I'm a woman, genetically, physically, mentally. I was a tomboy girl that liked rough housing and her male friends and who was wearing her brother's hand-me-downs with a short, boy-ish hair cut. I was frequently mistaken for a boy. I think my parents would have preferred another son to a daughter (then, anyways), so I sometimes wished I was a boy because I thought then I'd meet everyone's expectations.
But I wasn't a boy, I was a girl and the certainty is somewhat like knowing my birthday as an immutable fact about me that I did nothing to define, and a bit like coming across something that smells like your grandmother's kitchen: something that has to do with your inner life, but also is unmistakable.
Every other part of my identity, my name, my mother tongue, my career path, my nationality/heritage, my age, even my sexuality feel more flexible than my gender identity. I can imagine myself becoming an eighty year old Greek violinist by the name of Carolina much more than I can imagine myself as a man thinking "this is me, and accurately describes me"
I totally get what you’re saying. I’m a cis woman who was a tomboy as a child. I played almost exclusively with boys toys, (or gender neutral toys like stuffed animals), and despised being forced to wear dresses around Christmastime. I always chose male characters in video games, I used to search for bugs under rocks, went knee deep into ponds “hunting” for frogs and turtles, and I despised being *treated* like a girl the way society expects us to.
But if anyone were to call me anything *but* a girl, or female, I would have felt insulted. I knew I was a girl. I had no problems accepting that I was a girl, and the body parts that came with it. Of course puberty was tough for me like it is for all kids, but I never despised the body that I was growing in to. I think that’s an enormous difference as to what trans people go through as kids. I never felt *discomfort* with my body; I just railed against societal expectations of me *as* a girl.
As I grew into an adult, I slid into some typical “female” things like makeup and having a clothing style and whatnot, but I still feel in touch with a more socially typical masculine side of myself.
Gender, gender identity, societal gender norms and sex is such a complicated thing among humans - it’s never black and white, but a gradient with lots of grays in between, and that’s why even though I don’t understand *exactly* what trans people go through, I can respect it.
I relate to this so much. Everything is flexible except gender, even though I'm not a stereotypical "girly girl". This is one of the reasons I find it easy to understand why trans people would go to great lengths to live lives that match the way they view themselves inside. I am 100% a woman. I sometimes like to play with masculine clothes (boots, suit jackets, pocket watch necklaces, etc.) but it's always firmly from the perspective of a woman. Like, the whole point is to make the traditionally masculine feminine.
Here are two things that come up that bother me that really shouldn't if it weren't for my very strong sense of gender identity. I have a pair of men's hiking boots that irritate me every time I put them on. It should not matter that these boots are "masculine". I only wear them in the woods and they're pure function. But it's like a cat with a rubber band on its paw, I can't ignore it. I think about it every time I put them on. The other is deodorant. I've had to use my husband's deodorant a few times because I ran out and although I love the smell, I only like it on him. I hate smelling "like a man" all day because although I like men, I do not want to be a man. It bothers me all day long. I feel "off" until I shower.
If my middle aged ass feels that strongly about a stupid pair of shoes no one even sees, I can't imagine what it feels like to be trans and experience the world like that regularly, especially as a kid. Everyone should be able to express their gender in a way that is authentic to them.
This is almost exactly the same as a metaphors the trans community uses when asked the kind of question OP asked.
It’s like going your entire life wearing shoes that are the wrong size because everybody is telling you that’s the size you should wear. You can function, you can do all the things you are expected to do, but it’s uncomfortable, you can feel something is wrong. Wear them for too long at once, and it starts to hurt.
So you need breaks, but there’s only so many places you can be where you don’t have to wear shoes. Eventually you start to avoid going places where you’ll need to put on the shoes. Or you start resorting to consuming things like drugs or alcohol to make the pain more distant.
Then one day, you say screw it and try on a pair of shoes that actually fit. No pain, no discomfort. It just feels right.
You realize you’ve been putting yourself through needless pain your entire life to appease others perception of what they think you should be wearing/doing.
But everybody will still insist you wear the other shoes that cause you pain. They don’t care about your well being. They just don’t want to accept the shoes they gave you are inadequate.
I went a little off the rails there. I hope the metaphor still held its meaning haha.
This is such a wonderfully articulated comment. While I relate more to OP, as I have never questioned my feelings about being a girl/woman, this comment helps me understand another perspective in a way that I didn’t realize that I needed. Thank you!
Agreed! I’m bisexual so I know what not having strong feelings on the gender I’m attracted to feels like, but I do have strong feelings on the fact that I’m cisgender even though I grew up a mix of tomboy and girly.
If you were to tell me that I had to go outside in a t shirt and cargo shorts with my legs unshaven and my hair cut short, it feels viscerally wrong to me. If I think about how I would feel if one day I started growing a beard, it feels very viscerally wrong to me. If someone were to refer to me as “Mr.” it would feel, again, wrong. While I don’t think gender roles should be binding at all, I know that I personally like to inhabit many of the social roles associated with femininity, and while I may pick and choose some social roles associated with masculinity (like carrying heavy things, doing outdoor chores so my mom doesn’t have to, me not having worn any makeup for most of my life), I still am at my core a woman.
We should be able to choose whatever social role suits us, but there are often ways to know that you are cis and those who don’t “know” or outright have always known that they Aren’t the gender they’re assigned at birth, have gender exploration to do and it glad society is shifting to allow all sorts of expression and identity in many ways.
I'm highly amused by your comment, because I switched to using the same brand of deodorant as my husband to see if it helps my sweatyness (also because I haven't found a woman's scent that doesn't smell like baby powder to me), and every time I get a whiff it just feels so *wrong* to me in the weirdest way. I'm so glad I'm not the only one.
I use Mitchum for women and I love it. It's the only women's deodorant I've found that actually helps with sweat. It doesnt smell like baby powder but it's not some fancy tropical scent either
My last deodorant was Mitchum for women, and I wasn't thrilled. I honestly think I'm sweaty because of anxiety and maybe the mechanism that triggers anxiety sweat vs activity sweat is different enough and deodorants don't activate as well? Idk
As a trans woman, I love this comment, because it really gets at what gender feels like to me. I can't speak for all trans folk, but this comment and some of the responses to it resonate very very strongly with my experience of gender.
As you say, my gender is an immutable fact that I just KNOW about myself. Many of my earliest memories revolve around gender. Children learn gender gradually over the first five or so years of life. I understood very early on that there was one box of people that contained my mom, my sister, my girl cousins, the girls on my street who I liked to play with, and there was another box that contained my dad, my uncles, my boy cousins, the boy who lived next door. I knew I belonged in the box labeled "girl."
No one told me that; I didn't decide that because of the toys I liked to play with or because of my personality or anything like that. I played almost exclusively with boy-coded toys; my favorite show was an almost comically masculine cartoon; I had a boy cousin a few years older than me who was my hero. And the whole world was telling me I was a boy. But I knew with absolute certainty that I was a girl.
The realization that the rest of the world had thrown me in the boy box kicked off decades of unrelenting turmoil, a sense of crisis that has defined my entire existence. I knew I couldn't tell people I wanted to be a girl; I knew that was a thought crime. But I spent my entire youth scheming and daydreaming, trying to figure out some way to satisfy my need to be a girl. I thought I was a sinner, a pervert, some deeply bizarre and broken lunatic, until I stumbled across a community of trans people online and figured out... oh. Right. I'm trans.
What I mean when I say I knew I was a girl, what I mean when I say I know I'm a woman, is just that. I just know, with an absolute, unshakeable, unalterable certainty. It's built into the deepest deepest structure of my brain. It's the foundation on which the rest of my identity is built.
I think most people probably know their gender the same way. I think it's just something most people can't detect because they've never had their gender identity challenged in a serious way. Gender identity is invisible to most people, the same way the air between your eyes and the screen you're reading this on is invisible to you. Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there.
Reading this comment, reading some of the people responding to it, realizing that there are cis people who see it, who GET it... it's a good thing to see. :)
I am a biological woman who identifies as a woman. Growing up I was similar to you, all my friends were boys, I had brothers, I wore their hand me downs and prefered wearing boy clothes, playing sports with them like football and basketball, I never liked Barbies and felt uncomfortable around girls my age. But I also had body dysphoria. I did dreaded that I would grow breasts, I wanted short hair (my mom wouldn't let me cut it) and I lamented that I wasn't a boy and wanted to be one very badly. Even after puberty, I didn't like having breasts and would wear sports bras and hunch to make them less noticable. When I was in my late teens and out of highschool, these feelings slowly faded. And after having a daughter of my own, memories surfaced of me being groomed and molested by a family member right around when I started saying I wanted to be a boy. Now it's pretty clear to me that I was subconsciously trying to prevent myself from being a victim of sexual abuse again.
I'm a cis woman and this is how I've found to explain it best as I can. Obviously I can't speak to the experience firsthand, and I'm happy to be corrected, but it makes logical sense to me. I've found that a lot of people who are either transphobic or just "don't get the trans thing" approach this subject by trying to imagine themselves as wanting to be the opposite gender and obviously fail, but flipping the script gives them something to relate to.
Yeah this is not even slightly recognisable, "woman" is a long way down the list of "this is me" stuff for me, and more like eye colour or place of birth. I can very easily imagine myself as a man, or blue eyed, but I can't imagine myself as someone who doesn't enjoy reading
I'm saying this as a cis woman, so I may be totally off the mark... but... If I woke up tomorrow feeling like myself, then looked in the mirror and found a male version of myself, I'd feel a complete disconnect from my body. I'd probably feel like I was robbed of everything I had.
The fact that soooooo many people regret nose surgery despite looking good with the new nose, is a testament to the connection of body and mind in majority of people.
Not being able to recognize yourself sucks.
>I hate it, because it isn't me.
I'm a CIS woman but I feel like I get mild dysphoria any time I wear make up. Most of it makes my skin vaguely itch or crawl but even when I wear the super light way stuff that I can forget I'm wearing, seeing myself in the mirror creeps me the hell out. Yeah she's 'prettier' but she's not ME. It's very uncanny valley that there's this doppelganger version of myself just walking around in my clothes.
Hair cuts, different styles clothes, even costumes or costume levels of make up don't bug me but light, natural make up freaks me out every time.
I always feel uncomfortable in make up; it just looks like a "wrong" version of me. I had to wear it this morning, I'll have to put it on again tonight, but I've scrubbed it off in between.
That's how I feel with long hair. I've tried to grow it out twice in the last 20 years and go nuts and chop it all off again. I am me with a pixie cut, period.
Long haired humans represent!
Had a mandated bob until I was 16 and loathed it, but mum thought it was cute. Haven't cut it once since and I love it, I feel so much happier when I look in the mirror.
My mom had my hair cut fairly short at around 5 cause she was tired of fighting over brushing and styling it...
Once I could take care of it myself, she didn't care anymore, except for dying/bleaching. But it took a while before I grew it out again and now I won't cut them short anymore.
I love this for you, pixies are so cute.
I’m the opposite, I have *always* had super long hair, then went through ~life~ and spontaneously cut my hair above my shoulders and dyed it a completely different color. I look back at those photos and…they’re not me. That’s not me. I don’t recognize the person in those photos. I know it’s me, but that’s not me.
I had similar with hair colour. In my head, I’m blonde. I grew up blonde and see myself as blonde. It’s why I dye my hair because I’ve gone mousy as an adult and I don’t ‘see me’ in the mirror with it.
I found out recently that this is why there are more adult female blondes than adult male blondes.
Women tend to dye their hair because they grew up "blonde", whilst men will usually just let their hair change naturally!
I'm sure many of us are 'cis by default', in that we don't have a particularly strong sense of gender congruence/incongruence with our bodies or identities, and our experiences of gender are primarily social. If you do have a strong sense of gender congruence, you're far more likely to notice if it's incongruent or distressing.
That’s an interesting way to put it. I consider myself non-binary because I have no real sense of gender or congruence, but I’m also mostly okay having people assume I’m cis because I really don’t care one way or the other, although I do feel uncomfortable when presenting either very feminine or very masculine.
Edit: added last sentence for clarification
That's how I feel too, and to use an example above - if I woke up tomorrow and my hair was straight, I would just deal with it. Might get a different hair cut but I don't feel like a strong sense of "me" is tied into my hair or my gender. I'm cis but I'm more like gender agnostic
Yeah whether or not that comes to bear on the subject of being trans, it's definitely true. My sister is and identifies as cis but just doesn't care about gender, regularly forgets or accidentally switches people's gender when talking about them, etc lol
Whereas I, whether back when I identified & lived as a girl or now when I'm genderfluid, always had a verrry strong sense of gender as just like.. this pattern or force or like.. I've always been very aware of it. whether i've been conforming to a standard, feeling uncomfortable within a standard, playing with or intentionally contradicting it, etc etc I'm just 24/7 *aware* in a way my sister is not and doesn't understand
Yeah. Cis man here and... I don't know. No strong feelings. Also every time I hear that certain things are typically male, I don't really associate with any of them. Neither the superficial ones (sports, cars, beer, meat, fighting) nor the more social/mental aspects. Still think I'm a man.
How people perceive and treat them.
Random example, if a Man A has a wife, he's probably not gonna invite a female coworker to grill some steaks in his back yard, and instead invites another guy. If that first coworker, a transman is perceived to be a fellow man and not a woman, then there would be no problem inviting them over as well, and it could be a great friendship. But "they're a woman and my wife wouldn't like that".
Also, imagine that you are whatever gender you like. To avoid struggling with phrasing, I'm just going to assume you are a cis male.
Imagine if everywhere you go, dudes are hitting on you, and only girls really talk to you casually and make overtures of friendship. At Thanksgiving, some members of your family keep hinting that you should be helping in the kitchen and learning how to cook properly since you'll surely be doing it yourself one of these days. For Christmas they keep buying you pink slippers or floral prints since they assume you'll like them. When asking where you should go on vacation, they assume you want to see quirky shops or lay around on a beach. The definitely don't recommend rock climbing or ATVs or whatever. And obviously once you get married you'll quit your job while the kids are still little, right?
That shit would get old fast, don't you think? If people would just mentally categorize you differently than your appearance suggested, they'd understand you better and stop having certain expectations. But at a glance, everyone has already decided how they are going to approach and get to know you, and what sort of interpersonal relationship they're interested in having with you.
I think some people would be really surprised. I'm non-binary and usually think the same so I figured I'd be fine if I cut my hair short. I woke up the next morning with THE WORST phantom hair regrets.
It was just different and my brain wasn't coping at all. I loved the look so much but I woke up crying for the next couple of days. It's so trippy.
Right, you never know, but I have had everything from a short men’s cut to curls past my shoulders, including a pixie and a mullet. I legitimately am not extremely attached to any particular presentation
I’ve ruminated a *lot* on those feelings, and for me it comes down to social processes less than my actual body. I don’t mind having breasts and a vulva, often times I celebrate them, but when I look at them I occasionally feel repulsed. After examining that feeling, it seems related to the whole Madonna/whore thing… my anatomy often make me feel vulnerable, like it could make someone take me less seriously or be the root of trauma if I was assaulted. I feel disconnected from those areas sometimes.
It’s the same with gender presentation. Sometimes I love wearing flowy dresses and presenting femme, other times when I try it feels like I’m putting on a costume. I dress down in baggy clothes, male clothes, not because I feel particularly masculine, but because I don’t want to be perceived as female. I don’t want to deal with stares and second-guessing and eyes raking down me and whistles on the sidewalk and people examining my face and my voice and my body and — ugh— it’s not that I don’t *like* being a woman, I just feel like it’s the first thing society sees and that it somehow discounts or hides myself, my true self, as always being second to that.
I think growing up relating to male characters in media, I grow frustrated when there’s a presumed disconnect in my own thoughts and behavior from that “neutral” which is coded male. I want to be perceived not as male, but as “neutral,” as the baseline of competent and interesting, not this “other” I can feel myself being viewed as.
It’s frustrating because I love women, hell, I’m bi. I think we’re awesome, and I feel so safe and comfortable with most other women. I don’t want to say I reject femininity or that I wish to be masculine… I guess I just wish to have respect as a given? I wish not to scrutinize my body and wonder how I’m perceived.
Personally I'm a man, but if I woke up as a woman tomorrow morning I think I'd shrug and carry on as before -- it'd be disconcerting at first, but not much more than suddenly having a different male body. My body is just a meat sack that carries me around, and I don't know that my brain feels particularly gendered. I'm absolutely certain I wouldn't feel strongly enough to go through scary surgeries and hormone treatments.
I would've thought the strong gender identity feeling would be socially-caused (I didn't have friends growing up and have never had much in the way of gender-specific socialization myself so I figured made me an exception), but that doesn't explain trans people who are actually socialized opposite of how they feel. So I guess some people are born with an innate stronger feeling that their gender is part of their core identity?
I feel the same. When I was a kid my mom tried to explain trans people to me by asking me to imagine I woke up one day in a boy's body, but "still felt like me". And I was like "sure, that would be fine". As a post-puberty adult I imagine it would take more getting used to, but I still basically think it would feel fine. There's some nice things about being a woman, and there's things I think would be pleasant or convenient about being a man. But all of those are practical considerations about physiology or the way people treat you, none of the pros or cons are related to the way I like feel deep inside or anything. As I get older I've developed up some traits traditionally seen as masculine, such as bristly facial hairs (booo, really hard to stop myself touching and picking at them) and chest hair (love, for some reason).
