But you consider yourself a male-bodied girl right?
What about the boys out there who love girly stuff, but don’t consider themselves women? They may reject your box, as they have no gender dysphoria, or desire to be physically a woman, so they are just…boys who like girly stuff?
Your identity is about as personal as it gets, so I am just trying to understand.
Part of the problem might be that will society has long been more tolerant of tomboys (sometimes even praising them) the opposite is still largely true for the gender-flipped version, often called “sissy-boys”. “Tomboy” might be a compliment for a girl or woman, “sissy-boy” is an insult.
Perhaps the OP wants validation that it’s OK to be male-bodied with inclinations traditionally considered “girly” rather than the more typical condemnation?
I could see that. But I wonder if suggesting to girly-inclined boys that they are actually male-bodied women could actually *less *effective than just seeking cultural acceptance for a girly boy. I mean, tomboys are way more culturally accepted than the reverse. It just seems like it might be more effective to improve acceptance without throwing additional labels and boxes into the mix.
I don’t know, OP, were you ever told by other children that you weren’t a boy - that you were a girl? And was your IMMEDIATE reaction, yes, I am, or was there emotional pushback?
Yes (both to being told I was not a boy and to being told I was a girl); and for the second part, “Yes, and the girls are doing it right, so what’s wrong with that?”
So when boys called you a girl, it didn’t bother you? I assume it would be the same as boys telling a little girl “you’re not a boy, you’re a girl”?
“well, duh.”
Wellll… it bothered me that they were so dismissive and contemptuous of me. I mean, that was obvious, they weren’t just conveying the information in a neutral fashion, like “Gee, Wally, you’re basically a girl and stuff!” It made me angry and annoyed.
Meanwhile, though, I was consciously trying to be more like the girls. I wanted them to accept me. The boys telling me “AHunter3 is a girl, (nyaaah naaa naa na naaaa)” etc increased my tendency to be dismissive and contemptuous of boys in return, and to care that much less about their opinions.
Chronologically, I started comporting myself as a girl and trying to fit in with the girls around 2nd grade, and by the start of 4th grade I thought of boys as “THEM”.
Underline added.
If you can just not give a shit about that part, can’t you be a happy straight feminine male?
As a straight male I would be happy to consider you to be a man.
Go back in time and make it so that I wasn’t asked to choose between being accepted by others of my biological sex or behaving in the way that came natural to me. And make it so that girls in junior high and high school have in their heads the possibility of a feminine straight boy and some notion of how sex tends to happen with feminine straight boys. Let me have those formative experiences so that my identity isn’t shaped over the course of a lifetime by the specific things I went through.
Or not. I’m a happy person as I am. I don’t mind not identifying as a straight feminine male, although I acknowledge and appreciate the belated welcome you’re offering. Can you accept me the way I do identify and welcome me as a happy straight male who isn’t a man?
Yes. I’m happy to, and wish you the best.
I could summarize my feelings on the OP with a very simple question: who the fuck are these people, anyhow?
Now I shall elaborate: why or what about these people makes their opinions of you something you need to listen to? Transgender people love to talk and love to criticize, but the vast, vast majority of them have little experience other than their own, and much of their knowledge comes from following people’s tweets or (shudder) Huffington Post “articles.”
I’m at the point in my life and career as a professional (meaning, I am actually employed as such) transgender researcher and activist that if the person criticizing me doesn’t have at least as good a Q&E as I do, then their negative opinion of me is just like an asshole. Vis, “everyone’s got one.”
And don’t forget the fact that trolling and “concern” trolling are actively done in a variety of online fora, sometimes by “transgender” persons who have kept up the sockpuppet persona for years.
A lot of people share the experience of having been mistreated for having something different about them. It can take a lot of work to heal and free yourself to let it go and become strong in who you are, without the desperate need for validation by those who never could, can, or will accept you. You’ll never be ________ enough for some people, so stop focusing on that. The nature of many people is to seek and go with their group, follow its prevailing cultural rules and mindset, and to fear (and often act out against) those who don’t fit.
As a woman who is into femme-y guys, I have some secondhand exposure to these attitudes (and their converse; yes, I can be attracted to men because of their femininity, thank you so much). I look forward to the day when girly dudes can just be girly dudes and not an affront to the fundamental workings of the universe.
So have a hug, or thumbs up, or whatever gesture of solidarity you prefer. You know who you are and nobody else gets to tell you who you are.
Thanks JR! Yes, in addition to making the world aware that guys like me exist, I want to make the world aware that folks like you exist! It will change the way we’re perceived. Rock on!
Soooo…we’re talking Felix Unger here?
Interestingly it wasn’t just the character he played. Tony Randall would on go talk shows and be effervescent and not all that “manly”. I would have bet he was gay. Turned out he was all about women and was making babies into his 80’s.
