OT: Gender Identity

[Louisa]

I'm just jealous that Bubbles is somewhere warm enough to allow sitting around naked. It's been consistently cold and wet here for far too long.

[Captain LeBubbles]

I had been swimming all evening and got a light sunburn. My bra-strap was digging into it and irritating it and since it was nearly bedtime anyway I just shucked the whole lot, and then immediately there was posted a comment about being aware of your clothes. It was too good to pass up.

[Brook]

I realize after typing that this may get incoherent. Sorry for the inconvenience. I think I can sum it up: I am a cis female, but that stops at very very basic biological facts of matter. I don't know that I have any specific "gender". They seem like approximations to me.

I end up disoriented every time someone brings up my sex and my gender identity. I only care because not acting like people expect (because of the body type they can identify) makes them uncomfortable, and it reflects right back on me like a bucket of ice water. Gender expression is, at the core, fundamentally confusing to me and a system that I perceive to be arbitrary in many ways. There's no consistent pattern I can detect, so I get strained trying to fit it. I ended up dressing "like a boy" because I perceived their clothes as neutral, and they reflected me better than the ones labeled as "girl's clothes"... But still not quite like I'd wanted. For me, the boy + girl roles get tangled into so many others because I never felt any big natural effects of it in my own system. It's something I have to try to understand from a mechanical starting point, rather than any innate feeling of my own nature.

I used to play the boy roles of whatever shows I watched when I pretend-played as a kid. Not because I wanted to be a boy, but because I never reflected on their being male. (And because in Batman and TMNT, there weren't too many females I liked to pretend to be. Soon as MLP came into the picture, or Sailor Moon, it was different. I was getting more aware of the distinctions by that time, but it was still a matter of the choices in the cast, more than anything.) I never thought of myself as a girl, but I never thought of myself as a boy either - until the point when it was made more or less clear to me that a bunch of things I wanted to do and wear and say were things that my being a girl prevented me from.

Example that carved a deep enough score to stick: Dad's reaction when, at 15, I mentioned a wrestling match with a friend's boyfriend. Dad said "she should be the one wrestling with him, not you" in a distinctly disapproving tone. All it did was make me feel I had done something shameful, and that any physical contact with guys was reserved for 1. their girlfriends, or 2. other guys.
...Or someone who was perceived as a guy, for all events and purposes.
The same goes for a lot of things I like doing, or wearing, etc. That caused a lot of passing-as-a-guy urges. I like shoving and pushing. I like friendly wrestling. I don't view males sexually. I like loose clothing with few details that can snag, tear or end up in disarray, and as much as I love seeing elaborate dresses, I don't care to wear them much*. (But the same goes for elaborate dress suits.) I got the idea I could do what I liked ONLY as long as people perceived me as "good as male" so I went for that, emphasizing everything they seemed to think was "boyish" about me and laying that on thick to somehow assert those territories I was really after.
(Note that my orientation's tangential role here was less about "who gets to love girls" and more about "who gets to not-love boys". There's boys who love boys, but they get to opt out of it; their every interaction with boys isn't automatically viewed as mating rituals.)

It was only one out of two equally arbitrary assignments in my world, after all. I did not understand why I should be limited to one, but not why I couldn't just pick the other, either. The irony here is that people always seemed to think I was going out of my way to be different, when all that time, I was just trying to find a way of fitting into their categories without violating my own self too badly. But my nature doesn't match up with either pattern of expected gender expression, and they largely seem ...artificial... to me.
(This lack of agreement with /understanding of other people's mental categories is overarching and pretty fundamental for me.)

I have no problem with my body, except when the uterus does its thing every month, and that's pure inconvenience (my anxiety issues get notably worse between ovulation and the flushing-out). I don't desire to have a penis instead, but if I woke up one morning with one, I don't think I'd have an identity crisis. I just don't really care about it. If I got cancer and had to remove my uterus, that wouldn't affect my identity. Neither would losing my mammaries.

*However, I also like a number of things considered "girly" depending on whose standards you currently go by. I just don't think that I should be more entitled /expected to wear or do things because I'm female.

[FlyingFish]

It was too good to pass up.

Thus proving that one can be asexual and still understand how to mess with people's hormones.