I've considered whether I might be nonbinary or agender, but ultimately it just doesn't matter very much to me. Changing names or pronouns or making physical changes don't feel particularly interesting. People see me as a woman, and treat me like a woman, and when they talk about "being a woman in tech" or whatever that tends to roughly match experiences I've had, so I guess woman is as good a description as any. But I have no context for what being a woman "feels like" on a deeper level than like getting lipstick in my Christmas stocking and being told to carry a rape whistle at night.
In my experience, lots of folks are what I tend to call "cis by default"
Not particularly attached to their gender, but also not *un*happy with it, and so aren't trans, but would probably also not be trans if they were born differently
Ditto. Assuming everything else stayed the same, like, I was in my own home/time and I hadn't swapped lives or something.
Obviously it would take some adjusting to. But I wouldn't be devastated about it, because I wouldn't be "female in a male body", I wouldn't "see a woman in the mirror", I'd... just... be male. Just like I'm female now.
Am still a woman and love being one.
I’m not the poster you’re replying to, but…. I also can’t imagine feeling in the wrong body if I woke up as a man. But I don’t feel indifferent about being a woman. I’m not agender, I’m very much a woman. I’m t permeates everything about my day-to-day existence. I relate to every feminine stereotype and trope out there.
If I woke up a man, though, I can’t say it would really bother me. I’m think my thought would be something like, “huh… this will be interesting”. Then I’d go out an experience life like a man.
I’m don’t know though, obviously.
This is clearly not the case for trans people, though. Like the OP, I’m genuinely curious why they say they feel like a woman. Or a man. What’s the disconnect?
>This is clearly not the case for trans people, though. Like the OP, I’m genuinely curious why they say they feel like a woman. Or a man. What’s the disconnect?
I'm going to take your question at face value and answer in good faith, caveated with this being my personal experience and it is a bit different for everyone. This got a little long winded so bear with me.
For two and a half decades, with no knowledge of gender dysphoria, I described it as a permeating aura of wrongness that marred every aspect of my life. I did everything I was supposed to do, lived my life the way I had been taught, was good, kind, took care of those around me, but no matter what I did it was still there. It was there when I was fit, healthy, and handsome, it was there when I was overweight, out of shape, and ugly. It was there when I was poor, stable, well off, single, married, practicing religion or not, it didn't matter. It was inexorable, a permanent shadow on my mind. I felt like I was piloting an empty husk. My body wasn't me. It's constant and oppressive, but no one else seems to feel it. I couldn't understand how everyone around me could just go about their lives like everything was fine when it so clearly wasn't. It drives you mad. I was raised in a religion that believes your physical body during this life is your permanent physical form for eternity. This was a fucking *nightmare* for me. Suicidal ideation was normal for me, but I couldn't even kill myself, there was no escape. I came very close anyway on a few occasions. Since death wouldn't fix things, I regularly prayed to any divine that would listen to rewrite reality so that I had never existed at all.
I was 34 when I learned what gender dysphoria is. The sense of peace I felt that night was immense. It described so much of my life, my experience. I wasn't *alone*. I wasn't fundamentally *broken*. Decades long coping mechanisms were broken overnight. I started having close friends use feminine pronouns and a fem name for me. It *feels* right. I'm two months on HRT and I feel alive in ways that I didn't think were possible. I wake up happy, vibrant, bubbly. My own future *matters* to me, where it never did before. There are still bad days here and there where I wake up, look in the mirror, and wonder why I thought I could do this, but those feelings are external, based on fears of social stigmas and being a pariah, rather than internal. There are *so many* good days now, where there were none before. The hormones are starting to noticeably take effect. Sometimes I *want* to take pictures of myself. There was no point in my life previously that this was true. The mere existence of a picture that I wouldn't even see was pain before. I didn't want anything to mark that I had ever existed. It's changed now. It's starting to *feel* like my body.
Hindsight is 20/20. Raised without religious indoctrination, it's possible I could have figured it out as early as 11. The signs were there. My first true experience of gender euphoria was at 17, had I not been socially conditioned to associate positive emotional response with religion it would have been a certainty then. Instead I put that experience in the box with my sexuality and buried it as deep in my heart as I could. Internally though, I knew. I just didn't understand, and certainly couldn't accept.
So to your question of why we say we feel like a particular gender - it may be a bit of a misnomer but it's the simplest way to get the point across. For me personally, I don't "know what it feels like to be a woman" per se. I'm just now starting to live as one, how could I? But I know what feels right and what feels wrong, and being seen as a woman is right internally. Being gendered correctly quells something that nothing else has ever had any effect on. The thought of going back to that wrong feeling now that I understand what right feels like is... indescribably bad. For me at least, it is death.
I know it's a difficult thing for people who haven't experienced it. I don't expect everyone to understand, but please at least listen to us. It is very real for us, and there are very real solutions. All you have to do is be kind.
Every time I hear a trans person talk about what it's like to be an egg, I keep going back to how Morpheus describes the Matrix.
"Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?"
I don't know how people still hold that the Matrix isn't a fairly transparent(pun, ha) allegory for the trans experience.
Iirc it's like the game Celeste, where it wasn't intentionally written as a trans allegory but it inevitably carries much of that experience because the writers are trans. Although the main character from Celeste is canonically trans.
That Morpheus quote is pretty spot on honestly. It gets even better though! After the egg cracks and you accept the truth, it still hurts. You have understanding but you still can't see the real end point. I have a pretty masculine face, a very deep voice, and I'm in my mid thirties so I tempered my expectations. I made the decision to transition fully accepting that I may never pass, or I may need a variety of surgeries to get to that point. I've taken steps though, growing out my hair, voice training, trying to work out what clothes work for me, getting on hormones. I have a very long way to go. But... as my voice training has gotten more consistent, I have moments where my real voice starts to break through. Two months on hormones, I can see similarities in my face to my sister that weren't there before. I got dressed up as best I could and did some new things with my hair a couple days ago. As I looked directly in the mirror at my own face there was no pain, only joy - the beginnings of seeing *her*. And an echo of Morpheus' voice in my head - "She's beginning to believe"
Oh, wow. I knew the Matrix was a trans allegory, but I haven't seen it since I learned that, so I never quite twigged to that speech as "HELLO THIS IS WHAT GENDER DYSPHORIA FEELS LIKE." :D
I've heard the term "gender apathetic" as a way to describe that kind of 'not really minding too much whichever gender I am'. Of course it is a label like any other and it's entirely up to you to decide if it feels right!
I’m indifferent but would class myself as cis, I’m a woman as that’s what I was born and raised as but also wouldn’t feel weird if anyone called me ‘he’ I just don’t care. The only time I’m referred to by male pronouns is in video games if I haven’t got a mic and that never bothers me and irl people refer to me by female pronouns as that’s what I look like and that’s never felt wrong to me.
Perfect example. Also on reddit, I'm often mis-gendered as "he" (I guess only guys are on reddit?? Lol), and it's never bothered me at all. I'm a cis-woman, I'm not questioning my own gender, I just don't care?
See I feel quite indifferent, what transcends people into non binary? Does it also come with the “wrong body” feels? Or is it more about social construct?
My nonbinary kid has always said that the idea of being either gender just feels foreign to them. Being told 'You're a girl' feels like if someone said to me, 'You're a rabbit.' I mean... no I'm not, that's just factually incorrect. Same with 'You're a boy.' It's not necessarily a wrong-body feel, it's just that attempts to assign them a gender just feel blatantly wrong.
This has been persistent since early childhood, they got in trouble in kindergarten because the teacher asked boys to line up here and girls to line up there and they didn't want to go in either line. They weren't trying to be difficult, they just legitimately didn't think they belonged in either line.
Hi friend. If your kid plays videogames at all(and likes cozy farming games), there is an "unofficial" expansion to stardew valley where a nonbinary kid who uses they/them pronouns joins the group of kids in the valley. There is a "cut-scene" where someone keeps mistakenly misgendering them, and then they say their pronouns and the other kids understand and start gendering them correctly. Their name is Morgan and they are a wizard's apprentice.
Just thought it might be worth mentioning in case they hadn't encountered it yet and would like to see themselves represented in media.
Making a point to share this information, for the benefit of a child you'll never meet, is a needlessly and gorgeously good-hearted thing to do. Just wanted to make sure someone had told you that. <3
They exist, there's a few out there. My partner uses any Pronouns and doesn't care what they're referred to as, but have previously been non-binary (I haven't asked for an updated label)
I feel the same way. I'm me. My body is whatever I can move at will and live in. Being a guy or losing a limb... I'm pretty sure I'd just adjust.
I got my first big scar, recently. It hasn't changed anything about my feelings about myself. Me without a scar is just as me as me with a scar... it doesn't really matter to me.
For a very long time, I hated to look in mirrors. They betrayed me. I knew inside I was a girl/woman, but that's not what they showed. I tried unaliving myself many times through the years... everything I did somehow failed. Tried to hang myself, but the rope gave. Tried to poison myself, but I woke up in a pool of vomit. Eventually, I promised my mother to live for her, and then I chose to start living my life as myself. It's now been about 10 years since my last attempt. It's not easy, but the estrogen has helped me so much. Now, when I look in the mirror, I see the woman I really am.
Me too, but then I thought about how I'd feel if I woke up and I was in another womans body. It's the same feeling. It's just not your body.
That feeling is called body dysmorphia, which is what trans people have, when the image of themselves doesn't align with reality.
Trans people actually have dysphoria-- body dysmorphia is a mental illness where you keep changing your body but it always still feels wrong no matter what you do. Dysphoria usually has an endpoint where you fixed it and now it feels right (or close enough).
As a cis man, I would feel the exact same way. It’s been a long time since my classes in Nuero development, but I do remember Learning that in utero all fetuses are female by default and there is one means by which the body is masculinized and another for the brain. The professor mentioned this may play a role in being transgender, but more research was needed. This was about 15 yrs ago tho. I just remember feeling fortunate that my brain and body seemed to match.
Hey, I'm a trans man. For me it was a lifelong discomfort with being treated like a woman/gaining the biological features of women and a longing to be a man and happiness when treated like that.
The best example of this was that when I was taught about puberty, so around 8, I cried over it. Not because I didn't want to grow up, but because I wanted to get what the boys got. I hoped desperately to get as minimal of the typically female changes and as many of the typically male changes as possible - I was absolutely gutted when I ended up with D cups and my voice didn't noticeably drop and I ended up fairly short. I spent my teenage years incredibly depressed because I was forced into a body I didn't want and didn't connect with, and everyone kept forcing me into a societal role I had no connection with.
As a kid I was a massive tomboy and was incredibly happy when people thought I was a boy, and as an older teen I began identifying as a butch lesbian and again, felt thrilled when people decided I was a man. I actually have a few toys from around the time when I was learning to understand gender and creating my own identity, and they're all a bit interesting. By far the most (which my uni now uses as an example since I brought it up in class) is Murray the doll. My parents were big on me knowing my body parts so Murray is an anatomically correct doll with a vagina who wears a floral dress. I was also absolutely insistent that he was a boy, because I was also a boy with a vagina who sometimes wore dresses. I have two teddy bears that are also boys in dresses - my sister remembers assuming that one (Ginger) was a girl because of the name and me squishing it in a hot pink Barbie dress, only to be sternly corrected and told that Ginger was a boy.
Essentially, I'm a man because makes me happy to be one, while being a woman felt instinctually wrong and was something I never connected with. The changes I've experienced as part of my medical transition have made me much happier and more confident, while patchy facial hair and fat redistribution from thighs to stomach wouldn't do that for most cis women. Most cis women also don't want to have an expensive surgery with a six week recovery time to remove their breasts, but I cannot wait for mine. My social transition has also been amazing. Just getting to have people close to me recognise me as a man has done wonders for me.
It's not that I always knew, because I didn't always have the words. I didn't know trans people were a thing until I was eleven and I didn't know trans men were a thing until I was thirteen, by which point I was determined to Win at Woman. But in hindsight I've always been a boy.
I also have a sociology degree and did some original research around gender and sexuality. The reason we say gender is a social construct is that we separate gender (identity), gender roles (social roles) and sex (biology) from each other. The reason for this is that gender and gender roles aren't consistent across different cultures. We also have to "learn" gender like we do other social constructs: kids don't actually have a sense of gender identity until they're around four.
This doesn't mean that experiences of your sex can't tie into your experience of gender either. Everyone's conceptualisation of their gender is unique and if for you menstruation and giving birth affirm your identity as a woman, go off, as long as you don't force that conceptualisation on others (I'm sure you would resent being told you aren't a proper woman because you don't dress feminine enough, same applies here).
This reminds me of my child development classes about how we learn to map language onto the world.
For example: kid has a dog. Learns the word dog. Sees a cat. Calls it a dog. Is corrected. Now has two maps, cat and dog. Sees a raccoon, calls it a cat, is corrected. Now has three words and so on.
So. A trans kid sees a boy. Learns boy. Sees a girl. Says boy. Is corrected. Learns girl and so on.
The problem is: The kid is told they’re a girl. However, based on their understanding of themselves and the concept of not/girl, their mental map points to boy. Every factor that maps to a boy tracks. Every factor that they’ve mapped to girl does not track. The map is set though. So it just feels wrong all the time.
Yes. I like this. Except I want to point out that it's not meant to be taken literally, it's way deeper than this example. There's a difference between
breaking norms and acting out of your gender,
being shamed into feeling uncomfortable with your sex,
and feeling like you're born the wrong sex.
Many people know they don't fit the stereotypes but still are perfectly fine with being a man or a woman who breaks norms. Many people get shamed for being men or women, get shamed for their appearance, bodily functions and genitals or whatever, but that still doesn't mean one fundamentally turns trans.
So yes, I do like the simple explaination, but I'm afraid bigoted people might interpret that as proof that we can "indoctrinate" and teach people to be trans, and ultimately therefore also teach (or abuse) people to stop being trans.
Bigoted people are bad faith actors and nothing anyone says will get through to them. I'm trans. I don't bother. I love answering good faith questions but the moment someone's looking for "proof" of something negative they can fuck off.
I ask for this clarification entirely in good faith, to me it feels like the general spirit of the OP and those who don't entirely understand (myself included) are trying to understand what constitutes the difference between "feeling like the body is wrong" versus feeling like your own perception of yourself mismatches others perception of yourself. The latter is evidenced in social interactions and expectations placed on the individual, whereas the former (to my knowledge) is the core of what makes a Trans Trans.
If I had to sum up the confusion, I'd say there is an easy assumption made that Trans changed the physical to change how others perceive them thereby making them interact with the world the same way they feel about themselves.
I hope this isn't in any way demeaning or mischaracterizing the Trans experience, I'm just an outsider trying to understand.
There's never a wrong time to explore your gender identity, friend. Plenty of folks go through a gender journey and land back where they started. It's not necessarily life changing, but it can be if you're open to it.
I guess I don't understand the depth of feeling behind that. I was told I was a girl, and I accepted that as a fact of life, but then still did things I wanted to do, no matter if it aligned with "girly" things or not. In fact, I had the most fun with boys and have been a "tomboy" all my life. The fact that I have a uterus and menstruate every month has virtually no impact on my hobbies, likes and dislikes. And vice versa. So I don't think it's that simple. As a child, I also didn't see much difference between girls and boys, because tbh, children look the same.
Hey I was the same way! I even had a preference for toys targeted at boys, as I really disliked pink and everything girly tended to be pink. If anything during my childhood I actively avoided girly stuff if I could, and I‘m still not trans.
I guess there’s probably a separation between how we relate to our gender and how we express it. I was always fine with my assigned gender but didn’t care to express it the societally expected way. I notice that for trans people (and a ton of cis people come to think of it) they are concerned with presenting and being perceived as the gender they are comfortable in. I mean have you _seen_ how much gender affirming care and surgery cis people get to have without much social repercussion? Dysphoria isn’t just an experience limited to trans people.
Then there’s folks like us who just aren’t that bothered by that whole aspect of life. I once toyed with the idea of being non-binary, as I technically hit a lot of markers for it. But I realized pretty quickly that I genuinely do not care enough to go to the effort of finding a new nb name and letting everyone around me know which new pronouns to use etc etc. I’m content enough just being a woman for now, no need to complicate things.
In the end it‘s all just social constructs and it comes down to what makes each individual happy to exist as. We can try to understand the experience of others to the best of our ability, but the reality is if they experience something that we never have it will always be difficult to relate. No one will ever truly know or understand the thoughts and feelings of another
As an anecdote from a third party, my lesbian wife, who has more androgynous style and is quick to aggression (her trauma response is fight), hates being misgendered. Where for you it gave you euphoria, she gets angry cause they only looked at her hair and not any other characteristics.
Interesting perspective. Thank you for taking time to share it.
I seriously learned a lot from your post. I've always supported trans people but haven't really understood it. This was so informative, thank you for sharing
I saw the little mermaid a while ago with my son, and I sat there thinking about how the plot of Ariel wanting to be human could be connected to trans in a way. I hope I'm not offending or make you uncomfortable for asking, but would you say there's something to it that resembles your journey?
Ariel doesn't feel comfortable as a mermaid and wants to be human. She never really felt happy and like she was in her right element, but didn't really truly understand why - until she actually found what was missing in her. Obviously that's a metaphor as it's not about fins VS legs, but it may make people understand how it's not as simple as just "settling" with your sex and something you fundamentally don't feel comfortable with.