Look at it this way: is a tomboy actually a boy inside? Not necessarily. And while you might not have been bothered (at least after awhile) to be thought of as a girl, a lot of boys don’t want to be told, “you’re actually a girl!” simply because they like girly things. I believe you’ve called yourself a feminist, right? One of the points of feminism is to break the whole gender stereotypes – girls can do activities usually associated with boys, and vice versa, and that’s totally okay. No more, “that’s woman’s work”, or “that’s only for boys!”
Look, if that’s how you feel best expressing yourself, rock on. However, I think we do a real disservice to kids if we start including trans to mean people who simply don’t fit into the stereotypical gender roles. Because there are trans people who feel that way as well. There are butch trans women, and femm trans men. But I HAVE seen people say, “your child is actually trans – you’re just saying she’s a tomboy to make yourself feel better.” Like this woman did with her daughter – and apparently she got death threats and people saying her daughter should be taken away from her.
And so I think while you may feel “different”, or not totally cis, that’s cool. Not everyone fits the norm. But as I said, making up too many boxes and labels just makes them all meaningless.
When I was a kid, if you liked stuff that wasn’t typical to your gender, that meant you were gay. Now it’s trans. Let’s just say, “hey, these activities are for EVERYBODY” and not make assumptions.
TL,DR: stereotypes are bad, mmmkay?
Wasn’t able to edit: just read some of the comments.
I agree with Guin. I never refer to myself as trans. And I am not comfortable with any kind of rush towards categorizing someone (kids in particular) as trans on the basis of being gender atypical. They might instead be like me.
There do seem to be a lot of replies in this thread in which people seem to be thinking I am trying to identify as transgender. I’m not. (It’s something else).
I haven’t really replied to all the people in this thread who’ve said (directly or in different words) “Just be yourself. Don’t put yourself in a box. Why do you need a label? Be who you are, your own unique person”.
I wanted to give you a better response than some form of “no, you’re wrong, you don’t get it”. You’re not wrong. Furthermore, your impulse is quite good here.
I slept on it.
So, OK. Go back with me to 1980, when I first came out. I didn’t have a word for it, a label of any sort. I had nothing I could call myself that was going to convey to anyone my understanding of myself. Therefore I mostly just stopped being “at bay”, all worried (and broadcasting that worry) about my gender/sexuality, and instead began engaging people confidently.
Now, I should explain that other students had been dropping hints and making innuendos and insinuations left and right. And the kinder ones had been directly making the gentle suggestion that I should accept myself and come out, that I would find a lot of people willing to accept me too, once I did. Well, now I began doing that back at them, or replying in kind when they did it: saying things that had that kind of double meaning, garnished with a a facial expression or gesture. And, yes, to the ones who were more inclined to say things overtly, I would say explicit things, ranging from “yes and no… definitely a sissy but I actually prefer the round curvy forms” to a whole verbose coming-out. But I didn’t dump that on the ears and heads of every single person at every single opportunity or anything.
There’s a whole informal language going on, all the time, expressed with raised eyebrows, half-finished sentences, an impromptu sung-out phrase from a song, and short comments and statements that leave a lot of plausible deniability. I was widely perceived as an angst-ridden gay freshman holding awkwardly and desperately to my closet door or, if not that, then some kind of pathetic sexually insufficient dweeby person desperate to have a life that I wasn’t going to get. A good portion of what was conveyed in all this informal language was snarky, amused and dismissive, most of it light and with myself not the primary intended audience so much as people comparing impressions of me with each other.
Or so it seemed. With all that plausible deniability, I was never sure any of it was happening and that I wasn’t just imagining it all, you know what I mean? But people do communicate a great deal on those wavelengths in college.
I knew who I was now. In most ways I was just being myself and being comfortable in my own skin, finally. In most of the additional ways, I was speaking that language and replying informatively to the gentler-hued stuff and tossing back ripostes and clever turnarounds to the more pointed stuff, and it was working, the tables were turned.
I did my formal coming out, explaining the whole situation as best I could (I was not a social sciences major and didn’t know a lot of commonly used terms that I use nowadays), to the handful of people / situations where it was more likely that people would be in the mood to listen to a long and somewhat open-ended thing, and when I did, it typically became a discussion. (After all, I was still figuring it out myself)
Finally, let’s fast-forward to now. Some of the “just be yourself” comments seem to (still) have the embedded assumption that I’m currently trying to come to grips with my identity. It’s not at all bad advice. Meanwhile, though, I am comfortable in my own skin and I know myself; I’m not thrashing. Instead I’m off on a mission to insert this somewhat-different gender identity into the social dialogue.
Consider, if you will, the parents of the gender-atypical kids that Guinastasia just brought up. If they have never encountered the concept of a heterosexual sisssy guy who doesn’t think he was born in the wrong body (or the female gender-inverse equivalent), the explanation that may seem most affirming of what their child is going through is that their child is transgender and will want to transition. Which may be true, or it may not be.
Other parents may be expecting and accepting that their child is gay, given the same overall situation, and again, that may be true, or it may not be. I’m doing all this for a reason. I promised myself that I would. I still perceive a need for it to be said, there’s still no extant model, no socially shared archetype of such a person, and I wish to help create one.
I was thinking more like Raj Koothrappali.