"I always felt I was a boy/girl."

[even_sven]

@John_Mace

But we always hear transgendered people say they felt “wrong” when dressed in their biological gender’s clothes. Girls who only want to wear pants and keep their hair short and boys who want to wear dresses and such. The body image seems to only be part of it-- the cultural trappings of gender also plays a significant role. I have to admit that seems rather strange, since the cultural trappings are somewhat arbitrary.

I think it’s more about how you are treated.

Picture that starting tomorrow, everyone calls you “Frank Duncan”. Your ID says it. Everyone says “Hi, Frank” in the morning. When people go on vacation they bring back little souvenir doodads personalized to say “Frank.”

Frank is a perfectly fine name. And it’s not like there is anything objective in the name you were born with. But it’s not your name. It’s at the very least disorienting to have everyone call your “Frank Duncan” when that just isn’t who you are. And yet every time you explained, they just point at your ID and say of course you are Frank.

That’s annoying enough. But transgender people are also living with something they are often uncomfortable with. They may be scared or ashamed. They may have heard terrible things from their family and friends.

So when you picture yourself being called “Frank Duncan”, imagine you also harbor what you consider to be something deeply uncomfortable about your name. Maybe you were disowned at birth, or named after a Nazi, or something else you may feel shame and fear about having exposed.

And now you are here with people falling you “Frank” all day, each time poking that little wound. Each time reminding you that you are not normal, but rather stuck in this state where you can’t convince people that you are who you are. And furthermore you are uncomfortable and ashamed of even that.

[Smapti]

@even_sven

Picture that starting tomorrow, everyone calls you “Frank Duncan”…

I really don’t feel like this is a valid comparison. The name someone is given at birth is completely arbitrary, whereas the gender they are assigned is in almost all cases based on irrefutable biological evidence.

[Honey]

@stillownedbysetters

As a child, I preferred sports and boys’ games and I couldn’t have cared less about the trappings of girlhood. But I never thought I was a boy or should have been one. I dressed up for church on Sunday - although I didn’t like it - and took the ballet lessons my mother wanted me to take - although I didn’t like those either. But when puberty came around and being a ‘girl’ became inevitable, it was more an inconvenience than a crisis. Had puberty made a boy out of me instead, I’d have been fine with that, too.

This is interesting. I was also a tomboy, but I would have been pissed to go through puberty, and come out the other end as a man. I was so excited to get breasts, and even to get my first period. I love being a woman.

[John_Mace]

@even_sven

I think it’s more about how you are treated.

Picture that starting tomorrow, everyone calls you “Frank Duncan”. Your ID says it. Everyone says “Hi, Frank” in the morning. When people go on vacation they bring back little souvenir doodads personalized to say “Frank.”

Frank is a perfectly fine name. And it’s not like there is anything objective in the name you were born with. But it’s not your name. It’s at the very least disorienting to have everyone call your “Frank Duncan” when that just isn’t who you are. And yet every time you explained, they just point at your ID and say of course you are Frank.

That’s annoying enough. But transgender people are also living with something they are often uncomfortable with. They may be scared or ashamed. They may have heard terrible things from their family and friends.

So when you picture yourself being called “Frank Duncan”, imagine you also harbor what you consider to be something deeply uncomfortable about your name. Maybe you were disowned at birth, or named after a Nazi, or something else you may feel shame and fear about having exposed.

And now you are here with people falling you “Frank” all day, each time poking that little wound. Each time reminding you that you are not normal, but rather stuck in this state where you can’t convince people that you are who you are. And furthermore you are uncomfortable and ashamed of even that.

To be Frank, I don’t think that addresses what I was talking about. The claim was that the external trapping are not important, but form the stories I’ve read, they are very important. Maybe I haven’t read enough stories to get the full spectrum, but what I hear is not just “I didn’t like pants/dresses” but “I absolutely HATED pants/dresses”. This is what you hear for parents of very young trans people, and how they try and accommodate their needs and the problems it causes in school.

