Back in the timeframe when I was coming to terms with my sexual identity, the term in widespread use was transsexual. In considering and then finally rejecting that as the answer to who (or “what”) I am, yes, like Becky2844, I considered it to specifically imply that one considers one’s plumbing to be incorrect for one’s gender identity.
If the definition for transgender is inclusive of having a gender identity other than the conventionally expected one for one’s sex but does not, in fact, denote that one consider’s oneself to have the wrong bodysex, then it sounds like transgender applies to me
It does indeed boil down to me having a female mental gender but wanting to keep my male body intact. The body isn’t wrong; in a hypothetical world where people had mind-space for the existence of male women, and would (if given enough information) categorize me as such and treat me as such, I would not have any “gender dysphoria”, there would be no tension between my sex and my gender.
Anyway, you folks seem to be understanding what I’m saying when I describe it in detail. I’m open to considering that I may not have picked the best of the available adjectives. As I’ve said before, knowing what to call it has always been the central problem with coming out or identifying myself.
It’s a very good question and I don’t have a consistent answer for you. There are times when I’m much more swayed to believe that it is all a product of socialization, my own specific personal history and experiences, and how the two of them collided. There are other times when I’m convinced that I had a built-in predisposition that would invariably put me at odds with the socialization.
I usually eventually tell people when we become close and know each other pretty well, usually with lots of backstory and elaborations and descriptions and examples. It is difficult because (as I keep saying) there’s no readily understood WORD for it. Being able to say “genderqueer” helps a lot — it is so much better than “I want to tell you about a way in which I am different which is about my sexual identity and gender identity and it’s something I don’t consider an inferiority or an unfortunate condition but it is a source of social tension and yadda yadda blah blah blah”, but it doesn’t save me the long paragraphs’ worth of explanation because they invariably blink a few times and say “Well, exactly what does that mean?”
Some people that I tell have already picked up on something pretty close to the truth (hence “figured it out on their own”); others concluded that I was gay, concluded I was one of those unfortunate male failures to be sufficiently masculine and probably wished that I was, or concluded something else entirely different; and still yet others concluded nothing at all, having noticed nothing untoward at all, and these will often say “I don’t see why you say that, you seem completely normal to me” or some variation on that. (They generally appear to think they are telling me something reassuring when they do that. I wonder if every transgendered / genderqueer person gets their share of that?)
** considers the question **
First, see immediately above about the people in my lift who say they don’t see it and think of me as a normal guy. I assume that happens for most TS/GQ folks a good portion of the time unless they embrace every stereotyped trapping of the gender they identify with. (In other words, if I only dressed in skirts and started wearing lipstick and chose a feminine first name for myself, there would probably be fewer people saying “whatever are you talking about, you seem fully masculine to me!”)
But if I met someone who said “I’m genderqueer” I’d want to know what it was like for them growing up, going through puberty, confronting the dating scenario, and so on. And if that person looked at me blankly and said they’d never had any friction with how the world treated them as “different”, I… hmm…
well, their “genderqueer” experience could, I suppose, consist entirely of wanting to be treated differently, that they were fully accepted as a “normal” person of their bio sex but felt that this was totally not who they were and they hated that… ? Hmm, it’s another good question actually. It’s hard to imagine that someone who resented being treated as cisgendered and rebelled against it would not provoke some kind of “you are weird” behavioral reaction from others.
Imagine a boy growing up who is a bit more aware of his surroundings than most other boys. In short, he matures a bit earlier than they do, as girls do. He notices in grade school that the girls in his class are more interesting and seem more intelligent and fun to be with than his relatively crude male counterparts. As the years go by and he begins to develop physically as well, he begins to notice a physical attraction to females and looks forward to pursuing a more physical relationship with them one day. He then proceeds to develop into a stunningly normal heterosexual male, who has the slightly odd quirk to his nature that he began to realize that girls were interesting people a few years (or more) before the other boys did.
Yeah sort of wondering the same thing. You seem like a heterosexual male to me who doesn’t like stereotypical male things and preferred girl playmates to boys. Like tons of guys.
Unlike this lucky fellow (let’s call him NHM for short)…
• I, having decided early on in grade school that girls were better company than boys, apparently internalized a bunch of notions about “how to be a good person” that were intended for girls and only girls to internalize; or alternatively I rejected a bunch of notions of that ilk intended for boys and only boys to internalize, perhaps some of which consisted mostly of “avoid exhibiting any girl-like behaviors or characteristics”. So unlike NHM, I became more like the girls and less like the boys. Or at least you didn’t say or imply that this also happened to NHM.
• Because I was more like the girls and not so much like one of the boys, the boys (in particular) harassed me and tormented me, which polarized me even more against them and saw them as Other. I not only actively sought to emulate the girls, I actively avoided doing things that might associate me with THEM, the boys who were like that. And as I got older, in the upper levels of grade school and junior high, girls and adults as well as these boys began to treat me as if something was wrong with me, drew my attention to it, expressed anger and contempt towards me over it and so on, and this apparently didn’t happen to NHM.
• You did not specify whether NHM, in his stunningly normal heterosexual maleness, met up with a satisfyingly successful outcome to his expressions of heterosexual appetite and interests. If he was like me, he didn’t and instead was left feeling hurt and disappointed because attempted interactions with these girls, whom he found to be more intelligent and fun to be with than boys, didn’t work out so well. Is that stunningly normal for hetero males? I know that it seemed to me that boys who had relatively little in common with girls were leaving me in the dust. They had girlfriends (romantic/sexual relationships with girls, I mean) sooner. They were sexually active sooner and more often, or else did a really good job of creating that impression. They weren’t faking having girlfriends, I’d see them together with them in the hallways kissing and teasing and holding hands and stuff. Maybe I missed seeing how many stunningly normal hetero males lacked such successes and my alone-ness in this respect wasn’t as un-normal as I thought? But for me, and presumably for NHM as well, it mattered a lot because we weren’t just attracted to the girls, we wanted to be with them on all levels and had been wanting a girlfriend from before puberty, not just when hormones kicked in.
• I got called faggot and was beaten up for allegedly being one and otherwise subjected to hateful behavior that NHM didn’t have to put up with. Or so I assume. Oh, I know how mainstream normal guys rag on each other and harass each other sort of randomly, calling each other “fag” and messing with their stuff to provoke a fight, I’ve seen it… but I’m pretty sure I got significantly more hateful and more violent queer-bashing, more on a par with what gay guys have had to go through, and it’s both qualitatively and quantitatively different.
In short, NHM wasn’t perceived by others as weird and different and ostracized and harassed over it. I was. Aside from the dating-environment experiences (where my own frustrations and failures played a big part), most of what drew my attention to my gender difference as a Big Deal was not my own observations of it but the insistence of other people.