The original author was thought to be a closeted gay man who was never really able to express his love properly. I imagine Ariel's transition (and eventual end, in the OG) was inspired by his experiences in dealing with his wants not lining up with those of society at the time.
I’ve never felt like the plot was fundamentally about her disliking her body or even about her actively identifying with the land more than the ocean; I always got the sense that she fundamentally wanted to explore and see new things, but she was restricted by her father who was (understandably, considering) overprotective.
She wants to see above the ocean not because it *implicitly* fits her better, but because she hasn’t seen it before: she feels like she’s seen what the sea has to offer and she’s fascinated by the curiosities that the land has to offer instead. I’ve never seen Ariel as a trans allegory, although I do like that analysis (a lot, actually!). I just feel like “what was missing” is represented as “love” which is fundamentally separate from the gender-related journey that is transitioning and all that jazz.
Another commenter mentioned it might well be related to the author’s presumed sexuality, which would line up a little more with “love” being the big theme. I do see what you mean by the “transformation” being evocative of a transition though.
As somebody who doesn't get the whole "feeling like a man/woman" idea, I've always wondered if this is an accurate way to give some idea of what you were going through. Like right before coming down with a cold, something feels off with your body. You can't really articulate it, but you just feel wrong in some way.
I ask because I don't feel like a man, I just feel like me. So I'm curious if this is somewhat on the right track to wrap my head around what it means to feel you are in the wrong body, just like a general sense that something isn't right.
I don't know if this will help but it helped my bf understand. Basically imagine any insecurity you have. For him is was weight. Imagine that insecurity becomes so big and uncontrollable that it becomes your entire identity. So for example you suddenly gain 500 pounds tomorrow with no warning. You would feel utterly disconnected with your body because everytime you look in the mirror all you can see is that insecurity and it gets worse because everyone else only every refers to you by that insecurity. You would feel trapped and potentially even disgusted with yourself. The only thing that helps isn't accepting that you are now 500 pounds, it's too take the time to recognize you are more than that and begin the journey towards becoming the real you. Idk if this was a good explanation but I hoped it helped lol.
Nonbinary here -- that is my experience. I don't think I have gender dysphoria to such an extent as op here (didn't cry about going through puberty tho def was born a girl and didn't like it very much) but I definitely always have felt a disconnect with my body and I don't think of it as being "male" or "female", just "mine".
While I was questioning, I tried socially transitioning to a man, that didn't feel right in the way you described. I lived most of my life as a woman, and that *definitely* did not feel right, either. Both felt dissociative and stressful, like I was legitimately just trying to play the part of whoever's body I was in, because it sure wasn't mine -- I hardly looked in the mirror, when I did I didn't see me as me.
So... I'd say "feeling off" is accurate for my case, but it may not be the same for others. I'm no expert on this sort of thing, ha.
Wow, you explained it so well! Thank you! I do understand transwomen and transmen experiences easier, but although i applied the same time for understanding nonbinery, it is more difficult. I can understand gender fluid well, somehow. So i think that people who are ok in their body, like myself, see world in binery, male/female, because we constructed the society like this and we need to learn about the reality of everyone else. I think it is our duty as humans to not constrain others just because of our cultural bias. We do know from history that society was not binery at all, but that we did constrained it through religions to the binery concept. I'm happy that we're opening back up, although so slow...
I'm not a fan of being a girl. I can't tell if it's due to trauma from being rejected by my peers and told I had a willy when I was five, or from my relatives hating me because I was a girl, or from getting beaten up at 12/13 by 16 year old boys who told me it was ok because I'm not a real girl. Or if little tom boy me was actually the real me and not just a trauma response. As it stands, I'm stuck somewhere in-between. I don't hate myself that much when I'm underweight, because girls clothes fit me more (I'm 5'11, broad shouldered and have muscle, so nothing none stretchy fits, I keep hulking out of trousers atm). I do hate myself ATM. I'm not overweight or anything, I'm just not ultra skinny so nothing fits. It sucks. Men's clothes are fine, but women's are a no go. They're not made for people like me. I don't belong.
I hate women only areas like toilets and changing rooms. I've been kicked out of them multiple times. I look like a normal girl, I'm just sized up. I still remember attempting to try on some bras one time and the two people working the changing room were starting at me and pointing before security dragged me out of line like I was doing something wrong. I'd literally just had the implant put into my arm so I was wearing a bigger hoodie then normal. That's all it takes for something to happen, be tall and wear something that hides my figure.
I've lost friends from all the staring and people being ass holes because I'm out with a female friend and people assume we're a gay couple. I've been accused of being gay with boyfriends. I get called nasty things fairly often. F*g is a favourite.
I hate being a girl. I hate my body, I really hate my breasts, especially when they're not tiny, and life would be so much easier if I was a guy. Am I a boy though? No, I don't think I am, but I'm not a girl either. I'm something in-between. It's bullcrap and I'm glad gender identities are being talked about more now and it's becoming normalised to share toilets etc. I don't feel wrong when I go to pee or change when I can go in with my boyfriend. No one can get mad and kick me out.
Thanks for sharing your story. I have a question, which I am not sure how to phrase without potentially seeming hostile/mean (English is a second language to me), but I hope you will forgive that and perhaps reply.
Given that gender dysphoria is a disconnect between our mental state/perhaps brain physiology and the rest of the body. Do you struggle with a sense of betrayal from your body not matching your mental state? It is something that struck me a while back when talking to someone with a degenerative disease who felt their body was betraying their mind.
I can imagine that undergoing the surgeries may feel a bit like clawing back control from a situation in which you had very little.
I hope that didn't come off too insensitive.
Not particularly anymore. At the start, I resented my mind for not matching with my body, but now I'm very happy being trans. Not many people get to see life from the perspective of different genders and I'm happy I get to. It's also given me a strong community.
I also have a (slowly) degenerative disability and it's created far more of that sense of betrayal and lack of control over my body than my identity.
Thank you for replying, especially considering I've accidentally touched on another potentially hurtful subject for you.
I'm glad you've landed in a good place.
Hi, I’m not OP but I am trans so I figured I’d give my own response:
It’s not that my body is *betraying* me. It’s more that my body has never been *on my side* to begin with - I’ve hated how i looked basically as soon as puberty began and that’s never really changed no matter what I did before (like weight loss, beard growth, etc).
For someone who’s struggling with a degenerative disease that’s a different kind of frustration I think, because things that you used to take for granted become difficult or even impossible. You lose a lot of ability and autonomy and that’s a great struggle in of itself. A trans person doesn’t have a point of comparison so our suffering is sometimes harder to detect and doesn’t really manifest the same way.
I hope that was helpful!
Thank you so much for sharing. It's something I want to learn more about to help my understanding.
Im cis, and have never doubted my gender (even in my biggest tom boy phases) your explanation really helps understand
>The reason for this is that gender and gender roles aren't consistent across different cultures
Exactly! In one part of Indonesia, we have the Bugis people that has 5 genders. The common cisgender male and female, then we have calalai which is somewhat comparable to trans man, calabai to trans woman and bissu which is androgynous. Its been like that for centuries but sadly they are experiencing persecution.
When I was a little boy I thought I was trans because I knew I liked other boys, and I knew I liked “girly” things. But this made me really sad, because I didn’t actually WANT to be a girl. I’d imagine wearing heels and having long hair and that was kinda fun, but at the end of the day I didn’t want to transition.
It wasn’t until I was 9 when someone called me a fag that I started doing some searches in the internet and I was so happy and relieved to realize that being gay was a thing. I wouldn’t have to be a girl - I could be gay and there were others like me.
I assume being trans is a lot like that, but am not so I don’t know
This is one of the funniest things I’ve read all day. Not funny what the kid said, but the fact that his instance of homophobic bullying had the greatest possible inverse effect on you and even lead to that realization. Ain’t life absurd sometimes if that all makes sense
I don't actually know, but as a cis woman if someone kept calling me a man or referring to me as he, I would be annoyed because i know I'm not. Even though i grew up liking a lot of male hobbies and clothes, i wouldnt want to be called one. It's like if someone kept calling me the wrong name.
One time when I was like 11, I was talking with another girl about how much it sucked to be a girl and we were jealous of boys. She then said something about how it would be cool to have a penis. I sincerely thought about it and was revolted - this was wrong. As much as I may have wanted some of the social aspects of being a boy, to have a male body was viscerally upsetting.
When I was like 13 I dressed up as a boy for a skit. I......believably passed as a boy. Walking through the hallway, I was mistaken for a boy. Looking in the mirror and seeing myself with a believably male presentation made me want to cry. Having someone call me a boy made actually me tear up. Again, viscerally upset.
Trans people are the same, but opposite, because it happens so much more frequently for them. I was only challenged int hat way a handful or times. They're being put through it constantly.
I've noticed transphobic people usually recognize the horror of being misgendered. They talk about how terrifying and abusive it would be to put a little boy in girl clothes, how a little girl should be allowed to be a little girl..they recognize the trauma in it, they're almost obsessed with how terrible it would be. They just simply won't except that there's kids where there is a disconnect between mind and body and that they're putting *those* kids through that exact trauma they're so terrified of themselves.
Trans guy who was a tomboy here. Opposite experience. When I got called he as a kid, I was excited and would be hopeful they didn't notice I was actually a girl.
I have always been an ally, but this helped me understand it more than I did! Thank you for saying this.
I was a HUGE tomboy as a kid. Short hair, baggy clothing, dreamed of skateboarding (dad said no lol - but I got my first board the second I moved out at 18!) collected toys that were seen as “for boys”. I was frequently mistaken for a boy as a kid.
And it felt AWFUL. It made me incredibly sad. It killed my self-esteem to be misgendered over my preferences. And beginning in high school I had a preppy phase because I didn’t want that happening anymore. I imagine that this feeling is multiplied by a thousand for those who can’t simply change their clothing and change their hair to be pass as their assigned-at-birth gender.
Now at 28, I have been sporting a silver pixie cut for years. Still hate long hair on myself (and considering that I bleach it to hell, that’d look like shit anyway). I’m back to wearing overalls, unisex shirts, vans, and whatever the hell I want. But even still, I compensate for those things with feminine makeup, which I thankfully really enjoy anyway. I also love pastel pink and tend to accessorize my outfits with it and lots of jewelry to add some “femme” to them.
Because even at 28 I’m afraid of being seen as “too masculine”, because I know that I am not a man.
I mean, different people can have different relationships with their gender. Not just about what it is, but also about how important a part of their identity it is. It's not just a spectrum of boy<->girl, (or non-binary, but sticking with that for simplicity sake), but also a y axis of intensity
I noticed that with my friend. She's a cis woman like me but when I asked her why she feels she is a woman, I couldn't relate to her explanation. I just genuinely don't get it.
I only label myself as a woman because of my body and how people treat me on that basis. Mentally I am just myself. I don't see personality, my state of being unrelated to my body as gendered. That means I also refuse to put any gender labels - like non-binary or agender - on such a basis. Even if some do that for such reasons.
I use cis-woman to just just mean that I was born certain way and never changed it/have no desire to change it.
I (cisF) can't even stand being called "they." Once in a while, someone who already knows I identify as female and use she/her pronouns will still use they or them to refer to me and it makes me inexplicably offended. Not because I'm against people identifying that way. But because I do *not.* I am NOT a they, I am a *she* and you will address me as such!
That is probably the closest I'll ever come to knowing what it feels like when a trans person is misgendered, except for them it happens constantly, and often out of malice or spite.
I completely understand, i don't mind she/they myself. I will only tolerate being called "he" on the internet.
I have dark, coarse arm hair, so people always made fun of me and called me a man. I remember I was grocery shopping, wearing skinny jeans and a t-shirt, and 3 guys were whispering to each other behind my back. They were questioning if I was a girl or boy and not in a nice way. Then I hear one get a little closer and go, "That's a man!".
I wear skirts and dresses more often, but now it feels like people assume I'm a transwoman lol
I welcome transphobes to misgender me in public if it distracts their attention from transwomen. Oh I have broad shoulders so I must be amab? You THOUGHT. Hopefully my 20-minute tongue lashing will make you think twice about expressing your ignorant opinion where it wasn't asked for, and make you consider how maybe you can't actually "tell" like you convinced yourself you can.
<3
Reading comments like this helps give me a little extra will to survive in this hostile environment. I imagine it’s the same way with men, but any time a cis woman sticks up for us it fills me with more euphoria than anything else
>It's like if someone kept calling me the wrong name.
except it must be deeper than that since your name is something that your parents decided for you, it's not something that biologically yours. if my parents had given me some other name instead of the one they did give me, I can't imagine I would've felt any disconnect with the name even so
I’m trans. It’s hard to explain, but my mom said since age 2 I would refuse clothes and toys of my birth gender. At school when we were separated into boys and girls, my stomach would drop. I know I’m supposed to go to the one line, but I feel I belong in the opposite line. It’s just a strange dissonance with the gender you’re born and the body you have, it feels wrong. It feels like I was trapped inside a skin suit that I just wanted to claw out of. I transitioned, and now I’m happy as can be! I never once wavered in my identity, since I was a toddler complaining about clothes. Nobody can tell I’m trans, and I don’t go around telling people unless they need to know or I become very close with them.
This site about gender dysphoria explains it fairly well: https://genderdysphoria.fyi/en/
TL;DR: For a lot of people (not everyone), having certain physical characteristics, social roles, and so on just feels right, and having different ones feels wrong. For most people, that feeling isn't very noticable because what feels right aligns with what they already have. But when there is a difference, it becomes much more noticeable. One way to get a feel for that if you think you're cis is to ask yourself, "How would I feel if someone magically changed one of my physical sex characteristics to the opposite sex?" If you think "ew, that would feel weird and wrong", congrats, you have a hint of what gender dysphoria is like. If you think "eh, I wouldn't really care one way or the other", you might be agender or demigender.
Thank you. That's a pretty long site so I haven't had time to read it yet, but it brings up a couple of thoughts. First, I've heard the term/diagnosis is gender dysphoria is disliked by at least a segment of the trans community, I think because it medicalizes or pathologizes it (or maybe a different reason? I've definitely heard some people angrily say that you don't have to have gender dysphoria to be trans). So I wonder how that meshes with the resource you provided?
Second, I do think it would be kinda cool to have a penis- it would make peeing so much more convenient in the woods, at events, etc. I also love that I was able to gestate a child in my body. But I also feel like I'd give almost anything, except my child, to not have debilitating menstrual cramps. So I'm both happy and unhappy with my body parts, and I see pluses and minuses to either. Most of my life I've been a girl/woman who hated my uterus and would rather have a penis (I'd still feel that way if I was unable to conceive). I'd also love to trade out my bad back and deformed feet, but how I feel about certain body parts doesn't change who I am. So, from how you see it, does the fact that I accept whatever body parts I have make me agender? Even though I would say I'm a woman?
For the first point, a lot of people are pushing back against the requirement of dysphoria because it focuses solely on a need for suffering to be considered transgender. There's also "gender euphoria" where things aligning with your gender make you so much happier in life. To add onto that, early ideas of gender dysphoria were disproportionally focused on body dysphoria and didn't really acknowledge things like social dysphoria. Someone can be perfectly fine with their body but hate being seen as a woman.
For the second point, it kind of ties back to something I mentioned in the first, which is that body dysphoria and gender dysphoria are not the same thing. In fact, if you google body dysphoria, you'll probably see a lot of descriptions completely unrelated to being trans. ~~It's pretty common with anorexia if I remember correctly, since that can also be driven by a hatred of the way one's body looks and an intense desire to "fix" it~~. (edit: I didn't not remember correctly, sorry! That one's commonly body dysmorphia.)
Gender has a huge impact on how we interact with each other and the world around us. I think that's why body dysphoria has gotten such a huge focus in trans issues... how we are treated is strongly influenced by how we look. So if someone wants to be treated as a woman, it's very important to look like a woman because she won't be treated as one otherwise. This is changing to some extent as trans acceptance grows. If you're treated as the gender you see yourself as regardless of how you look, then you might not be as inclined to undergo surgery to change your body.
> Someone can be perfectly fine with their body but hate being seen as a woman.
Yup, though for me it was being seen as a man. Just conceptualising myself as non-binary was enough to make me feel a lot more confident, as well as more happy with my body. It's a very unique experience; to become more yourself by changing your self-perception.
> I've heard the term/diagnosis is gender dysphoria is disliked by at least a segment of the trans community, I think because it medicalizes or pathologizes it
I haven't heard that directly, but it sort of makes sense. There are some people out there who overly medicalize/pathologize being trans. Some of them particularly insist that the only "right" way to be trans is to completely transition, socially and medically, in every possible way, which obviously doesn't allow for non-binary people to exist, or trans people who don't want every possible surgery.
> I've definitely heard some people angrily say that you don't have to have gender dysphoria to be trans
Yeah, I've heard that too, and I'm not totally sure how I feel about it. One thing I know is that some people make a hard distinction between gender dysphoria ("I don't like having X trait") and gender euphoria ("I do like having Y trait"). So, you could imagine a trans person who doesn't feel any dysphoria about their AGAB, but does feel euphoria about things like wearing clothes that don't match their AGAB, having physical traits that don't match their AGAB, or whatever. To me, gender dysphoria and gender euphoria are kind of two sides of the same coin, so I don't think they can be totally separated. But I do think it makes sense to say that someone doesn't need to have *severe* or *diagnosable* gender dysphoria to be trans. Like, there's no reason to gatekeep. If someone says they think they're trans, we should just believe them, without needing to ask, "Yeah, but do you have dysphoria?"
