard goes.
When I want to be a boy, the beard returns.

I didn’t understand people.
People don’t behave rationally.
So I turned to computers.
It was the infancy of the computer industry.
There were only two commercial computers then.
I became a programmer.
It was a suitable vocation for a boy.
But, I wasn’t a boy.
I was agendered.

Because I wasn’t comfortable being male,
and I wasn’t physically female,
I stayed in the agender state most of the time
unless gender was a necessity
for a particular activity.
I had no good male role models,
and I didn’t feel accepted with females.

Mother would probably have welcomed me
into her conversations and circles.
I’m sure both my father and my mother loved me,
but neither one of them knew how to reach me.
I didn’t want to be reached.
My grandmother was probably the only “abusive” thing I suffered as a child.
I had good parents who wanted the best for me.
But, they were in over their heads
and didn’t understand or know how to cope
with the situation.

My male personality became a computer whiz kid
before there was Computer Science.
I've worked for 2 universities -
without a degree,
teaching the professors how to use computers.

I became a programmer,
or what is called a “developer” today.
Then I became a System Analyst
(analyze existing systems),
a System Engineer
(design new systems),
and as systems became too complex
for a single person to wholly understand,
a Technical Writer.
Only the Project Manager and the Technical Writer
understood the whole system.
I never did learn how people work.
I didn’t want to be a Project Manager
because I would have to deal with people.
What I did start to learn
was how to program minds.

Part of the problem was analytical intelligence.
It interferes with emotional intelligence
and vice versa.
If you are too analytical, and male
(boys don’t have emotions) to boot,
it prevents you from developing
emotional intelligence.

Eventually, like a good boy,
I got married in my 20s.
I was a closed-minded male.
I had shifted into my “young married” role,
and never having had good role models,
I had shit for an idea of how a marriage works.
So my marriage broke up,
mostly because I was a male asshole.

Psychotherapy was the silver lining
in the cloud of despair.
The psychological testing told me my personality was right down the middle
between male and female,
and that I had a 99.9 percentile intelligence.
What the tests didn't show is that I have
a high empathy level,
but it's hidden in my female personality
and is not accessible to my male personality.
At the time, the words “bigender” and “agender” still didn’t exist.
Otherwise, I might have had a clue.

I had a wonderful female therapist.
I learned Gestalt and Bio-Energetic techniques.
I know how to induce an abreaction
and how to bring someone back
out of the flashback
to the here and now.
I began to find my emotional intelligence.
I bought two pairs of batakas, padded foam bats.
I had bataka fights with my friends.
I learned how the mind works.

I met my first pwBPD
(person with Borderline Personality Disorder)
in New York City.
We visited the 79th Street Boat Basin
and I fell in love with houseboats.
She helped me loosen up
and live on a cabin cruiser.
She got me interested in tarot cards.

I found a strange little occult shop in Brooklyn.
I immediately fell in love with the Thoth Tarot
by Aleister Crowley.
The images on the cards spoke to me.
This is how I met my totem or spirit animal, “Wolf.”
Upuaut, or Wepwawet is the Egyptian
wolf-headed god who Opens the Way
for the Bark of Ra.

That led me to study ceremonial magick
and hang out with the local Wiccan coven.
I learned more about how the mind works.
My emotional intelligence got a little better.

I dated a girl who lived in a filmmaking “cooperative” in Manhattan.
They supported their “artistic” filmmaking activities
by shooting “artistic” pornos on the side.
I learned how to let go of my ideas of sexuality
and sensuality.
She was open to anything that didn’t hurt.
She did the costumes for the films
(costumes for pornos?)
and sold clothing of her own design on the side.
She would have loved to dress me up.
She gave me my first rim-job,
my first pregnancy,
my first abortion,
and my first STD.
We didn’t last because her interests were
too limited – nothing but film and clothing and sex.
if I had stayed with her,
I would have become a shemale whore.

Then, one day, when I wasn’t looking for it,
I met my soul mate at work.
Beautiful, gourmet cook, fashionista,
emotionally open,
and with a high-tech job.
One day, after dinner at her place, I never left.

We never had any intention of getting married.
We knew the change in roles from
“young couple living together”
to “married couple”
could be disastrous.
We both had lousy role models.

Unfortunately, child abuse can be traced back
five generations in her family.
We got married to adapt her granddaughter,
Titania,
out of an abuse situation.
I had never wanted kids.
(What if I got a boy, or worse someone not smart.)
Now I had one pre-teen girl
with lots of sexual experience and brutality –
fortunately smart enough
I could communicate with her.

That’s when I started getting serious about tarot.
I used it to explore myself and my relations with Titania, Queen of the World.
Together, I (Tayoh Dey) and Wolf (Wepwawet Vvulff) designed a tarot deck
and wrote a book. We called it Do-It-Yourself Brain Surgery.
When you're hitting 85% or better accuracy,
it gets scary.
When you can't do a reading for someone who
is desperate,
and then commits suicide the next week,
it gets scary.
I don't do readings for other people any more.
I’m not “good enough” to save them.