[even_sven]

@John_Mace

To be Frank, I don’t think that addresses what I was talking about. The claim was that the external trapping are not important, but form the stories I’ve read, they are very important. Maybe I haven’t read enough stories to get the full spectrum, but what I hear is not just “I didn’t like pants/dresses” but “I absolutely HATED pants/dresses”. This is what you hear for parents of very young trans people, and how they try and accommodate their needs and the problems it causes in school.

I don’t think it’s the pieces of cloth themselves. It’s how people treat you when you wear those pieces of cloth. It’s the disconnect that happens every time time you are lumped in a category you don’t feel comfortable with. It’s the huge mass of things that are expected of you as this other gender. And it’s the constant reminder that something is “off”-- something you may find scary or uncomfortable- with the fundamentals of who you are.

[AHunter3]

As I’ve said elsewhere & elsewhen, I didn’t start off making a big deal about being one of girls instead of one of the other boys when I was a young male kid; it was other people who made a big deal about it.

I was not the only male-bodied kid who was occasionally told “you’re acting like a girl” or even “you are a girl”, but the usual reaction was for the kid receiving that treatment to get violently angry (proving he’s a boy) and then, subsequently, to avoid the kinds of behaviors that caused people to say “what are you, a girl or something?” because, in general, male-bodied kids don’t want to be thought of that way, as girls or as girlish or whatever.

That wasn’t my reaction. My reaction was “yeah, so? The girls are behaving like everyone should, they’re doing it right, you boys are acting ridiculous and you should be emulating the girls too”.

I didn’t think my plumbing was wrong and didn’t think I was “supposed” to have girl parts instead. At that age I was more like the tomboys who know they are female but like to prove they are as good as any boy at boy-things like competitive sports and roughhousing and fighting and so on. Except the other way around, of course.

If other people had not made an issue of males exhibiting girl-characteristics, there wouldn’t have been a polarization, but they did, so there was polarization over time: most of the boys becoming more and more boyish, masculinized, learning how not to act to avoid being accused of being girly; then me becoming more and more girlish at least in comparison because I’m not avoiding those behaviors and, if anything, avoiding exhibiting a lot of boy-behaviors and boy-characteristics lest I be thought to be like the other boys.

By the time I was an adult, this had been a major component of how I saw myself, and it had influenced tastes and choices and experiences and so on. So what started out as an “attitude” became a real formative thing, a shaper of my personality and sexuality and so on and so forth.

[JcWoman]

@OneCentStamp

I know a few people (one from this board) who say that from an early age, they were often the opposite sex in dreams, and once they started having sex dreams, they were [sometimes/often/always] equipped with the other sex’s toolkit. I remember one woman in particular who said, in effect, that in her sex dreams she always has a penis and is doing the penetrating, and it feels more “right” than she feels in her own body when awake.

Setting aside the socialization and cultural components (which are huge, no doubt), another aspect that we’ve glossed over in this discussion is biology. Namely as a fetus develops, it’s bathed in a varying mixture of hormones. Biology being imperfect (compared to say robots, my intention isn’t to say that transgendered people are imperfect, just that biology does it’s own thing which is what makes us all unique from each other) we all have slightly different mixes of hormones in our bodies that ebb and flow at different phases of life. We don’t really know what would happen to a developing brain if it was washed in too much estrogen or too much testosterone. I could see it possibly having impacts like this - dreaming and being convinced you’re in the wrong gendered body.

Also there’s the ongoing debate about whether there is a difference between a male and female brain. Does being washed in estrogen at an early age make a female brain? It’s possible that the differences are subtle but unmistakable to someone who has a male brain in a female body or vica versa.

[velomont]

This question has intrigued me as well. I’m male, I look male, I sound male, and I have absolutely no doubt that I love women. But I don’t think of myself “as a man (with all the gravitas or whatever)”. I know damn well I wouldn’t want to be female but that’s not because I’m a Man but, rather, because of all the PITA hassles that women endure. I want to dress like a guy certainly because it’s the appropriate thing to do but also women’s clothing (that is clearly identifiable as women’s) seems to incorporate more of the female-specific PITA stuff.

So I don’t really understand the “I feel I’m the wrong gender” thing either.