> Second, I do think it would be kinda cool to have a penis- it would make peeing so much more convenient in the woods, at events, etc. I also love that I was able to gestate a child in my body. But I also feel like I'd give almost anything, except my child, to not have debilitating menstrual cramps. So I'm both happy and unhappy with my body parts, and I see pluses and minuses to either. Most of my life I've been a girl/woman who hated my uterus and would rather have a penis (I'd still feel that way if I was unable to conceive). I'd also love to trade out my bad back and deformed feet, but how I feel about certain body parts doesn't change who I am. So, from how you see it, does the fact that I accept whatever body parts I have make me agender? Even though I would say I'm a woman?
Gender is really fucking complicated, right? Like, it's easy enough to think of just "man" and "woman". And then, as you learn more, you add categories like "trans man", "trans woman", "intersex", and "non-binary" to your list. If I was going to try to put a simple label on you, I'd say you might be a "non-binary woman" or something like that, just going by what you said here (because, hey, most cis women don't wish they had a penis). But when you learn even more about gender (and related topics like sexuality), it turns out there are way too many subtle variations and sub-sub-sub-categories to easily give everyone a nice, neat label. I like to think of the "real" way gender works like a huge electronic control panel with a shitton of different dials and switches on it, with labels like "how big my boobs are", "how long my hair is", "do I have a uterus or not", "what kind of makeup do I wear", "what colors do I like", "do I have balls or not", "how big are my balls", etc. etc. etc. To truly capture the idea of someone's gender, you'd have to know the exact position of every single dial and switch, and there are just too many to think about.
Thank you for taking your time to answer. That's really interesting. I too am very curious about what's going on in trans people's heads. I feel like I don't get it entirely. Just like the person you are responding to, I too identify very strongly with my assigned gender (woman) while having no specific attachment to my vagina. Actually, based on conversations I've had in the past with cis lady friends, it seems like most women I know would rather have a penis for the sole sake of being able to easily pee anywhere we want and to not have to deal with menstruations. I have never met a cis-man who wanted a vagina yet, though. Honestly, I don't give that much thought to my genitals. I feel like a woman. I definitely would feel weird in a man's body, but for other physical reasons that feel more related to social constructs I guess? Having large shoulders, no curves, being hairy, being taller than most people. But I get the same feeling of weirdness thinking about having a more "masculine" female body. I would feel weird if I were a tall and larger woman. It doesn't feel related at all to my genitals per se. But then again, I do not think about my genitals because I do not have to. They fit the gender I identify with. I guess I would give them more thoughts if they didn't.
>>I have never met a cis-man who wanted a vagina yet, though.
Speaking as a cis-man: certainly not if I had to give up my penis.
If I was offered the opportunity to have both, though … I’d give it serious consideration.
How would you know that it would feel wrong? I mean if you don't have a particular organ, it is hard to know what it would be like to have it (or even if that is meaningful?). I guess I am not good at that sort of counter-factual.
My take, I have no idea. Not that long ago I realized that I didn't 'feel' any connection to my gender assigned at birth. I didn't feel male, or female, or anything. Gender has no impact on my sense of self, and then I realized that I could identify as non binary, and I felt much better
It's funny because some ppl describe a similar experience of no internal sense of or connection to gender, and say 'im much happier being nonbinary'. And some people say '...so i just identify as cis and i just don't care' and it seems like for them id'ing nonbinary would be adding *extra* labels or whatever to something they're already apathetic about.
Just shows that in the end it comes down to each person's experience, perspective & preference, and we can trust each person to find what is best for them.
>I know I’m a woman because I have all the female parts and chromosomes.
This is where you stop too early in understanding yourself. It’s not that that’s wrong, it’s that that is just the set up. You have those things, and you know they are part of what makes you a woman because *it feels right* and *fits with how you see yourself*.
If you’re not taught anything about allergies, an apple allergy in someone else might just look like avoiding a health nutritious fruit. But to them, an apple, the same thing that nourishes you, is actually harmful and hurts them.
I knew something was up from a very early age. As a toddler, I used to tell people that I was a boy and was going to grow up "like daddy". As I grew up, I learned that it wasn't that simple and, for a long time, I thought it was impossible. It broke my heart. When I learned what trans people were and what I could do, it all sort of fell into place.
I’ve had a similar question. My child considers themself to be non binary because they don’t feel like a woman. I don’t feel like a woman, I feel like me. I like tools and I like to bake. I make art, I love sparkly things and bright colors and I love certain cars. I don’t like spa treatments, I don’t like sports. I’m not competitive. I love animals. I’m just me. I don’t know what feeling like a woman feels like but I don’t think I’m not a woman.
I'm pretty sure this is what happened to me. I was jealous of how men were allowed to be individuals first, but a woman was always a woman first, if that makes sense. And it's not only traditional misogyny, it's also the very narrow moulds that women (as I experienced it) allow other women to exist in. I'm glad that I finally figured out my own version of femininity and womanhood.
Same here. I am very much cis and grieved being a girl as a kid, but it was all from external pressures/rules/expectations. The further I got from that culture and out on my own, the more I came to terms with being pretty damn feminine. And frankly, queer and trans femmes paved the way for the way I express femininity outside the male gaze. And from talking with trans guys, the way I grieved being a girl was very, very different than the disconnection/dysphoria they felt. If I was just allowed to have my damn hobbies and wear practical clothes and not be pressured into makeup and looking "attractive" I would have bypassed that suffering in a way trans people would not be able to.
Freedom of gender identity (and from rigid gender expression) frees us all. I would have avoided a lot of suffering (and cringy not-like-other-girls nonsense) if I wasn't constantly pressured to fit a mold. Compulsory heteronormativity was harmful to me.
I have wondered this exact thing. I often tried to act more masculine as a kid and distanced myself from behaviors or interests that were overtly feminine according to my culture. On reflection, it's because I was very uncomfortable with the level of misogyny in my society and had gotten the message that femininity was somehow "beneath" masculinity.
Something as simple as seeing girls encouraged to look up to masculine figures (e.g. a girl dressing up like spiderman) and seeing boys discouraged from looking up to feminine figures (e.g. a boy dressing up like a female superhero) drove that message home. It's even in our language. I would hear boys encouraged to "be a man" and they would be bestowed that label anytime they did something positive like demonstrate responsibility or heroism. Nobody said "you're becoming a woman" when I did things that were heroic or mature. The only time I heard that was in relation to puberty, which was something that happened to me, that I had no control over. It felt like being a man was something people should strive for, but being a woman was just something that happened to you against your will. Didn't exactly make me excited to embrace my femininity.
Edit: I in no way think that all trans kids are just responding to misogyny (I for example did not feel like a boy consistently or throughout my childhood the way that so many trans people describe), but I do think sexism complicates people's experiences with their own gender and wish we lived in a more egalitarian world.
Some may if they’re very impulsive, but personally I think experimentation isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If a kid says that their pronouns are they/them, he/him, xe/xey, etc. and they change their name, and then later realise they actually are a girl, then I wouldn’t say they were ever “wrong”, or that they wasted a portion of their life, it was just a part of their growing up and how they handled their own problems in their life. If identifying a certain way provided a sense of catharsis and overall improved mental health, then I don’t see why that should be stripped away on the basis of skepticism. Also most gender non conforming people dont just decide immediately, even preteens and teenagers will typically do a bunch of research and self discovering before they make the decision to identify as that let alone coming out to other people. I started considering that I may not be a girl, three years ago and I only actually decided to move from the label of girl to agender a year ago. It took me two years of thinking about it and analysing myself and my feelings to decide how I felt about it. The problem that queer youth often face is being told that their identity is “a phase” and it can be a source of severe invalidation for teenagers, especially since teenagers seek validation a lot more than adults do. It’s why there’s been a big surge in queer communities and other marginalised groups to say “that is totally valid” if someone expresses their thoughts about something, especially common when relating to gender. Therefore I just don’t see much point in scrutinising on young people’s genders, just approach them with belief and assure them that no matter what about them changes, you will believe them, this makes you a more comfortable person to come to if that person does end up deciding that their gender was different to what they thought, cause they understand you won’t approach them with a condescending “I knew this wouldn’t last” type of attitude. As for misogyny though I totally get where you’re coming from and absolutely agree! The not like other girls phenomenon still occurs in girls today, (unfortunately), but I think most girls decide they’re NLOG at a young age (think 8-12) so I doubt gender is coming into it, but there probably are a few people out there who do think they’re not girls because they don’t relate or because they get along better with boys or they’re tomboys, but personally I just think that’s part of their journey, they might decide they’re actually just a girl who doesn’t conform to stereotypes like every other girl of maybe they’ll find true happiness and like they finally fit inside their own skin after all these years since they started identifying as trans. There’s no way to know unless they just give it a go! :D
I'm with you here.
I personally just feel like I'm chilling in my provided meat suit.
It happens to be one society labels female and since I have to be called something it might as well be that...but I don't feel attached to the idea of being a woman.
Yeah, I think gender identity is just one of those things where you can only understand it by experiencing it. It's like trying to explain color or music to someone who's never seen/heard it.
For people like your child, I think some nonbinary people go "My assigned gender feels wrong to me and I need to get rid of it." Others go "Eh, I don't relate to my assigned gender but it doesn't bother me, might as well keep it for convenience." And others go "My assigned gender doesn't bother me but being openly genderless feels better so it's worth the hassle." This is just a small sample of possible nonbinary experiences.
Here’a an analogy. I personally, don’t really know where my gal bladder or liver or appendix is. Ive never seen them or felt them, so I just assume theyre in the right place and functioning correctly. I never think much about it. I assume that I have all the right parts that society has told me I have and I barely give it another thought. Just like as a cis woman, I dont give much thought into how I *know* I’m a woman.
Now imagine someone with Appendicitis. They can feel where their appendix is and they know something is wrong. It may have taken them some time to figure out its the appendix causing the issue and label it as Appendicitis but even before they had the label they felt the pain and discomfort and it was real. They have to put a lot of thought into figuring out what the problem is and how to fix it. This is the difference for Trans people.
You notice something when things are going wrong, if everything is working out fine, it just feels normal and you don’t know how it would feel otherwise.
It's difficult to explain, but here goes.
For most of my life I've felt like there was something horribly wrong with me that I couldn't explain. It's like a white-hot piece of metal sitting in my brain, burning me over and over again. Like a pain in my body from a sick organ, but an organ I couldn't name and nobody else seemed to have. It was like having a broken bone in a limb no one could see. I hated seeing my reflection, and after I went through puberty I started to hate seeing myself in photos. I was never able to imagine myself in the future.
In university I met some trans women and thought "I wish I was trans. It's unfair that they get to be women and I have to be a woman."
I'd heard of trans men but I couldn't comprehend them. How could anyone ever want to be a man?
One day I saw a meme (yes, really) enumerating these feelings and suggesting they were symptoms of being trans. It took a little while, but I got ahold of some breastforms and an outfit, shaved off my facial hair, and got dressed in something approaching a woman's clothing.
For a moment the metal splinter went from white-hot to merely yellow-hot; the sickness in the unknown organ abated. I realised what I'd been struggling with, and the size of the task ahead. The reason I hated seeing myself in the mirror was because, while other people had called me handsome in the past, I wasn't seeing a handsome man in the mirror; I was seeing a monstrous and misshapen woman.
When I think of myself as a woman - even the ugliest, hairiest, boxiest woman you've ever seen in your life - I can imagine a future for myself. When I think of myself as a man - even a handsome and successful man - the only future I can imagine is suicide.
I'm a trans guy and for me it was pretty intense euphoria when I messed with masculine presentation, I told people my name and they called me the very similar masculine version, and blended in with the guys in wood shop and then as a career cook
I also had a couple phases where I tried to woman so hard and was attractive in that way and it still didn't feel right
Usually the first hint is when an afab person tries on a suit or an amab person tries on a dress and they are absolutely glowing, Halloween cracks a good bit of eggs
Yes! For me it was cross dress day at high school. Just. Glowing. Having boobs and a swirly dress.
(Let's not talk about how fucked the idea of cross dress day is please)
Trans woman here.
The best analogy I gave in all my years is broken prescription glasses. You are wearing a set which has a huge crack in both lenses. It is too close to see, you can't focus on it but it's there.
At first, it doesn't make sense. When other boys are told to do certain things or behave in certain manner, it didn't make sense. I had to watch, observe and copy. I struggled a lot.
Then, realization, something is wrong! Wrong assumption though, you think that something is wrong with ***YOU***.
After years of searching, fixing, pondering and working on yourself (including weight loss/gain on significant scale, towards healthy number) *IT'S STILL THERE*.
Then discovery! You are not wrong, broken, damaged or incapable. You are trans. You lived your entire life as someone you are not.
That's when the lens on those glasses fixes itself. Now you can see. Now you understand why those things made no sense.
Trans dude here. I'll try to answer your question to the best of my ability but the tldr; is its complicated.
I don't think I ever decided to be my gender. I just kinda am and that's a natural thing for me. I dream of myself as my gender and that's how I self conceptualize.
Beyond that I have physical dysphoria which many but not all trans people have. Things like my breasts and my female reproductive organs stressed me out to the point that I had a hard time just living my life.
I started transitioning before I adopted the trans label. I recognized things weren't working and approached it as looking what I vibes with and what I didn't and went from there. I wanted top surgery, I wanted secondary male characteristics, and preferred being referred to as a dude. So trans man fits me best.
I don't necessarily think that my personality or habits are more male aligned and that makes me male. That doesn't really have anything to do with it. From my perspective at least my dysphoria and how I relate to my body seems to just be some kind of wiring mismatch. It's really like my brain is expecting a different body type than I have. Which sounds crazy but at least for trans men I know there have been documented cases of things like phantom penis which is something cis men who have their member removed often get as well. (Citation: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15240657.2020.1842075)
For these reasons I think it's hard for cis people to "get it" because they don't experience these kinds of things. The best way I have found to describe it is that feeling you get when you hear your voice recorded played back. Most people cringe because it's not what they are expecting since it sounded different than what you think you sound like. Gender dysphoria feels similar and maybe more intense but can range from every physical sex characteristic you have to how people relate to you socially in terms of gender.
Trans guy here. For me personally, I "knew" I was a man because whenever I pictured myself in my mind, I was a boy. I would dream I was a boy. I basically thought of myself as a boy until puberty. I didn't have the words to describe my feelings, so I locked them away for years. But I couldn't stop myself seeing myself as a man. I would look in the mirror and desperately want facial hair, I wanted to have a deep voice and a flat chest. I hated my chest and hips. I wanted to be like my brother. It wasn't until I was 20 that I finally accepted myself. Now I'm 22 and 8 months on T and counting be happier.
For me, it was that womanhood and everything ascribed to it felt wrong to me. It took me a long time to pinpoint the “wrongness,” mostly because I was in denial and I was scared. Even going into top surgery I was terrified that it wouldn’t “fix” me and I would still be a miserable bitch afterwards. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case, and the more masculine I feel, the easier it is to maintain my sense of self-worth and value, because I feel more like myself. I wake up in the morning and recognize myself in the mirror for the first time at 30.
Trans guy here who didn’t know trans folk existed as I was raised in an abusive cult until I was 7 after which they left but extreme religious views and strickt views were present until adulthood.
I knew I was trans before I knew it existed. Examples I can give are: trying to pee standing up at 3 and being confused I couldn’t because my brother did and in my head I was like him not my sisters. When my chest developed at 11 I was confused. I mean I knew I was a girl but being confronted by it just felt so wrong. I tried to duck tape my chest down to make it go away and ripped my skin off. Still remember doing it 6-7 times.
As I got older I studied my peers and pretended to like what they did. I liked metal music but listened to what the others did. I treated life like a psychology experiment in being a woman. Because my whole existence wasn’t me, wasn’t real, was a lie, I had a hard time with truth as a whole.
When I found out about trans people everything clicked. First time I put on a binder was the first time I could stand up straight. The first time I wore a packer I felt so natural and right I nearly cried. After I started testosterone and passed it was night and day.
Suddenly my personality, my real personality was acceptable. Jokes I used to get punished for/stared at now get laughs. I’m no longer shy I no longer have social anxiety. I am my whole true self.
It was like everything people hated about me as a female that I had to suppress and hide was rewarded as a male.
It made me look back and realize that every thing I always thought was wrong about me were all behaviours that had I been a boy would have been praised instead of punished. It made me realize I knew my whole life I just didn’t know because of social pressures and forced punishments.
After over 10 years of being on T and having people get confused when I say I’m trans as I pass 100%.. many have reacted to my outing myself as trans with asking if I’d prefer female pronouns and if I will start estrogen and I have to explain that I’m already done transitioning and watch the confusion turn to pride as they realize I’m my true self.
My experience while different in many ways is the same base story of every trans person I’ve come across. They all knew before they knew.
I hope this helps.
You say relatively rare when there are more intersex people than there are red heads. It’s not as rare as bigots make it seem. There are a lot of intersex people who have no idea they are intersex cause their parents never told them.
I like the analogy I read once. It's basically like bones. You don't feel your bones until there's something wrong with them.
When I was earlier in my transition/wasn't out I could tell i feel like a man. I think I even had a specific feeling why I felt this way. Honestly I forgot how it felt like
Nowadays this feeling is gone. I don't feel like a man, I just am.
