Female and glad to be, it has serious perks. And some not so fun biological drawbacks but all that will be over soon, I hope.
Growing up toys and chores were not generally gender specific though Mom really wanted me to be her ‘little lady’. She had to clue me in once when I was 17 that throwing a 50lb bad of dog food up on my shoulder was not the best way to impress the guy I was talking to. I thought it was.
I’ve never been a girly girl but I do like wearing skirts and dresses and heels.
A few times I’ve wished I was a guy but that was because the guy I was in love with (and he loved me) had no interest in me for sex.
I’m a man and I can’t see any point in changing it. I’m tall and not really at all androgynous, I’m pretty strong and don’t get sick. I worked with senior citizens at one point, and it really made me realize how ambulatory I am. Climbing mountains, going running, just striding around, I physically like it the way it is. Physicality isn’t always important, but we’re talking gender so there ya go. I’m competitive if you look at it in the right way, which seems more like a male thing (though really it isn’t).
If I could climb into the Avatar machine and test-drive being a woman for a few days, yeah, I suppose I’d try it. Maybe that would change my mind about wanting it permanently, but I really doubt it, my mentality seems too ‘male’ to me for that. A better switch would be this body but with wealthy parents, or maybe an ultra-talented body.
I’d definitely like to try it for a year, to see how much of it comes effortlessly vs where and how I fail to pass or cope with reactions and expectations and whatnot.
To have been female all along, to have been the opposite sex rather than be the opposite sex, which actually seems to be what you’re asking in the OP… that’s tricky. So much of my sense of identity is wired to being “a male person who is actually more like a girl or woman” and that would not have been my experience of self if I’d been born female. I don’t feel like I was born in the wrong body, just that my gender is contrary to the expectations attached to the body I was born with. Doing an entire-lifetime rewind and starting over as female, I wouldn’t be quite the same me that I am; I would not have these memories and my experiences would be different.
I dig being a woman. Based on my sort of warm and emotional personality, I would be less socially accepted as a man than I currently am as a woman. I don’t adhere to all female stereotypes, but I adhere to enough of them that my masculinity would be questioned were I a man.
I live in an environment where being female doesn’t really limit my ability to succeed in life. I’m not saying there aren’t disadvantages (the glass ceiling, sexual assault, domestic violence, etc.) but by and large I have always felt free to do whatever I wanted with my life. (It helps that my chosen career field, social work, is a societally approved profession for a woman.) Often women in our society are encouraged to be strong as well as empathic, professional as well as domestic, whereas you rarely see a man being encouraged to take on elements of the female gender role. So in a way, I get the best of both worlds as a woman.*
Then there’s just… I dunno, I love inhabiting the female body. I don’t know how else to explain it. It makes sense to me that I am soft and curvy. I try to be open to others’ experience of inhabiting the wrong body but I cannot relate at all.
*I fully recognize that not every woman has those opportunities, and that a lot of my perceived freedom is tied into being not just a woman, but a white straight cisgender educated middle class woman living in the U.S.
Yeah. The capability of giving birth ain’t worth the disadvantages of being a woman. Plus my dad would rather have had a son. And I probably wouldn’t have been sexually abused if I weren’t a woman.
Ditto! Most of my interests are typically male. Computer gaming, my tech predilection/education, my job doing tech support.
There are very few things I am more grateful for than being born a man. I cannot even imagine having to go through all the crap that women put up with, honestly.
I’m with you there. Though I think I’d like a few months or even a year - enough to get over the initial shock and see what’s it’s really like as it begins to feel “normal.”
But I try to live in acceptance of what I am. So I don’t see any particular desire to be one gender or the other, except for the one that I am. I think that if I’d been born a woman, I’d prefer to stay that way too.
Woman in her late fourties here. I liked to be a woman up untill 40, I think.
But now…It would be nice to skip (peri) menopause with all the emotional havoc it brings. And, if I have to become a straight man, I’d have a much better time on the love market as a fifty something male then as a fifty something female.
Also, I’m kind of assertive, and that goes over better for a man. But I would suck at politics and tact in either body.
I’d love to be strong and sporty. And I would also love to be married to a woman who does all the chores.
I’m comfortable with being a man, it’s the only way to describe it. I suspect if I had been born a woman I’d wind up being comfy being a woman. But all my male psychological/cultural equipment is properly working and so forth, and why fix it if it ain’t broke?