[Macca26]

Hershele Ostropoler mentioned a viewpoint in this thread that I never thought about before. When you experience the status quo, it’s an easy thing to be used to, ignore, or not feel strongly about. Everything points to, “this is how you are, everything is as it should be, and everything is ok”, so plenty of us aren’t acutely aware of our own male-ness or female-ness because nothing draws attention to it as “wrong”. So when everything is misaligned and it starts, “You feel wrong, people tell you you’re wrong, everything is not ok”, it’s incredibly more acute to realize there is something wrong inside you because you are constantly being made aware of it. Are you constantly aware of your stomach when it doesn’t hurt? How about if it hurt all the time?

I’d never thought of it this way before, and it makes a lot of sense as to why a lot of cis people can be so blase about what they are while transgender people feel otherwise.

[AnaMen]

@Macca26

Hershele Ostropoler mentioned a viewpoint in this thread that I never thought about before. When you experience the status quo, it’s an easy thing to be used to, ignore, or not feel strongly about. Everything points to, “this is how you are, everything is as it should be, and everything is ok”, so plenty of us aren’t acutely aware of our own male-ness or female-ness because nothing draws attention to it as “wrong”. So when everything is misaligned and it starts, “You feel wrong, people tell you you’re wrong, everything is not ok”, it’s incredibly more acute to realize there is something wrong inside you because you are constantly being made aware of it. Are you constantly aware of your stomach when it doesn’t hurt? How about if it hurt all the time?

I’d never thought of it this way before, and it makes a lot of sense as to why a lot of cis people can be so blase about what they are while transgender people feel otherwise.

People expressing gender-stereotype-based disapproval of one’s behavior, appearance, attire, interests, taste, etc. is incredibly common, but deciding that this means you are the “wrong gender” is not.

[Chronos]

Yeah, I have a hard time understanding gender identity, too. I mean, I can understand homosexuality, for instance, because I have a sexuality. A gay man feels approximately the same way about men than I feel about women. I can relate to that. But what’s gender identity? If I were to tell you that I don’t know what my gender identity is, what questions could you ask me to help me figure it out? I know what organs I have. I can deduce what hormones I have. I’ve never had my chromosomes tested, but I understand that it could in principle be done. I know my hobbies and interests. I know what kind of bodies I find appealing. All of these I understand, and none of these are what people are talking about when they say “gender identity”.

Or to put it another way: Suppose that someone asked me “Is your personality stuvtz or heimtz? Most people are one or the other.”. And suppose I asked “I don’t know, what are those?”, and the response was “You just know which you are.”. I’d be befuddled about that, of course… but it sounds to me like the same sort of question as gender identity. The only difference is that gender identity, instead of being assigned nonsense words, is assigned words associated with sex. But that doesn’t help, because after assigning those words associated with sex, I’m then told that they aren’t the same thing.

[even_sven]

For those of you who don’t think it’s a big deal, have you thought about sex?

If I woke up tomorrow with a penis, I’m not even sure what I’d do with it. Being a penetrating partner doesn’t seem sexy to me at all, nor do being left with just the alternatives. Having a penis seems the opposite of sexually fun to me. It seems awkward and unsettling.

But even if I do get used to penis sex, who am I dating? I’m attracted to guys, and if I am a guy myself, that means my dating pool is gay men.

Thing is, I’m not particularly attracted to gay men. And I doubt gay men are going to be attracted to me. I don’t think I’d ever get used to it. I’m not a gay man who wants to have penis sex. I’m a straight woman.

And yet everyone and everything around me would be telling me “you are a gay man. You need to go the the gay disco and the pride parade and embrace your manliness”. My gay friends would probably be wondering why I’m so uncomfortable embracing that identity, and wondering why I felt like I didn’t belong.

[Don_t_Panic]

@even_sven

If I woke up tomorrow with a penis, I’m not even sure what I’d do with it.

1. Have fun peeing standing up.
2. Throw it over your shoulder, like a continental soldier.
3. Point it at random passers by, while going “bang, bang”.
4. Get bored, take it back for a refund.