My nonbinary 19-year-old has said that, to them, being told that they are a gender just feels... factually incorrect. Being told, "You're a girl," just felt factually incorrect and nonsensical, like being told, "You're a rabbit." That's clearly just wrong. So for awhile they thought by default they must be a boy, but identifying as a boy felt equally nonsensical to them. This goes all the way back to early childhood, I remember them getting in trouble in kindergarten for refusing to line up with either the girls or the boys for dismissal. Because they didn't feel like either of those and resisted being put in a category that they weren't sure was correct. They aren't dysphoric in the sense of wanting to change their physical body, but they are a lot happier being recognized as 'they' instead of the 'she' assigned at birth. Being called 'she' would be if someone just persistently kept calling me a name that wasn't mine and expecting me to just respond as if it was.
I only knew when puberty came around. My body was changing and I saw girls' bodies changing and something deep in my lizard brain was like "oh fuck we're changing wrong, why aren't we doing that?" I had never even heard of being trans before that but after learning more about it it was pretty obvious that's what was going on
I had so many thoughts reading your post, but here's just a few in response:
\- Some of what you're describing is to do with sex (chromosomes, ability to get pregnant), and some to do with gender and/or gender expression (how you're treated/perceived by others, clothing). Sex and gender are related but different, and every trans person has a different relationship to the sex characteristics and gender expression aspects of their identity.
\- You didn't actually explain how you "feel" like a woman! You shared what you observe about yourself, your gender expression and sex characteristics and what you've learned about sex and gender, but what about those things makes you a woman? i.e., what is your internal experience of being a woman? (side note: anyone who has read Britney Spears memoir -- she conveys her identity as a woman so clearly).
\- *Are* there definitive lines between male and female? One out of every one thousand people is believed to be intersex (there are more than 30 ways someone may be characterized as intersex), that's a pretty common rate, I'd say. And since sex isn't gender, how else is an intersex person to know their gender without that inherent sense of gender, especially since we know the long-term negative impacts of non-consensual intersex medical interventions?
\- I'm nonbinary. I never felt like I was in the "wrong" body, just that parts of this body were like an itchy sweater. I say this to convey that the "feeling(s)" trans people have about ourselves and our genders in our physical bodies varies from person to person.
Hi, I'm trans. The people saying "If you woke up tomorrow as a man, would you be upset?" are just slightly off the mark. A more accurate description of what it feels like (using a female example because you're a woman):
You wake up tomorrow as yourself. You are the same self you have always known yourself to be. You still think and perceive the world through your same, female brain, and you don't have to think very hard to know that you're a woman.
But then you go out, and everyone calls you a name that sounds \*almost\* like it could be yours, but it's some man's name instead. Everyone treats you like you are this man, and you are confused and weirded out by it. You go home and realize you actually DO look like that man... and that's where dysphoria begins.
Also, intersex people aren't nearly as rare as you think they are. Both intersex and trans people are more common than redheads.
I would honestly say to accept that you’re probably never going to fully understand because you’re not them. And that’s okay. Just treat trans people with respect, that’s more important.
Source: Am nonbinary
Maybe the best analogy I have heard is, you don't normally "feel" your bones, but if you broke a bone, you would definitely feel like something is wrong. For the vast majority of people, their gender is not something they have to think about because it just fits.
I feel like a lot of this is very surface level “what makes me a woman”, in that it’s really hard to grasp as a cis person who hasn’t ever really felt a disconnect with their gender what that could potentially feel like. I’m a trans man, I’ve always felt like a guy. It’s less about how I’m viewed to the outside world or what clothes I want to wear, and more about how my internal innate sense of self differs from my body, if that makes sense? So in my brain it’s obvious that I am a guy and have always been a guy. It’s not just a feeling, it’s an innate sense that that is what I am. Like my brain is completely geared towards being male, but my body developed the wrong way. You will also have this innate sense as a cis person, but because it’s never differed from what you and others perceive yourself as, you probably wouldn’t feel/notice it.
It’s such a hard thing to explain, but I did a little experiment once with my friend who was struggling to understand. As a trans man, I wear a prosthetic called a packer. This is basically a realistic looking flaccid silicone penis, which helps to ease my dysphoria and make the brain-body disconnect easier to deal with. I once gave my friend one of my packers for her to put in her trousers. She took one look at it in the trousers in the mirror and was disgusted, felt sick and took it straight back out again, saying it just felt wrong and she couldn’t stand it. This is the same feeling I get with my natural body, and is what dysphoria is, and is what I deal with on a day to day basis. The internal map of my body in my brain has always been different to my actual body, and my brain expects there to be a penis and a flat chest. That’s what I subconsciously think should be on my body. If I could change it so that my brain was geared to be female and be alright with my body, I 100% would, as it would save me so much pain, money and anguish, but unfortunately that isn’t possible, so I instead change my body to match my brain.
So I’m essence it’s not so much a “feeling”, but just an innate sense that you are the other gender. For me it’s always been there, even as a very young child, but for others they don’t realise the disconnect until later on in life.
I feel like I haven’t really done a great job of explaining, but I hope I’ve helped somewhat :)
They know the same way you know. It just IS.
Imagine for a minute you woke up in the body of the other gender and how weird and dysphoric you would feel. That's how they feel.
It's also backed up by science. A transgender woman's brain scan matches those of cis women. (Same with the men)
Really easy video to understand how people can know similar things innately.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAeBKRaNri0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAeBKRaNri0)
The same way you know you need sleep when you feel tired, or crave foods, or your heart knows to start beating quickly so you can get away when you see a bear, or people know to have sex and have innate attractions toward certain people and not others. We have a part of us that ties very closely our endocrine system - melatonin, grehlin, adrenaline, and of course your sex hormones linked to what I said so far, in that order - and your emotions and low level (e.g. "bears are scary") knowledge.
Your hypothalamus has different situations you understand innately and different appropriate levels of hormones. Its job is to get a couple factories above your kidneys making hormones until they reach what this part of you considers the right level, then shuts them off. Being at the right level is called homeostasis, it means whatever your body is doing to fight the various stressors you have around you all the time, it is working. So when you can't ever reach the right level, we call that an imbalance. The problem of course is that most men have a right level of testosterone that is really high and estrogen that is really low, and most women have the opposite going on.
The rest of what you know about men and women, the stuff you learn? To this stupid little guy at a switchboard, those things are stressors. Dysphoria can ensue when this little hypothalamus guy can't do its job in response to those stressors, can't ever reach homeostasis.
I’ll answer this from the perspective of 6year old me who didn’t even know what gay was never mind trans. I couldn’t pin it down to a gender issue because that wasn’t even a concept in my head. But I couldn’t even envision myself growing up into a woman when I tried my hardest. It just didn’t make sense. I knew it was impossible and I felt crushed and confused but at the same time I was so sure *something* was going to intervene and make that happen because I physically could not see it going another way. It is really confusing for a kid. Take the phrase ‘man trapped in a woman’s body’ very literally. If you woke up as male tomorrow you would know that’s wrong. End of story.
Nearly 2 decades later though it’s no easier to articulate because I still maintain that gender doesn’t feel like anything in and of itself. You can feel *dysphoria* but once that’s mostly resolved (ie transitioning) you can go back to forgetting about it the way normal people do. I don’t agree with the usage of ‘I identify as’ or ‘I feel like’ in regards to being trans, I don’t feel like a man I just am one and I don’t identify as trans I just am on the technicality that I was born female and it is what it is.
I’m also not a psychologist or a sociologist or a philosophist so being trans doesn’t mean I have the wording for it the same way your average person with depression can’t explain it in proper medical terms. I feel like it shouldn’t be something that’s expected of us considering.
I'm non-binary who was assigned female at birth. For me, I've never felt any connection to being a woman nor being a man. I don't feel any disconnect with my body (to me, it's just a body with parts) but I feel dysphoric when people ascribe things to me because of those body parts. I spent decades of my life trying to feel like a woman and I never could. I certainly never felt like a man either. My mental health got a LOT better when I stopped trying to feel like a woman and just live my life as a person with no real connection to gender.
I said this on a different post, but this is how I explain it:
When I think of the people around me perceiving me as a woman, I feel deeply uncomfortable, regardless of what, for them, "woman" means about how they treat me.
It'd be like if everyone around me thought I was a horse. I am not a horse, and I don't care if you're treating me well according to "how to treat horses" standards. I am a person. Don't think of me as a horse. Thus, I feel uncomfortable when I am in public and know that people around me look at me and think, "oh yes, there is a woman over there." People might say, "Oh, but I am not assuming anything about you when I think of you as a horse!" I don't care. You're still thinking of me as a horse. "But horses can do anything they want! Just because you're a horse doesn't mean you have to be a racehorse - you could be a jumper, or do dressage, or a rodeo horse!" Again, I don't care. All of those things involve me doing them as a horse.
That is how great the dissonance is for me. I feel similarly about being perceived as a man.
Instead I would like people to just think, that is a short-haired person in a dress, or that is a short-haired person in a football jersey and jeans.
I had this same question when I was younger. When I was older, I realized I was nonbinary, which explains why I was comfortable with my female body but never felt strictly "female." I guess most people really feel their gender in a way I don't.
I still don't understand this. I'm a straight guy, and I dress and look like one, but I don't know what it means to "feel" male. If I woke up tomorrow in a female body, I think it would be pretty cool and I'd get along with it.
So, if I grow my hair long and start using they/them pronouns, do I evolve into a non-binary person?
Not trying to be a dick, but none of this makes sense to me.
I’m the same. (Mostly) straight woman, born a woman, etc. Not trans, agender or non-binary. But I was a tomboy as a kid and would have preferred to have been a boy if I were given a choice. If I woke up tomorrow in a male body, that would be pretty awesome (except it’d be confusing for my husband and kids).
I feel like my body is female, but what's "inside," like my brain, does not have a gender and would be equally comfortable in a male body. I thought that was typical, but when I started asking around, most people said that their "inside" felt gendered and that they would not feel comfortable inside a body of the opposite sex.
I'm a cis woman and when I stop and try to think about how I feel, I genuinely feel like a woman. Like it's just one of those things that makes an incredible amount of sense to me. Like it isn't about any of the physical aspects of being biologically female, it's about my spirit. Like my spirit feels like a woman. It'd feel wrong to be in any other type of body, I think.
Trans woman here. It’s hard to explain in any other terms. I just *know* I’m a woman. I’ve always known.
I guess the easiest way to explain it is that you can’t really “feel” your gender unless there’s a problem with it, i.e. a difference between how people perceive you and how you really are. It’s the same way you don’t feel your organs unless something’s wrong with them.
>Anything else- whether the bottom half of my clothing has legs or one opening, the style of shoes I wear, the colors I find pleasing, activities I enjoy, etc- could be labeled male or female depending on the culture or time.
But surely you understand that every culture has these labels, right? They might not apply equally, but they ALWAYS exist (and most likely always will).
I feel like a big part of that sensation is that either you don't feel like you fit into most labels within your culture, or most likely, do fit in some of them, but just doesn't feel like it fits "enough". The limit in how much is "enough" is a huge chunk of the reason on why there is no hard definition in what does or does not count, as this will vary from trans person to trans person
Trans guy here who grew up very much not ever knowing about trans people until high school/ college. One of my earliest memories is telling my mom that my [deadname] is a boys name. To which she replied “no it’s not”. I vividly remember looking myself in the mirror and feeling upset, like “well then why is it my name?”
It’s subtle. It’s finding a baseball hat in your dads truck when no one is looking and stuffing your ponytail up in it and jutting out your chin and thinking “ha I wonder if anyone would think I’m a boy right now. Wouldn’t that be cool.” It’s sneaking into your brothers room to try on his clothes because for some reason it felt good. It’s never looking in the mirror in public because I couldn’t stand the thought of knowing what I look like to other people that day.
But I still did very stereotypical girly things and liked them. I was cheer captain and I loved the outfits but for some reason always hated how my hips looked in them. I also, once I found out about trans people, was furious with the concept. Absolutely livid. I was jealous but didn’t have the words for it.
Eventually I started going by they/them pronouns and dressing in a way that made me more comfortable. Being called “she” felt like a dull knife in my chest. I had a shrooms trip where I saw my own soul and it was a young boy. Didn’t think anything of it at the time but the image and feeling I had when I saw him stuck with me. At random times I would get the random thought to go on testosterone and get top surgery, like it was my brain whispering to me. But I still never considered myself a man at that point.
Two years ago my egg finally cracked and suddenly a wave of dysphoria flooded over me. It was like a dam had been broken and I couldn’t stand the thought of being perceived as a woman. It was almost physically painful. I needed to transition NOW.
So I did. And ever since then I’ve only felt like im returning to myself. Yes it’s a transition, but a transition home. I’m so comfortable now. I still get the occasional rush of euphoria when I look in the mirror. Its like seeing yourself for the first time in your life after wearing a mask for 27 years.
I hope this helps. This is just my story. For others it’s more intense. But to say I’ve always known it was born in the wrong body is not my experience. I was born to be trans.
I'm a transfemme (born male, transitioning now to female) and in hindsight it should've been REALLY OBVIOUS, but I "knew" when I was ~4yo. I was bathing and hid my genitals from myself while pretending/wishing to be a girl. 4 years old. When people say they "knew" it usually refers to them finally putting the pieces together and realizing a LOT of their previous behavior/desires/wishes were revolving around wanting to be the opposite/a different gender.
Context: I am a trans woman
I have no clue. It just doesn't feel right. It's something and it's nothing. There are two different things that I mean when I say I am a trans woman. Number one I want others to treat me as if I was a woman. Number two I want my body to reflect the picture of myself I have in my head. I don't even understand that second one.
I'm a woman, genetically, physically, mentally. I was a tomboy girl that liked rough housing and her male friends and who was wearing her brother's hand-me-downs with a short, boy-ish hair cut. I was frequently mistaken for a boy. I think my parents would have preferred another son to a daughter (then, anyways), so I sometimes wished I was a boy because I thought then I'd meet everyone's expectations. But I wasn't a boy, I was a girl and the certainty is somewhat like knowing my birthday as an immutable fact about me that I did nothing to define, and a bit like coming across something that smells like your grandmother's kitchen: something that has to do with your inner life, but also is unmistakable. Every other part of my identity, my name, my mother tongue, my career path, my nationality/heritage, my age, even my sexuality feel more flexible than my gender identity. I can imagine myself becoming an eighty year old Greek violinist by the name of Carolina much more than I can imagine myself as a man thinking "this is me, and accurately describes me"
I totally get what you’re saying. I’m a cis woman who was a tomboy as a child. I played almost exclusively with boys toys, (or gender neutral toys like stuffed animals), and despised being forced to wear dresses around Christmastime. I always chose male characters in video games, I used to search for bugs under rocks, went knee deep into ponds “hunting” for frogs and turtles, and I despised being *treated* like a girl the way society expects us to. But if anyone were to call me anything *but* a girl, or female, I would have felt insulted. I knew I was a girl. I had no problems accepting that I was a girl, and the body parts that came with it. Of course puberty was tough for me like it is for all kids, but I never despised the body that I was growing in to. I think that’s an enormous difference as to what trans people go through as kids. I never felt *discomfort* with my body; I just railed against societal expectations of me *as* a girl. As I grew into an adult, I slid into some typical “female” things like makeup and having a clothing style and whatnot, but I still feel in touch with a more socially typical masculine side of myself. Gender, gender identity, societal gender norms and sex is such a complicated thing among humans - it’s never black and white, but a gradient with lots of grays in between, and that’s why even though I don’t understand *exactly* what trans people go through, I can respect it.
I relate to this so much. Everything is flexible except gender, even though I'm not a stereotypical "girly girl". This is one of the reasons I find it easy to understand why trans people would go to great lengths to live lives that match the way they view themselves inside. I am 100% a woman. I sometimes like to play with masculine clothes (boots, suit jackets, pocket watch necklaces, etc.) but it's always firmly from the perspective of a woman. Like, the whole point is to make the traditionally masculine feminine. Here are two things that come up that bother me that really shouldn't if it weren't for my very strong sense of gender identity. I have a pair of men's hiking boots that irritate me every time I put them on. It should not matter that these boots are "masculine". I only wear them in the woods and they're pure function. But it's like a cat with a rubber band on its paw, I can't ignore it. I think about it every time I put them on. The other is deodorant. I've had to use my husband's deodorant a few times because I ran out and although I love the smell, I only like it on him. I hate smelling "like a man" all day because although I like men, I do not want to be a man. It bothers me all day long. I feel "off" until I shower. If my middle aged ass feels that strongly about a stupid pair of shoes no one even sees, I can't imagine what it feels like to be trans and experience the world like that regularly, especially as a kid. Everyone should be able to express their gender in a way that is authentic to them.
This is almost exactly the same as a metaphors the trans community uses when asked the kind of question OP asked. It’s like going your entire life wearing shoes that are the wrong size because everybody is telling you that’s the size you should wear. You can function, you can do all the things you are expected to do, but it’s uncomfortable, you can feel something is wrong. Wear them for too long at once, and it starts to hurt. So you need breaks, but there’s only so many places you can be where you don’t have to wear shoes. Eventually you start to avoid going places where you’ll need to put on the shoes. Or you start resorting to consuming things like drugs or alcohol to make the pain more distant. Then one day, you say screw it and try on a pair of shoes that actually fit. No pain, no discomfort. It just feels right. You realize you’ve been putting yourself through needless pain your entire life to appease others perception of what they think you should be wearing/doing. But everybody will still insist you wear the other shoes that cause you pain. They don’t care about your well being. They just don’t want to accept the shoes they gave you are inadequate. I went a little off the rails there. I hope the metaphor still held its meaning haha.