I finally fully understood how
the mind is programmed.
I also learned how impossibly difficult it is
to alter the coding –
something any shrink could have told me.
Understanding what has gone wrong is easy.
Changing it is almost impossible.

Years later, after a series of brutal boyfriends,
Titania died of cirrhosis of the liver.
I wasn’t “good enough” to save her.

Titania’s mother committed suicide
after 25 years of therapy
I had helped her through.
I wasn’t “good enough” to save her.

Our marriage lasted for 41 years.
I got to wear thigh-top stockings in bed.
(I’m very tactile and very oral.)
She couldn't deal with anything more than stockings, but she wore them too.

I've done a lot of things that may seem
male gender specific.
I don't think gender has anything
to do with any of them.
I have met women who have done all of them.

I have been on the pit crew of an amateur race car.
I have been an auto mechanic.
I have lived on a cabin cruiser for several years and played tag with whales.
I have built robots and computers.
I have been a photographer with both wet (chemical) and dry (computer) darkrooms.
I have done videography.
I have owned a printing press
and been a publisher.
I do photo editing, video editing,
and sound editing.
I have written high technology documentation
and training programs.
I have written "how-to" arts and crafts books.
I am really lousy at music. I can't hold a tune.
I have excellent hand-eye coordination.
I can work on microscopic circuits.
I have very poor reflex times.
I stink at sports.
I don't twitch fast enough to play video games.
I have restored and repaired pinball games.
My reflexes are too slow to play them very well.
I have done stage lighting and rigging.
I have acted on the stage.
(That’s where I learned to do makeup.)

So, why Tayoh Dey? What’s my name all about?

Well, since I seem to be both male and female (as opposed to one or the other),

I went looking for the Yin & the Yang.

From Wikipedia:

Tao or Dao (English pronunciation: /da/, DOW; from Chinese: pinyin: About this sound Dào) is a Chinese word signifying 'way', 'path', 'route', 'key' or sometimes more loosely 'doctrine' or 'principle'.

The Tao can be roughly thought of as the flow of the Universe, or as some essence or pattern behind the natural world that keeps the Universe balanced and ordered.

The Tao is a non-dualistic principle – it is the greater whole from which all the individual elements of the Universe derive.

[...] the object of spiritual practice is to 'become one with the Tao' (Tao Te Ching) or to harmonize one's will with Nature… in order to achieve 'effortless action' (Wu wei).

De ("power; virtue; integrity") is the term generally used to refer to proper adherence to the Tao; De is the active living or cultivation of the way. Particular things (things with names) that manifest from the Tao have their own inner nature that they follow, in accordance with the Tao, and the following of this inner nature is De.

So: Tayoh Dey - the named Tao - spelled phonetically to avoid the common pronunciations of TAU DE which would be approximately: "Dou Duh" in Chinese and "Dowdy" or "Towdy" in English.

Tayoh Dey. Because that's who I am.

My male personality was happily married for 41 years to a wonderful woman.
He spent the last 5 years of the marriage helping her fight metastatic bowel cancer.
The chemotherapy killed her.
A year before the cancer took her body.
He feels he wasn’t “good enough” to save her.
His childhood has come back to haunt him.
He is not interested in going on.
Wolf and I don’t expect to see him much anymore.
Sometimes, it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie.

And the absolute worst thing that happened,
I didn’t really understand until recently,
70 years later,
and didn’t clear up in therapy,
is that my mother forced me to violate my personal integrity
by lying to my grandmother.
That’s why I never connected with my mother.
That’s why she couldn’t reach me.
That’s why I refused to give her the grandchildren she so desired.
That’s why I have to be Tayoh to survive.

Wolf and I share the single consciousness now.
Wolf does the thinking and writing.
I tend to our emotional life and body awareness.
And I guide Wolf into achieving our joint survival
by becoming permanently Tayoh.

The pictures are from November, 1984,
when I was 44.
Yes, they have been Photoshopped
to replace the background.

I’m 84 now. (2025)

It’s time to lose the weight.
It’s time to lose the bags under the eyes.
It’s too late for the heels –
my feet won’t take it anymore.
It's time to ditch the male depression,
and be a happy woman.

I like being a girl!
It makes me happy!

To clarify things:

I still look the same.
I still have a beard,
I don't cross dress,
I don't act noticeably different.
If you don't already know me,
the only thing you will notice
is I have pierced ears with small studs.

If you do know me,
you may notice I am much more emotional.
I talk about how I feel.
My body language is more open.
My movements are more fluid.
I relate more to people
instead of being aloof and outside.
I take care of myself a little better.

I still feel like a woman
masquerading in a man’s body.