It’s funny to hear that you wouldn’t know what to do with one, BTW. If I woke up with breasts and female genitalia tomorrow, there’s about a million things I would do. It sounds awesome. I’ll spare y’all the details, though.

(Although finding a penis to interact with is not one of them. I’d need to find some gay ladies.)

[AnaMen]

@even_sven

For those of you who don’t think it’s a big deal, have you thought about sex?

If I woke up tomorrow with a penis, I’m not even sure what I’d do with it. Being a penetrating partner doesn’t seem sexy to me at all, nor do being left with just the alternatives. Having a penis seems the opposite of sexually fun to me. It seems awkward and unsettling.

But even if I do get used to penis sex, who am I dating? I’m attracted to guys, and if I am a guy myself, that means my dating pool is gay men.

Thing is, I’m not particularly attracted to gay men. And I doubt gay men are going to be attracted to me. I don’t think I’d ever get used to it. I’m not a gay man who wants to have penis sex. I’m a straight woman.

And yet everyone and everything around me would be telling me “you are a gay man. You need to go the the gay disco and the pride parade and embrace your manliness”. My gay friends would probably be wondering why I’m so uncomfortable embracing that identity, and wondering why I felt like I didn’t belong.

You’d have had the penis all along, so figuring out what to do with it shouldn’t be that challenging. You can try all the stuff the other penis-owners are doing and maybe you’ll like some of it.
Lots of gay guys are attracted to straight men, yet they are still men and do not claim to be women. The feeling that you are one gender or another can’t be based on convenience or the existence of attractive potential sexual partners, since it’s supposedly inside each of us, not a reasoned solution to external circumstances.

[Renee]

Yeah, I’d be an awesome gay man. Sign me up.

[Ambivalid]

Whom do transsexuals date/form physical relationships with? This is something I’ve always had trouble understanding. I mean, from the perspective of the other person?

[Ambivalid]

What I mean is, if it is a gay transsexual man, for example, he will be attracted to gay men. But how likely is it for a gay man to be sexually attracted to a transsexual? This issue must be quite an obstacle for many transsexuals.

[SpoilerVirgin]

@Ambivalid

What I mean is, if it is a gay transsexual man, for example, he will be attracted to gay men. But how likely is it for a gay man to be sexually attracted to a transsexual? This issue must be quite an obstacle for many transsexuals.

This week’s episode of I Am Cait was all about this topic. It really is one of the most difficult issues for trans people. Many cis people are kind and accepting of trans people as far as civil rights, not mocking or abusing them, etc., but still have absolutely no interest in a romantic relationship with a trans person. That leaves a very small pool of cis individuals who are open-minded enough not to care, the even smaller pool of people who are specifically attracted to trans people (which may not be what the trans person wants), or other trans people. A lot of trans people are very lonely. I wonder how much this impacts the well-documented suicide rate among even those trans people who have transitioned.

[even_sven]

@AnaMen

You’d have had the penis all along, so figuring out what to do with it shouldn’t be that challenging. You can try all the stuff the other penis-owners are doing and maybe you’ll like some of it.

Lots of gay guys are attracted to straight men, yet they are still men and do not claim to be women. The feeling that you are one gender or another can’t be based on convenience or the existence of attractive potential sexual partners, since it’s supposedly inside each of us, not a reasoned solution to external circumstances.

But I don’t think it works like that. I had a good transgender friend, and she felt completely fluxomed by her penis, as it just didn’t fit in to her sense of sexuality.

You are right that the gender of the person you are attracted to isn’t connected to being transgender. But what I’m talking about is your OWN gender. Do you really think you’d ever be comfortable being a woman in a relationship> Having sex as a woman?

[Renee]

I honestly think penises are totally sexy, not to mention vastly more convenient, and I would be perfectly happy with that plumbing option. I like my vagina just fine, but I don’t find the prospect of having sex as a man at all unappealing. I totally get that most people feel differently, but, yes, I really think penatrative sex would be great, as long as it wasn’t with a woman (vaginas really don’t do it for me, except mine.)

All that said, I’m pretty feminine in a lot of ways. Long hair, dresses, makeup. I just wouldn’t miss a bit of it if I got turned into a guy.