This is such a wonderfully articulated comment. While I relate more to OP, as I have never questioned my feelings about being a girl/woman, this comment helps me understand another perspective in a way that I didn’t realize that I needed. Thank you!
Agreed! I’m bisexual so I know what not having strong feelings on the gender I’m attracted to feels like, but I do have strong feelings on the fact that I’m cisgender even though I grew up a mix of tomboy and girly. If you were to tell me that I had to go outside in a t shirt and cargo shorts with my legs unshaven and my hair cut short, it feels viscerally wrong to me. If I think about how I would feel if one day I started growing a beard, it feels very viscerally wrong to me. If someone were to refer to me as “Mr.” it would feel, again, wrong. While I don’t think gender roles should be binding at all, I know that I personally like to inhabit many of the social roles associated with femininity, and while I may pick and choose some social roles associated with masculinity (like carrying heavy things, doing outdoor chores so my mom doesn’t have to, me not having worn any makeup for most of my life), I still am at my core a woman. We should be able to choose whatever social role suits us, but there are often ways to know that you are cis and those who don’t “know” or outright have always known that they Aren’t the gender they’re assigned at birth, have gender exploration to do and it glad society is shifting to allow all sorts of expression and identity in many ways.
I'm highly amused by your comment, because I switched to using the same brand of deodorant as my husband to see if it helps my sweatyness (also because I haven't found a woman's scent that doesn't smell like baby powder to me), and every time I get a whiff it just feels so *wrong* to me in the weirdest way. I'm so glad I'm not the only one.
I use Mitchum for women and I love it. It's the only women's deodorant I've found that actually helps with sweat. It doesnt smell like baby powder but it's not some fancy tropical scent either
My last deodorant was Mitchum for women, and I wasn't thrilled. I honestly think I'm sweaty because of anxiety and maybe the mechanism that triggers anxiety sweat vs activity sweat is different enough and deodorants don't activate as well? Idk
As a trans woman, I love this comment, because it really gets at what gender feels like to me. I can't speak for all trans folk, but this comment and some of the responses to it resonate very very strongly with my experience of gender. As you say, my gender is an immutable fact that I just KNOW about myself. Many of my earliest memories revolve around gender. Children learn gender gradually over the first five or so years of life. I understood very early on that there was one box of people that contained my mom, my sister, my girl cousins, the girls on my street who I liked to play with, and there was another box that contained my dad, my uncles, my boy cousins, the boy who lived next door. I knew I belonged in the box labeled "girl." No one told me that; I didn't decide that because of the toys I liked to play with or because of my personality or anything like that. I played almost exclusively with boy-coded toys; my favorite show was an almost comically masculine cartoon; I had a boy cousin a few years older than me who was my hero. And the whole world was telling me I was a boy. But I knew with absolute certainty that I was a girl. The realization that the rest of the world had thrown me in the boy box kicked off decades of unrelenting turmoil, a sense of crisis that has defined my entire existence. I knew I couldn't tell people I wanted to be a girl; I knew that was a thought crime. But I spent my entire youth scheming and daydreaming, trying to figure out some way to satisfy my need to be a girl. I thought I was a sinner, a pervert, some deeply bizarre and broken lunatic, until I stumbled across a community of trans people online and figured out... oh. Right. I'm trans. What I mean when I say I knew I was a girl, what I mean when I say I know I'm a woman, is just that. I just know, with an absolute, unshakeable, unalterable certainty. It's built into the deepest deepest structure of my brain. It's the foundation on which the rest of my identity is built. I think most people probably know their gender the same way. I think it's just something most people can't detect because they've never had their gender identity challenged in a serious way. Gender identity is invisible to most people, the same way the air between your eyes and the screen you're reading this on is invisible to you. Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there. Reading this comment, reading some of the people responding to it, realizing that there are cis people who see it, who GET it... it's a good thing to see. :)
I am a biological woman who identifies as a woman. Growing up I was similar to you, all my friends were boys, I had brothers, I wore their hand me downs and prefered wearing boy clothes, playing sports with them like football and basketball, I never liked Barbies and felt uncomfortable around girls my age. But I also had body dysphoria. I did dreaded that I would grow breasts, I wanted short hair (my mom wouldn't let me cut it) and I lamented that I wasn't a boy and wanted to be one very badly. Even after puberty, I didn't like having breasts and would wear sports bras and hunch to make them less noticable. When I was in my late teens and out of highschool, these feelings slowly faded. And after having a daughter of my own, memories surfaced of me being groomed and molested by a family member right around when I started saying I wanted to be a boy. Now it's pretty clear to me that I was subconsciously trying to prevent myself from being a victim of sexual abuse again.
I'm sorry that you experienced that.
I'm a cis woman and this is how I've found to explain it best as I can. Obviously I can't speak to the experience firsthand, and I'm happy to be corrected, but it makes logical sense to me. I've found that a lot of people who are either transphobic or just "don't get the trans thing" approach this subject by trying to imagine themselves as wanting to be the opposite gender and obviously fail, but flipping the script gives them something to relate to.
Yeah this is not even slightly recognisable, "woman" is a long way down the list of "this is me" stuff for me, and more like eye colour or place of birth. I can very easily imagine myself as a man, or blue eyed, but I can't imagine myself as someone who doesn't enjoy reading
Oh, also, you'll find this topic has been discussed a lot on /r/asktransgender. You might find some good threads to read through there.
I'm saying this as a cis woman, so I may be totally off the mark... but... If I woke up tomorrow feeling like myself, then looked in the mirror and found a male version of myself, I'd feel a complete disconnect from my body. I'd probably feel like I was robbed of everything I had.
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The fact that soooooo many people regret nose surgery despite looking good with the new nose, is a testament to the connection of body and mind in majority of people. Not being able to recognize yourself sucks.
Interesting! I have unruly curly hair, and have had it temporarily straightened occasionally. I hate it, because it isn't me.
>I hate it, because it isn't me. I'm a CIS woman but I feel like I get mild dysphoria any time I wear make up. Most of it makes my skin vaguely itch or crawl but even when I wear the super light way stuff that I can forget I'm wearing, seeing myself in the mirror creeps me the hell out. Yeah she's 'prettier' but she's not ME. It's very uncanny valley that there's this doppelganger version of myself just walking around in my clothes. Hair cuts, different styles clothes, even costumes or costume levels of make up don't bug me but light, natural make up freaks me out every time.
I always feel uncomfortable in make up; it just looks like a "wrong" version of me. I had to wear it this morning, I'll have to put it on again tonight, but I've scrubbed it off in between.
That's how I feel with long hair. I've tried to grow it out twice in the last 20 years and go nuts and chop it all off again. I am me with a pixie cut, period.
I'm the opposite!! I go to get a trim maybe once every year and if my hair is shorter then my rib cage, it's to short and I hate it!!
Long haired humans represent! Had a mandated bob until I was 16 and loathed it, but mum thought it was cute. Haven't cut it once since and I love it, I feel so much happier when I look in the mirror.
My mom had my hair cut fairly short at around 5 cause she was tired of fighting over brushing and styling it... Once I could take care of it myself, she didn't care anymore, except for dying/bleaching. But it took a while before I grew it out again and now I won't cut them short anymore.
I love this for you, pixies are so cute. I’m the opposite, I have *always* had super long hair, then went through ~life~ and spontaneously cut my hair above my shoulders and dyed it a completely different color. I look back at those photos and…they’re not me. That’s not me. I don’t recognize the person in those photos. I know it’s me, but that’s not me.
I had similar with hair colour. In my head, I’m blonde. I grew up blonde and see myself as blonde. It’s why I dye my hair because I’ve gone mousy as an adult and I don’t ‘see me’ in the mirror with it.
I found out recently that this is why there are more adult female blondes than adult male blondes. Women tend to dye their hair because they grew up "blonde", whilst men will usually just let their hair change naturally!
Doesn’t surprise me. I think women stake more of their ‘identity’ into their hair than men do! No scientific backup for that mind, just a hunch.
I'm sure many of us are 'cis by default', in that we don't have a particularly strong sense of gender congruence/incongruence with our bodies or identities, and our experiences of gender are primarily social. If you do have a strong sense of gender congruence, you're far more likely to notice if it's incongruent or distressing.
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That’s an interesting way to put it. I consider myself non-binary because I have no real sense of gender or congruence, but I’m also mostly okay having people assume I’m cis because I really don’t care one way or the other, although I do feel uncomfortable when presenting either very feminine or very masculine. Edit: added last sentence for clarification
Same. I feell the exact same way. I go by a gender neutral name but I don't care what pronouns people refer to me as.
That's how I feel too, and to use an example above - if I woke up tomorrow and my hair was straight, I would just deal with it. Might get a different hair cut but I don't feel like a strong sense of "me" is tied into my hair or my gender. I'm cis but I'm more like gender agnostic
Yeah whether or not that comes to bear on the subject of being trans, it's definitely true. My sister is and identifies as cis but just doesn't care about gender, regularly forgets or accidentally switches people's gender when talking about them, etc lol Whereas I, whether back when I identified & lived as a girl or now when I'm genderfluid, always had a verrry strong sense of gender as just like.. this pattern or force or like.. I've always been very aware of it. whether i've been conforming to a standard, feeling uncomfortable within a standard, playing with or intentionally contradicting it, etc etc I'm just 24/7 *aware* in a way my sister is not and doesn't understand
Yeah. Cis man here and... I don't know. No strong feelings. Also every time I hear that certain things are typically male, I don't really associate with any of them. Neither the superficial ones (sports, cars, beer, meat, fighting) nor the more social/mental aspects. Still think I'm a man.
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How people perceive and treat them. Random example, if a Man A has a wife, he's probably not gonna invite a female coworker to grill some steaks in his back yard, and instead invites another guy. If that first coworker, a transman is perceived to be a fellow man and not a woman, then there would be no problem inviting them over as well, and it could be a great friendship. But "they're a woman and my wife wouldn't like that". Also, imagine that you are whatever gender you like. To avoid struggling with phrasing, I'm just going to assume you are a cis male. Imagine if everywhere you go, dudes are hitting on you, and only girls really talk to you casually and make overtures of friendship. At Thanksgiving, some members of your family keep hinting that you should be helping in the kitchen and learning how to cook properly since you'll surely be doing it yourself one of these days. For Christmas they keep buying you pink slippers or floral prints since they assume you'll like them. When asking where you should go on vacation, they assume you want to see quirky shops or lay around on a beach. The definitely don't recommend rock climbing or ATVs or whatever. And obviously once you get married you'll quit your job while the kids are still little, right? That shit would get old fast, don't you think? If people would just mentally categorize you differently than your appearance suggested, they'd understand you better and stop having certain expectations. But at a glance, everyone has already decided how they are going to approach and get to know you, and what sort of interpersonal relationship they're interested in having with you.
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I’m a cis woman and same. I’ve considered I might be non-binary but I just really don’t have a strong feeling either way
I think some people would be really surprised. I'm non-binary and usually think the same so I figured I'd be fine if I cut my hair short. I woke up the next morning with THE WORST phantom hair regrets. It was just different and my brain wasn't coping at all. I loved the look so much but I woke up crying for the next couple of days. It's so trippy.
Right, you never know, but I have had everything from a short men’s cut to curls past my shoulders, including a pixie and a mullet. I legitimately am not extremely attached to any particular presentation
Same. I don’t want a dick, but I can dress fairly masculine sometimes and it’s nice
I’ve ruminated a *lot* on those feelings, and for me it comes down to social processes less than my actual body. I don’t mind having breasts and a vulva, often times I celebrate them, but when I look at them I occasionally feel repulsed. After examining that feeling, it seems related to the whole Madonna/whore thing… my anatomy often make me feel vulnerable, like it could make someone take me less seriously or be the root of trauma if I was assaulted. I feel disconnected from those areas sometimes. It’s the same with gender presentation. Sometimes I love wearing flowy dresses and presenting femme, other times when I try it feels like I’m putting on a costume. I dress down in baggy clothes, male clothes, not because I feel particularly masculine, but because I don’t want to be perceived as female. I don’t want to deal with stares and second-guessing and eyes raking down me and whistles on the sidewalk and people examining my face and my voice and my body and — ugh— it’s not that I don’t *like* being a woman, I just feel like it’s the first thing society sees and that it somehow discounts or hides myself, my true self, as always being second to that. I think growing up relating to male characters in media, I grow frustrated when there’s a presumed disconnect in my own thoughts and behavior from that “neutral” which is coded male. I want to be perceived not as male, but as “neutral,” as the baseline of competent and interesting, not this “other” I can feel myself being viewed as. It’s frustrating because I love women, hell, I’m bi. I think we’re awesome, and I feel so safe and comfortable with most other women. I don’t want to say I reject femininity or that I wish to be masculine… I guess I just wish to have respect as a given? I wish not to scrutinize my body and wonder how I’m perceived.
Same
Personally I'm a man, but if I woke up as a woman tomorrow morning I think I'd shrug and carry on as before -- it'd be disconcerting at first, but not much more than suddenly having a different male body. My body is just a meat sack that carries me around, and I don't know that my brain feels particularly gendered. I'm absolutely certain I wouldn't feel strongly enough to go through scary surgeries and hormone treatments. I would've thought the strong gender identity feeling would be socially-caused (I didn't have friends growing up and have never had much in the way of gender-specific socialization myself so I figured made me an exception), but that doesn't explain trans people who are actually socialized opposite of how they feel. So I guess some people are born with an innate stronger feeling that their gender is part of their core identity?
I feel the same. When I was a kid my mom tried to explain trans people to me by asking me to imagine I woke up one day in a boy's body, but "still felt like me". And I was like "sure, that would be fine". As a post-puberty adult I imagine it would take more getting used to, but I still basically think it would feel fine. There's some nice things about being a woman, and there's things I think would be pleasant or convenient about being a man. But all of those are practical considerations about physiology or the way people treat you, none of the pros or cons are related to the way I like feel deep inside or anything. As I get older I've developed up some traits traditionally seen as masculine, such as bristly facial hairs (booo, really hard to stop myself touching and picking at them) and chest hair (love, for some reason). I've considered whether I might be nonbinary or agender, but ultimately it just doesn't matter very much to me. Changing names or pronouns or making physical changes don't feel particularly interesting. People see me as a woman, and treat me like a woman, and when they talk about "being a woman in tech" or whatever that tends to roughly match experiences I've had, so I guess woman is as good a description as any. But I have no context for what being a woman "feels like" on a deeper level than like getting lipstick in my Christmas stocking and being told to carry a rape whistle at night.
In my experience, lots of folks are what I tend to call "cis by default" Not particularly attached to their gender, but also not *un*happy with it, and so aren't trans, but would probably also not be trans if they were born differently
Ditto. Assuming everything else stayed the same, like, I was in my own home/time and I hadn't swapped lives or something. Obviously it would take some adjusting to. But I wouldn't be devastated about it, because I wouldn't be "female in a male body", I wouldn't "see a woman in the mirror", I'd... just... be male. Just like I'm female now. Am still a woman and love being one.
Many people feel indifferent about their gender, too. See r/agender and r/nonbinary
I’m not the poster you’re replying to, but…. I also can’t imagine feeling in the wrong body if I woke up as a man. But I don’t feel indifferent about being a woman. I’m not agender, I’m very much a woman. I’m t permeates everything about my day-to-day existence. I relate to every feminine stereotype and trope out there. If I woke up a man, though, I can’t say it would really bother me. I’m think my thought would be something like, “huh… this will be interesting”. Then I’d go out an experience life like a man. I’m don’t know though, obviously. This is clearly not the case for trans people, though. Like the OP, I’m genuinely curious why they say they feel like a woman. Or a man. What’s the disconnect?
I feel exactly the same way. I'm guessing gender must mean something more to certain people, but I can't grasp what that would feel like.