[phagocyte]

first explain why YOU feel you're the gender you are, if you haven't already

[FlyingFish]

The closest I can get to understanding the anguish that comes with it is typical "body image" stuff-- "My nose is too big," or "I have too many freckles." And I know it's got to be much more difficult than that, but it comes down to being a little similar. The bottom line is that something physical isn't matching up to your mental self, and it bothers you. It might bother you a little or it might bother you a lot. But that's the best I can do to put myself in that position.

Looking back on this comment, I see at least one obvious difference: When someone worries about their nose or their freckles, the recognized best response is to encourage the person to be happy as they are, because how they are is fine. But this is recognized as the wrong response (in fact potentially bigoted and at minimum displaying total inability to understand) when it comes to gender identification. Something is going on here that isn't merely more difficult but is in a completely different category.

[FlyingFish]

first explain why YOU feel you're the gender you are, if you haven't already

I hinted at it here:

Do I think of myself as male? Well, yes, by default; I look like one and have all the parts, so therefore... But I've never felt particularly attached to either the appearance or the parts in an emotional sense, while at the same time I've never desired to go through the trouble of replacing or hiding them. They're just there. And I don't picture my "maleness" extending beyond them.

...

(Post-post-script: A possibility I've started to consider is that my personal gender-identification is either nonexistent or mixed, the gender equivalent of asexuality or bisexuality, and that the majority of people identify with one or the other in a way that just doesn't come naturally to me. If so, that would explain a lot about my own feelings and lack of understanding on the matter. Thoughts?)

Looking at other similar responses, I suspect my PPS was correct and I'm bigender/agender, leaning male largely out of convenience. I do have a protective nature toward those I care about, which some have described as masculine, but I've never thought of it as masculine (due to heavy viewing of Whedon, perhaps?) and have categorized it as more of an expression thing.

In short, I'm with Bubbles; a gender-bender ray would be only mildly disorienting for me. (Bubbles, if you ever want to try peeing standing up, I'll call in Fitz from Fans and we can swap for a couple hours.)

[Artemisia]

You know, I don't know if we've covered the physical dimension of this in any real way.

When I am aroused, my brain tells me to prepare for the various sensations that a would would normally feel- right up to and including a need for mild penetration. The problem is that the only sensations that my body provides are all male in nature, and that makes me upset because it The mental set up of my brain is very female, but my body is male and it creates a horrible feeling inside me. In fact, it feels horrible to not have all the proper sensations that a woman would normally have such as pressure on my breasts and such that my brain expects to occur, but my body cannot provide.

It leads to a lot of depression and dysphoria.

I hope that helped explain some of the issues centering around gender identity disorder. It has nothing really to do with gender expression, though, since not only am I, well, lesbian (femme), but a gamer and something of a nerd.

[svenman]

The closest I can get to understanding the anguish that comes with it is typical "body image" stuff-- "My nose is too big," or "I have too many freckles." And I know it's got to be much more difficult than that, but it comes down to being a little similar. The bottom line is that something physical isn't matching up to your mental self, and it bothers you. It might bother you a little or it might bother you a lot. But that's the best I can do to put myself in that position.

Looking back on this comment, I see at least one obvious difference: When someone worries about their nose or their freckles, the recognized best response is to encourage the person to be happy as they are, because how they are is fine. But this is recognized as the wrong response (in fact potentially bigoted and at minimum displaying total inability to understand) when it comes to gender identification. Something is going on here that isn't merely more difficult but is in a completely different category.

Let's say person X believes their nose is too big. (Might as well be the ears, or whatever, I'm not trying to make an inherently gender-related argument here.) The general assumption seems to be, and probably with good reason in the majority of cases, that this is a feeling of not sufficiently conforming to an external beauty standard, rather than a deep inner conviction of actually truly being a person with a smaller nose who just happens to be trapped in a non-matching body.

I think this is the fundamental distinction that leads to completely different appropriate responses: is the body image at odds with an ideal (for want of a better word) that comes from the outside world or one that is rooted deep within the identity of the person themselves?

[oddtail]

I don't have anything informative/insightful to contribute, but I do have something to share that puzzles me, and that seems to fit the thread. Plus, no real place to talk about it, and I've been sitting on this aspect of my identity for a while, so:

I am cis-gendered, that part I am sure of. I am physically male, I tend to act/react and (I presume) think like a man, and I have a rather strong sense of being a man.

...and that's pretty much where it stops being simple.