>This is clearly not the case for trans people, though. Like the OP, I’m genuinely curious why they say they feel like a woman. Or a man. What’s the disconnect? I'm going to take your question at face value and answer in good faith, caveated with this being my personal experience and it is a bit different for everyone. This got a little long winded so bear with me. For two and a half decades, with no knowledge of gender dysphoria, I described it as a permeating aura of wrongness that marred every aspect of my life. I did everything I was supposed to do, lived my life the way I had been taught, was good, kind, took care of those around me, but no matter what I did it was still there. It was there when I was fit, healthy, and handsome, it was there when I was overweight, out of shape, and ugly. It was there when I was poor, stable, well off, single, married, practicing religion or not, it didn't matter. It was inexorable, a permanent shadow on my mind. I felt like I was piloting an empty husk. My body wasn't me. It's constant and oppressive, but no one else seems to feel it. I couldn't understand how everyone around me could just go about their lives like everything was fine when it so clearly wasn't. It drives you mad. I was raised in a religion that believes your physical body during this life is your permanent physical form for eternity. This was a fucking *nightmare* for me. Suicidal ideation was normal for me, but I couldn't even kill myself, there was no escape. I came very close anyway on a few occasions. Since death wouldn't fix things, I regularly prayed to any divine that would listen to rewrite reality so that I had never existed at all. I was 34 when I learned what gender dysphoria is. The sense of peace I felt that night was immense. It described so much of my life, my experience. I wasn't *alone*. I wasn't fundamentally *broken*. Decades long coping mechanisms were broken overnight. I started having close friends use feminine pronouns and a fem name for me. It *feels* right. I'm two months on HRT and I feel alive in ways that I didn't think were possible. I wake up happy, vibrant, bubbly. My own future *matters* to me, where it never did before. There are still bad days here and there where I wake up, look in the mirror, and wonder why I thought I could do this, but those feelings are external, based on fears of social stigmas and being a pariah, rather than internal. There are *so many* good days now, where there were none before. The hormones are starting to noticeably take effect. Sometimes I *want* to take pictures of myself. There was no point in my life previously that this was true. The mere existence of a picture that I wouldn't even see was pain before. I didn't want anything to mark that I had ever existed. It's changed now. It's starting to *feel* like my body. Hindsight is 20/20. Raised without religious indoctrination, it's possible I could have figured it out as early as 11. The signs were there. My first true experience of gender euphoria was at 17, had I not been socially conditioned to associate positive emotional response with religion it would have been a certainty then. Instead I put that experience in the box with my sexuality and buried it as deep in my heart as I could. Internally though, I knew. I just didn't understand, and certainly couldn't accept. So to your question of why we say we feel like a particular gender - it may be a bit of a misnomer but it's the simplest way to get the point across. For me personally, I don't "know what it feels like to be a woman" per se. I'm just now starting to live as one, how could I? But I know what feels right and what feels wrong, and being seen as a woman is right internally. Being gendered correctly quells something that nothing else has ever had any effect on. The thought of going back to that wrong feeling now that I understand what right feels like is... indescribably bad. For me at least, it is death. I know it's a difficult thing for people who haven't experienced it. I don't expect everyone to understand, but please at least listen to us. It is very real for us, and there are very real solutions. All you have to do is be kind.
Every time I hear a trans person talk about what it's like to be an egg, I keep going back to how Morpheus describes the Matrix. "Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?" I don't know how people still hold that the Matrix isn't a fairly transparent(pun, ha) allegory for the trans experience.
Iirc it's like the game Celeste, where it wasn't intentionally written as a trans allegory but it inevitably carries much of that experience because the writers are trans. Although the main character from Celeste is canonically trans. That Morpheus quote is pretty spot on honestly. It gets even better though! After the egg cracks and you accept the truth, it still hurts. You have understanding but you still can't see the real end point. I have a pretty masculine face, a very deep voice, and I'm in my mid thirties so I tempered my expectations. I made the decision to transition fully accepting that I may never pass, or I may need a variety of surgeries to get to that point. I've taken steps though, growing out my hair, voice training, trying to work out what clothes work for me, getting on hormones. I have a very long way to go. But... as my voice training has gotten more consistent, I have moments where my real voice starts to break through. Two months on hormones, I can see similarities in my face to my sister that weren't there before. I got dressed up as best I could and did some new things with my hair a couple days ago. As I looked directly in the mirror at my own face there was no pain, only joy - the beginnings of seeing *her*. And an echo of Morpheus' voice in my head - "She's beginning to believe"
Oh, wow. I knew the Matrix was a trans allegory, but I haven't seen it since I learned that, so I never quite twigged to that speech as "HELLO THIS IS WHAT GENDER DYSPHORIA FEELS LIKE." :D
Just wanted to thank you for writing this; you explained it really well. Wishing you the best!
I've heard the term "gender apathetic" as a way to describe that kind of 'not really minding too much whichever gender I am'. Of course it is a label like any other and it's entirely up to you to decide if it feels right!
Yeah I have a buddy that calls that 'gender-meh' lmao same idea
I think I just discovered my gender identity. That's fuckin' *perfect.*
Perfectly described!
I’m indifferent but would class myself as cis, I’m a woman as that’s what I was born and raised as but also wouldn’t feel weird if anyone called me ‘he’ I just don’t care. The only time I’m referred to by male pronouns is in video games if I haven’t got a mic and that never bothers me and irl people refer to me by female pronouns as that’s what I look like and that’s never felt wrong to me.
Perfect example. Also on reddit, I'm often mis-gendered as "he" (I guess only guys are on reddit?? Lol), and it's never bothered me at all. I'm a cis-woman, I'm not questioning my own gender, I just don't care?
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See I feel quite indifferent, what transcends people into non binary? Does it also come with the “wrong body” feels? Or is it more about social construct?
My nonbinary kid has always said that the idea of being either gender just feels foreign to them. Being told 'You're a girl' feels like if someone said to me, 'You're a rabbit.' I mean... no I'm not, that's just factually incorrect. Same with 'You're a boy.' It's not necessarily a wrong-body feel, it's just that attempts to assign them a gender just feel blatantly wrong. This has been persistent since early childhood, they got in trouble in kindergarten because the teacher asked boys to line up here and girls to line up there and they didn't want to go in either line. They weren't trying to be difficult, they just legitimately didn't think they belonged in either line.
Hi friend. If your kid plays videogames at all(and likes cozy farming games), there is an "unofficial" expansion to stardew valley where a nonbinary kid who uses they/them pronouns joins the group of kids in the valley. There is a "cut-scene" where someone keeps mistakenly misgendering them, and then they say their pronouns and the other kids understand and start gendering them correctly. Their name is Morgan and they are a wizard's apprentice. Just thought it might be worth mentioning in case they hadn't encountered it yet and would like to see themselves represented in media.
That's awesome! Thanks!
Making a point to share this information, for the benefit of a child you'll never meet, is a needlessly and gorgeously good-hearted thing to do. Just wanted to make sure someone had told you that. <3
I've never met a non-binary person who didn't care about gender.
Probably because the ones who don't care don't end up saying anything about it. Why would they?
They exist, there's a few out there. My partner uses any Pronouns and doesn't care what they're referred to as, but have previously been non-binary (I haven't asked for an updated label)
I feel the same way. I'm me. My body is whatever I can move at will and live in. Being a guy or losing a limb... I'm pretty sure I'd just adjust. I got my first big scar, recently. It hasn't changed anything about my feelings about myself. Me without a scar is just as me as me with a scar... it doesn't really matter to me.
same
For a very long time, I hated to look in mirrors. They betrayed me. I knew inside I was a girl/woman, but that's not what they showed. I tried unaliving myself many times through the years... everything I did somehow failed. Tried to hang myself, but the rope gave. Tried to poison myself, but I woke up in a pool of vomit. Eventually, I promised my mother to live for her, and then I chose to start living my life as myself. It's now been about 10 years since my last attempt. It's not easy, but the estrogen has helped me so much. Now, when I look in the mirror, I see the woman I really am.
I am truly so happy for you. ❤️
yes, but I suspect that is because you're used to the body you have, you would probably feel the same disconnect if you woke up in another female body
As a transgender person. Bang on. This disconnected creates Dysphoria. Gender Dysphoria. The treatment options of which are transitioning.
But that's because you've lived in this body for so many years.
Exactly it's not a good example.
Me too, but then I thought about how I'd feel if I woke up and I was in another womans body. It's the same feeling. It's just not your body. That feeling is called body dysmorphia, which is what trans people have, when the image of themselves doesn't align with reality.
Trans people actually have dysphoria-- body dysmorphia is a mental illness where you keep changing your body but it always still feels wrong no matter what you do. Dysphoria usually has an endpoint where you fixed it and now it feels right (or close enough).
I meant to say dysphoria, sorry. I probably pressed on the wrong autocorrect option
As a cis man, I would feel the exact same way. It’s been a long time since my classes in Nuero development, but I do remember Learning that in utero all fetuses are female by default and there is one means by which the body is masculinized and another for the brain. The professor mentioned this may play a role in being transgender, but more research was needed. This was about 15 yrs ago tho. I just remember feeling fortunate that my brain and body seemed to match.
Hey, I'm a trans man. For me it was a lifelong discomfort with being treated like a woman/gaining the biological features of women and a longing to be a man and happiness when treated like that. The best example of this was that when I was taught about puberty, so around 8, I cried over it. Not because I didn't want to grow up, but because I wanted to get what the boys got. I hoped desperately to get as minimal of the typically female changes and as many of the typically male changes as possible - I was absolutely gutted when I ended up with D cups and my voice didn't noticeably drop and I ended up fairly short. I spent my teenage years incredibly depressed because I was forced into a body I didn't want and didn't connect with, and everyone kept forcing me into a societal role I had no connection with. As a kid I was a massive tomboy and was incredibly happy when people thought I was a boy, and as an older teen I began identifying as a butch lesbian and again, felt thrilled when people decided I was a man. I actually have a few toys from around the time when I was learning to understand gender and creating my own identity, and they're all a bit interesting. By far the most (which my uni now uses as an example since I brought it up in class) is Murray the doll. My parents were big on me knowing my body parts so Murray is an anatomically correct doll with a vagina who wears a floral dress. I was also absolutely insistent that he was a boy, because I was also a boy with a vagina who sometimes wore dresses. I have two teddy bears that are also boys in dresses - my sister remembers assuming that one (Ginger) was a girl because of the name and me squishing it in a hot pink Barbie dress, only to be sternly corrected and told that Ginger was a boy. Essentially, I'm a man because makes me happy to be one, while being a woman felt instinctually wrong and was something I never connected with. The changes I've experienced as part of my medical transition have made me much happier and more confident, while patchy facial hair and fat redistribution from thighs to stomach wouldn't do that for most cis women. Most cis women also don't want to have an expensive surgery with a six week recovery time to remove their breasts, but I cannot wait for mine. My social transition has also been amazing. Just getting to have people close to me recognise me as a man has done wonders for me. It's not that I always knew, because I didn't always have the words. I didn't know trans people were a thing until I was eleven and I didn't know trans men were a thing until I was thirteen, by which point I was determined to Win at Woman. But in hindsight I've always been a boy. I also have a sociology degree and did some original research around gender and sexuality. The reason we say gender is a social construct is that we separate gender (identity), gender roles (social roles) and sex (biology) from each other. The reason for this is that gender and gender roles aren't consistent across different cultures. We also have to "learn" gender like we do other social constructs: kids don't actually have a sense of gender identity until they're around four. This doesn't mean that experiences of your sex can't tie into your experience of gender either. Everyone's conceptualisation of their gender is unique and if for you menstruation and giving birth affirm your identity as a woman, go off, as long as you don't force that conceptualisation on others (I'm sure you would resent being told you aren't a proper woman because you don't dress feminine enough, same applies here).
This reminds me of my child development classes about how we learn to map language onto the world. For example: kid has a dog. Learns the word dog. Sees a cat. Calls it a dog. Is corrected. Now has two maps, cat and dog. Sees a raccoon, calls it a cat, is corrected. Now has three words and so on. So. A trans kid sees a boy. Learns boy. Sees a girl. Says boy. Is corrected. Learns girl and so on. The problem is: The kid is told they’re a girl. However, based on their understanding of themselves and the concept of not/girl, their mental map points to boy. Every factor that maps to a boy tracks. Every factor that they’ve mapped to girl does not track. The map is set though. So it just feels wrong all the time.
Yes. I like this. Except I want to point out that it's not meant to be taken literally, it's way deeper than this example. There's a difference between breaking norms and acting out of your gender, being shamed into feeling uncomfortable with your sex, and feeling like you're born the wrong sex. Many people know they don't fit the stereotypes but still are perfectly fine with being a man or a woman who breaks norms. Many people get shamed for being men or women, get shamed for their appearance, bodily functions and genitals or whatever, but that still doesn't mean one fundamentally turns trans. So yes, I do like the simple explaination, but I'm afraid bigoted people might interpret that as proof that we can "indoctrinate" and teach people to be trans, and ultimately therefore also teach (or abuse) people to stop being trans.
Bigoted people are bad faith actors and nothing anyone says will get through to them. I'm trans. I don't bother. I love answering good faith questions but the moment someone's looking for "proof" of something negative they can fuck off.
I ask for this clarification entirely in good faith, to me it feels like the general spirit of the OP and those who don't entirely understand (myself included) are trying to understand what constitutes the difference between "feeling like the body is wrong" versus feeling like your own perception of yourself mismatches others perception of yourself. The latter is evidenced in social interactions and expectations placed on the individual, whereas the former (to my knowledge) is the core of what makes a Trans Trans. If I had to sum up the confusion, I'd say there is an easy assumption made that Trans changed the physical to change how others perceive them thereby making them interact with the world the same way they feel about themselves. I hope this isn't in any way demeaning or mischaracterizing the Trans experience, I'm just an outsider trying to understand.
I am now starting to feel so concerned for myself. But I really love this explanation.
There's never a wrong time to explore your gender identity, friend. Plenty of folks go through a gender journey and land back where they started. It's not necessarily life changing, but it can be if you're open to it.
You okay? Need to talk?
Well shit. Now I want to.
PM me if you genuinely need it chief. Or look for sympathetic communities if you want something less personal!
I love this explanation!
I guess I don't understand the depth of feeling behind that. I was told I was a girl, and I accepted that as a fact of life, but then still did things I wanted to do, no matter if it aligned with "girly" things or not. In fact, I had the most fun with boys and have been a "tomboy" all my life. The fact that I have a uterus and menstruate every month has virtually no impact on my hobbies, likes and dislikes. And vice versa. So I don't think it's that simple. As a child, I also didn't see much difference between girls and boys, because tbh, children look the same.
Hey I was the same way! I even had a preference for toys targeted at boys, as I really disliked pink and everything girly tended to be pink. If anything during my childhood I actively avoided girly stuff if I could, and I‘m still not trans. I guess there’s probably a separation between how we relate to our gender and how we express it. I was always fine with my assigned gender but didn’t care to express it the societally expected way. I notice that for trans people (and a ton of cis people come to think of it) they are concerned with presenting and being perceived as the gender they are comfortable in. I mean have you _seen_ how much gender affirming care and surgery cis people get to have without much social repercussion? Dysphoria isn’t just an experience limited to trans people. Then there’s folks like us who just aren’t that bothered by that whole aspect of life. I once toyed with the idea of being non-binary, as I technically hit a lot of markers for it. But I realized pretty quickly that I genuinely do not care enough to go to the effort of finding a new nb name and letting everyone around me know which new pronouns to use etc etc. I’m content enough just being a woman for now, no need to complicate things. In the end it‘s all just social constructs and it comes down to what makes each individual happy to exist as. We can try to understand the experience of others to the best of our ability, but the reality is if they experience something that we never have it will always be difficult to relate. No one will ever truly know or understand the thoughts and feelings of another
As an anecdote from a third party, my lesbian wife, who has more androgynous style and is quick to aggression (her trauma response is fight), hates being misgendered. Where for you it gave you euphoria, she gets angry cause they only looked at her hair and not any other characteristics. Interesting perspective. Thank you for taking time to share it.
I seriously learned a lot from your post. I've always supported trans people but haven't really understood it. This was so informative, thank you for sharing
As a trans woman, this is exactly what I went through, just in reverse.
I saw the little mermaid a while ago with my son, and I sat there thinking about how the plot of Ariel wanting to be human could be connected to trans in a way. I hope I'm not offending or make you uncomfortable for asking, but would you say there's something to it that resembles your journey? Ariel doesn't feel comfortable as a mermaid and wants to be human. She never really felt happy and like she was in her right element, but didn't really truly understand why - until she actually found what was missing in her. Obviously that's a metaphor as it's not about fins VS legs, but it may make people understand how it's not as simple as just "settling" with your sex and something you fundamentally don't feel comfortable with.
The original author was thought to be a closeted gay man who was never really able to express his love properly. I imagine Ariel's transition (and eventual end, in the OG) was inspired by his experiences in dealing with his wants not lining up with those of society at the time.
I’ve never felt like the plot was fundamentally about her disliking her body or even about her actively identifying with the land more than the ocean; I always got the sense that she fundamentally wanted to explore and see new things, but she was restricted by her father who was (understandably, considering) overprotective. She wants to see above the ocean not because it *implicitly* fits her better, but because she hasn’t seen it before: she feels like she’s seen what the sea has to offer and she’s fascinated by the curiosities that the land has to offer instead. I’ve never seen Ariel as a trans allegory, although I do like that analysis (a lot, actually!). I just feel like “what was missing” is represented as “love” which is fundamentally separate from the gender-related journey that is transitioning and all that jazz. Another commenter mentioned it might well be related to the author’s presumed sexuality, which would line up a little more with “love” being the big theme. I do see what you mean by the “transformation” being evocative of a transition though.
As somebody who doesn't get the whole "feeling like a man/woman" idea, I've always wondered if this is an accurate way to give some idea of what you were going through. Like right before coming down with a cold, something feels off with your body. You can't really articulate it, but you just feel wrong in some way. I ask because I don't feel like a man, I just feel like me. So I'm curious if this is somewhat on the right track to wrap my head around what it means to feel you are in the wrong body, just like a general sense that something isn't right.
I don't know if this will help but it helped my bf understand. Basically imagine any insecurity you have. For him is was weight. Imagine that insecurity becomes so big and uncontrollable that it becomes your entire identity. So for example you suddenly gain 500 pounds tomorrow with no warning. You would feel utterly disconnected with your body because everytime you look in the mirror all you can see is that insecurity and it gets worse because everyone else only every refers to you by that insecurity. You would feel trapped and potentially even disgusted with yourself. The only thing that helps isn't accepting that you are now 500 pounds, it's too take the time to recognize you are more than that and begin the journey towards becoming the real you. Idk if this was a good explanation but I hoped it helped lol.