Despite strongly feeling that I'm a man, and seeing the cultural constructs of "man" and "woman" as useful and helpful, I do not particularly enjoy the constraints the society puts on me. I am a man, but I am not happy with having to stay in the social role of a man. And yet, the distinction between men and women, as I said, is a meaningful one for me. I can't really explain this, even though I think it's contradictory. For the lack of a better description, I consider myself to be feminist - in the sense that I see equality as achievable by removing any constraints put by society on both men *and* women. Men are just as constrained in a traditionally labeled society as women are, even if it's usually less obvious.

And it doesn't stop at cultural roles either. I look very obviously like a man and I do maintain the visual image that makes it unmistakable - a promiment beard, for one thing. At the same time - again, in what I see as a paradox - I am very unhappy that I do not look much more androgynous. *But* I identify with my looks and I would not describe myself as genderqueer. If that makes any sense, I think my physical looks are very much "me", but I would be happy to change them. I am not even aware if there's a way to describe that.

I wish there was a way I could - again, for the lack of a better description - get in touch with my feminine side better. For instance, I'm into crossdressing and would probably act on that if it didn't look ridiculous for me. I used to think it's simply a sexual fetish for crossdressing, but while it might play a role, it goes beyond that. The closest I managed to find in the Internet is autogynephilia, but this thing is explicitly a paraphilia, and the word seems to carry rather negative connotations. So it doesn't work.

What's more, I don't have the need that many crossdressing men seem to have (according to what I found out on the Internet) in that I have absolutely no need to "pass" as a woman, not even in theory. I wish I could act/dress in a feminine fashion and not look silly in the process. While still being unmistakably a dude.

And finally, while I am physically a man, have the brain of a man and identify as a man, I would not have a problem with any of that changing. If I were to magically become physically a woman, that'd be pretty cool. Heck, if my brain got rewired and I became a woman in mind as well, I wouldn't mind either. But I do not need, actively want or miss either of those things. And, as I mentioned, I am pretty sure I am not transgendered in any conceivable way (and no, I am pretty sure I am not in denial, either).

With all the contradictions regarding my gender identify (or whatever it is I'm describing), I find it a little unsettling that I can't even put my finger on what my view on the gender binary IS. It doesn't make it any easier that I haven't even found a name for most of what I am in that respect, anywhere. And yes, I realise the irony of worrying about finding a fitting label for myself when a few days ago or so I pointed out to someone else that labels are not that important .

TL;DR - I'm a man who doesn't like the way he's "supposed" to be a man, and who would not mind being a woman, but it's still a "what if" thing. And I can't even neatly classify it as having issues with my sex/gender, a sexual fetish, a sexual orientation, or anything clear-cut and simple like that. If anyone can point to anything similar, I'll be grateful, because as it is, I feel unusual in a rather negative sense of the word.

[Valerie]

I think you're just a feminist. And, as I said before, if I as a woman can wear pants, why can't you as a man wear a skirt? I still identify as a woman while wearing pants. You can still identify as a man while wearing skirts.

[Captain LeBubbles]

Besides, skirts are nice and breezy, and if you get the right kind they flair out when you twirl around. Why wouldn't you want to wear one?

[oddtail]

I think you're just a feminist. And, as I said before, if I as a woman can wear pants, why can't you as a man wear a skirt? I still identify as a woman while wearing pants. You can still identify as a man while wearing skirts.

Possibly. I feel it doesn't account for a lot of things, though. Like how being a woman, in theory, would be appealing. Or the fact that certain things seem interesting *because* they are associated with women.

To sum up an IRC conversation I once had: "So, kilts. Kilts are essentially skirts for men." "Yeah... and because they are skirts for men, I have absolutely no desire to wear them."

Plus, as I said, it goes beyond crossdressing.

[Artemisia]

Just wear a kilt.

[Valerie]

Kilts are a similar shape and size to skirts, but they aren't quite the same. There's a cultural difference to take into account.

Fun fact: In Ancient Greece, pants were considered feminine. Skirts have actually been worn by many, many men over the years-- not because they were cross-dressers, but because that was what men wore. I think the trend of boys wearing skirts (until a certain age) lasted well into the 1900s, at least in the U.S. FDR wore them.

Lots of gender stereotypes are very pointless and differ greatly based on the time and location.

Anyway, as for not minding if you just suddenly woke up female one day... well, sure, if your body and mind changed together. If you woke up physically female but still psychologically male, would it be as easy to accept?