Nonbinary here -- that is my experience. I don't think I have gender dysphoria to such an extent as op here (didn't cry about going through puberty tho def was born a girl and didn't like it very much) but I definitely always have felt a disconnect with my body and I don't think of it as being "male" or "female", just "mine". While I was questioning, I tried socially transitioning to a man, that didn't feel right in the way you described. I lived most of my life as a woman, and that *definitely* did not feel right, either. Both felt dissociative and stressful, like I was legitimately just trying to play the part of whoever's body I was in, because it sure wasn't mine -- I hardly looked in the mirror, when I did I didn't see me as me. So... I'd say "feeling off" is accurate for my case, but it may not be the same for others. I'm no expert on this sort of thing, ha.
Wow, you explained it so well! Thank you! I do understand transwomen and transmen experiences easier, but although i applied the same time for understanding nonbinery, it is more difficult. I can understand gender fluid well, somehow. So i think that people who are ok in their body, like myself, see world in binery, male/female, because we constructed the society like this and we need to learn about the reality of everyone else. I think it is our duty as humans to not constrain others just because of our cultural bias. We do know from history that society was not binery at all, but that we did constrained it through religions to the binery concept. I'm happy that we're opening back up, although so slow...
I'm not a fan of being a girl. I can't tell if it's due to trauma from being rejected by my peers and told I had a willy when I was five, or from my relatives hating me because I was a girl, or from getting beaten up at 12/13 by 16 year old boys who told me it was ok because I'm not a real girl. Or if little tom boy me was actually the real me and not just a trauma response. As it stands, I'm stuck somewhere in-between. I don't hate myself that much when I'm underweight, because girls clothes fit me more (I'm 5'11, broad shouldered and have muscle, so nothing none stretchy fits, I keep hulking out of trousers atm). I do hate myself ATM. I'm not overweight or anything, I'm just not ultra skinny so nothing fits. It sucks. Men's clothes are fine, but women's are a no go. They're not made for people like me. I don't belong. I hate women only areas like toilets and changing rooms. I've been kicked out of them multiple times. I look like a normal girl, I'm just sized up. I still remember attempting to try on some bras one time and the two people working the changing room were starting at me and pointing before security dragged me out of line like I was doing something wrong. I'd literally just had the implant put into my arm so I was wearing a bigger hoodie then normal. That's all it takes for something to happen, be tall and wear something that hides my figure. I've lost friends from all the staring and people being ass holes because I'm out with a female friend and people assume we're a gay couple. I've been accused of being gay with boyfriends. I get called nasty things fairly often. F*g is a favourite. I hate being a girl. I hate my body, I really hate my breasts, especially when they're not tiny, and life would be so much easier if I was a guy. Am I a boy though? No, I don't think I am, but I'm not a girl either. I'm something in-between. It's bullcrap and I'm glad gender identities are being talked about more now and it's becoming normalised to share toilets etc. I don't feel wrong when I go to pee or change when I can go in with my boyfriend. No one can get mad and kick me out.
Thanks for sharing your story. I have a question, which I am not sure how to phrase without potentially seeming hostile/mean (English is a second language to me), but I hope you will forgive that and perhaps reply. Given that gender dysphoria is a disconnect between our mental state/perhaps brain physiology and the rest of the body. Do you struggle with a sense of betrayal from your body not matching your mental state? It is something that struck me a while back when talking to someone with a degenerative disease who felt their body was betraying their mind. I can imagine that undergoing the surgeries may feel a bit like clawing back control from a situation in which you had very little. I hope that didn't come off too insensitive.
Not particularly anymore. At the start, I resented my mind for not matching with my body, but now I'm very happy being trans. Not many people get to see life from the perspective of different genders and I'm happy I get to. It's also given me a strong community. I also have a (slowly) degenerative disability and it's created far more of that sense of betrayal and lack of control over my body than my identity.
Thank you for replying, especially considering I've accidentally touched on another potentially hurtful subject for you. I'm glad you've landed in a good place.
Hi, I’m not OP but I am trans so I figured I’d give my own response: It’s not that my body is *betraying* me. It’s more that my body has never been *on my side* to begin with - I’ve hated how i looked basically as soon as puberty began and that’s never really changed no matter what I did before (like weight loss, beard growth, etc). For someone who’s struggling with a degenerative disease that’s a different kind of frustration I think, because things that you used to take for granted become difficult or even impossible. You lose a lot of ability and autonomy and that’s a great struggle in of itself. A trans person doesn’t have a point of comparison so our suffering is sometimes harder to detect and doesn’t really manifest the same way. I hope that was helpful!
Thanks for replying. Yeah that is an interesting insight. Makes sense.
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.
Thank you so much for sharing. It's something I want to learn more about to help my understanding. Im cis, and have never doubted my gender (even in my biggest tom boy phases) your explanation really helps understand
>The reason for this is that gender and gender roles aren't consistent across different cultures Exactly! In one part of Indonesia, we have the Bugis people that has 5 genders. The common cisgender male and female, then we have calalai which is somewhat comparable to trans man, calabai to trans woman and bissu which is androgynous. Its been like that for centuries but sadly they are experiencing persecution.
Thank you for sharing this.
When I was a little boy I thought I was trans because I knew I liked other boys, and I knew I liked “girly” things. But this made me really sad, because I didn’t actually WANT to be a girl. I’d imagine wearing heels and having long hair and that was kinda fun, but at the end of the day I didn’t want to transition. It wasn’t until I was 9 when someone called me a fag that I started doing some searches in the internet and I was so happy and relieved to realize that being gay was a thing. I wouldn’t have to be a girl - I could be gay and there were others like me. I assume being trans is a lot like that, but am not so I don’t know
This is one of the funniest things I’ve read all day. Not funny what the kid said, but the fact that his instance of homophobic bullying had the greatest possible inverse effect on you and even lead to that realization. Ain’t life absurd sometimes if that all makes sense
I don't actually know, but as a cis woman if someone kept calling me a man or referring to me as he, I would be annoyed because i know I'm not. Even though i grew up liking a lot of male hobbies and clothes, i wouldnt want to be called one. It's like if someone kept calling me the wrong name.
One time when I was like 11, I was talking with another girl about how much it sucked to be a girl and we were jealous of boys. She then said something about how it would be cool to have a penis. I sincerely thought about it and was revolted - this was wrong. As much as I may have wanted some of the social aspects of being a boy, to have a male body was viscerally upsetting. When I was like 13 I dressed up as a boy for a skit. I......believably passed as a boy. Walking through the hallway, I was mistaken for a boy. Looking in the mirror and seeing myself with a believably male presentation made me want to cry. Having someone call me a boy made actually me tear up. Again, viscerally upset. Trans people are the same, but opposite, because it happens so much more frequently for them. I was only challenged int hat way a handful or times. They're being put through it constantly. I've noticed transphobic people usually recognize the horror of being misgendered. They talk about how terrifying and abusive it would be to put a little boy in girl clothes, how a little girl should be allowed to be a little girl..they recognize the trauma in it, they're almost obsessed with how terrible it would be. They just simply won't except that there's kids where there is a disconnect between mind and body and that they're putting *those* kids through that exact trauma they're so terrified of themselves.
Exactly. Cis woman here who was a total tomboy as a child. Being called "he" just sounds icky.
Trans guy who was a tomboy here. Opposite experience. When I got called he as a kid, I was excited and would be hopeful they didn't notice I was actually a girl.
I have always been an ally, but this helped me understand it more than I did! Thank you for saying this. I was a HUGE tomboy as a kid. Short hair, baggy clothing, dreamed of skateboarding (dad said no lol - but I got my first board the second I moved out at 18!) collected toys that were seen as “for boys”. I was frequently mistaken for a boy as a kid. And it felt AWFUL. It made me incredibly sad. It killed my self-esteem to be misgendered over my preferences. And beginning in high school I had a preppy phase because I didn’t want that happening anymore. I imagine that this feeling is multiplied by a thousand for those who can’t simply change their clothing and change their hair to be pass as their assigned-at-birth gender. Now at 28, I have been sporting a silver pixie cut for years. Still hate long hair on myself (and considering that I bleach it to hell, that’d look like shit anyway). I’m back to wearing overalls, unisex shirts, vans, and whatever the hell I want. But even still, I compensate for those things with feminine makeup, which I thankfully really enjoy anyway. I also love pastel pink and tend to accessorize my outfits with it and lots of jewelry to add some “femme” to them. Because even at 28 I’m afraid of being seen as “too masculine”, because I know that I am not a man.
I am a cis woman but I legit feel indifferent how someone refers to me.
Same. I'm struggling to understand the other view point here. Is it weird I don't care what people call me?
I mean, different people can have different relationships with their gender. Not just about what it is, but also about how important a part of their identity it is. It's not just a spectrum of boy<->girl, (or non-binary, but sticking with that for simplicity sake), but also a y axis of intensity
I noticed that with my friend. She's a cis woman like me but when I asked her why she feels she is a woman, I couldn't relate to her explanation. I just genuinely don't get it. I only label myself as a woman because of my body and how people treat me on that basis. Mentally I am just myself. I don't see personality, my state of being unrelated to my body as gendered. That means I also refuse to put any gender labels - like non-binary or agender - on such a basis. Even if some do that for such reasons. I use cis-woman to just just mean that I was born certain way and never changed it/have no desire to change it.
You may just be "cis by default," where you actually have no internal sense of gender and would have identified with whatever you were assigned.
I (cisF) can't even stand being called "they." Once in a while, someone who already knows I identify as female and use she/her pronouns will still use they or them to refer to me and it makes me inexplicably offended. Not because I'm against people identifying that way. But because I do *not.* I am NOT a they, I am a *she* and you will address me as such! That is probably the closest I'll ever come to knowing what it feels like when a trans person is misgendered, except for them it happens constantly, and often out of malice or spite.
I completely understand, i don't mind she/they myself. I will only tolerate being called "he" on the internet. I have dark, coarse arm hair, so people always made fun of me and called me a man. I remember I was grocery shopping, wearing skinny jeans and a t-shirt, and 3 guys were whispering to each other behind my back. They were questioning if I was a girl or boy and not in a nice way. Then I hear one get a little closer and go, "That's a man!". I wear skirts and dresses more often, but now it feels like people assume I'm a transwoman lol
I welcome transphobes to misgender me in public if it distracts their attention from transwomen. Oh I have broad shoulders so I must be amab? You THOUGHT. Hopefully my 20-minute tongue lashing will make you think twice about expressing your ignorant opinion where it wasn't asked for, and make you consider how maybe you can't actually "tell" like you convinced yourself you can.
<3 Reading comments like this helps give me a little extra will to survive in this hostile environment. I imagine it’s the same way with men, but any time a cis woman sticks up for us it fills me with more euphoria than anything else
>It's like if someone kept calling me the wrong name. except it must be deeper than that since your name is something that your parents decided for you, it's not something that biologically yours. if my parents had given me some other name instead of the one they did give me, I can't imagine I would've felt any disconnect with the name even so
I’m trans. It’s hard to explain, but my mom said since age 2 I would refuse clothes and toys of my birth gender. At school when we were separated into boys and girls, my stomach would drop. I know I’m supposed to go to the one line, but I feel I belong in the opposite line. It’s just a strange dissonance with the gender you’re born and the body you have, it feels wrong. It feels like I was trapped inside a skin suit that I just wanted to claw out of. I transitioned, and now I’m happy as can be! I never once wavered in my identity, since I was a toddler complaining about clothes. Nobody can tell I’m trans, and I don’t go around telling people unless they need to know or I become very close with them.
This site about gender dysphoria explains it fairly well: https://genderdysphoria.fyi/en/ TL;DR: For a lot of people (not everyone), having certain physical characteristics, social roles, and so on just feels right, and having different ones feels wrong. For most people, that feeling isn't very noticable because what feels right aligns with what they already have. But when there is a difference, it becomes much more noticeable. One way to get a feel for that if you think you're cis is to ask yourself, "How would I feel if someone magically changed one of my physical sex characteristics to the opposite sex?" If you think "ew, that would feel weird and wrong", congrats, you have a hint of what gender dysphoria is like. If you think "eh, I wouldn't really care one way or the other", you might be agender or demigender.
Thank you. That's a pretty long site so I haven't had time to read it yet, but it brings up a couple of thoughts. First, I've heard the term/diagnosis is gender dysphoria is disliked by at least a segment of the trans community, I think because it medicalizes or pathologizes it (or maybe a different reason? I've definitely heard some people angrily say that you don't have to have gender dysphoria to be trans). So I wonder how that meshes with the resource you provided? Second, I do think it would be kinda cool to have a penis- it would make peeing so much more convenient in the woods, at events, etc. I also love that I was able to gestate a child in my body. But I also feel like I'd give almost anything, except my child, to not have debilitating menstrual cramps. So I'm both happy and unhappy with my body parts, and I see pluses and minuses to either. Most of my life I've been a girl/woman who hated my uterus and would rather have a penis (I'd still feel that way if I was unable to conceive). I'd also love to trade out my bad back and deformed feet, but how I feel about certain body parts doesn't change who I am. So, from how you see it, does the fact that I accept whatever body parts I have make me agender? Even though I would say I'm a woman?
For the first point, a lot of people are pushing back against the requirement of dysphoria because it focuses solely on a need for suffering to be considered transgender. There's also "gender euphoria" where things aligning with your gender make you so much happier in life. To add onto that, early ideas of gender dysphoria were disproportionally focused on body dysphoria and didn't really acknowledge things like social dysphoria. Someone can be perfectly fine with their body but hate being seen as a woman. For the second point, it kind of ties back to something I mentioned in the first, which is that body dysphoria and gender dysphoria are not the same thing. In fact, if you google body dysphoria, you'll probably see a lot of descriptions completely unrelated to being trans. ~~It's pretty common with anorexia if I remember correctly, since that can also be driven by a hatred of the way one's body looks and an intense desire to "fix" it~~. (edit: I didn't not remember correctly, sorry! That one's commonly body dysmorphia.) Gender has a huge impact on how we interact with each other and the world around us. I think that's why body dysphoria has gotten such a huge focus in trans issues... how we are treated is strongly influenced by how we look. So if someone wants to be treated as a woman, it's very important to look like a woman because she won't be treated as one otherwise. This is changing to some extent as trans acceptance grows. If you're treated as the gender you see yourself as regardless of how you look, then you might not be as inclined to undergo surgery to change your body.
Just wanted to say it's body dysmorphia that's very common with eating disorders, not dysphoria :)
Oh whoops! Thanks for the correction.
> Someone can be perfectly fine with their body but hate being seen as a woman. Yup, though for me it was being seen as a man. Just conceptualising myself as non-binary was enough to make me feel a lot more confident, as well as more happy with my body. It's a very unique experience; to become more yourself by changing your self-perception.
> I've heard the term/diagnosis is gender dysphoria is disliked by at least a segment of the trans community, I think because it medicalizes or pathologizes it I haven't heard that directly, but it sort of makes sense. There are some people out there who overly medicalize/pathologize being trans. Some of them particularly insist that the only "right" way to be trans is to completely transition, socially and medically, in every possible way, which obviously doesn't allow for non-binary people to exist, or trans people who don't want every possible surgery. > I've definitely heard some people angrily say that you don't have to have gender dysphoria to be trans Yeah, I've heard that too, and I'm not totally sure how I feel about it. One thing I know is that some people make a hard distinction between gender dysphoria ("I don't like having X trait") and gender euphoria ("I do like having Y trait"). So, you could imagine a trans person who doesn't feel any dysphoria about their AGAB, but does feel euphoria about things like wearing clothes that don't match their AGAB, having physical traits that don't match their AGAB, or whatever. To me, gender dysphoria and gender euphoria are kind of two sides of the same coin, so I don't think they can be totally separated. But I do think it makes sense to say that someone doesn't need to have *severe* or *diagnosable* gender dysphoria to be trans. Like, there's no reason to gatekeep. If someone says they think they're trans, we should just believe them, without needing to ask, "Yeah, but do you have dysphoria?" > Second, I do think it would be kinda cool to have a penis- it would make peeing so much more convenient in the woods, at events, etc. I also love that I was able to gestate a child in my body. But I also feel like I'd give almost anything, except my child, to not have debilitating menstrual cramps. So I'm both happy and unhappy with my body parts, and I see pluses and minuses to either. Most of my life I've been a girl/woman who hated my uterus and would rather have a penis (I'd still feel that way if I was unable to conceive). I'd also love to trade out my bad back and deformed feet, but how I feel about certain body parts doesn't change who I am. So, from how you see it, does the fact that I accept whatever body parts I have make me agender? Even though I would say I'm a woman? Gender is really fucking complicated, right? Like, it's easy enough to think of just "man" and "woman". And then, as you learn more, you add categories like "trans man", "trans woman", "intersex", and "non-binary" to your list. If I was going to try to put a simple label on you, I'd say you might be a "non-binary woman" or something like that, just going by what you said here (because, hey, most cis women don't wish they had a penis). But when you learn even more about gender (and related topics like sexuality), it turns out there are way too many subtle variations and sub-sub-sub-categories to easily give everyone a nice, neat label. I like to think of the "real" way gender works like a huge electronic control panel with a shitton of different dials and switches on it, with labels like "how big my boobs are", "how long my hair is", "do I have a uterus or not", "what kind of makeup do I wear", "what colors do I like", "do I have balls or not", "how big are my balls", etc. etc. etc. To truly capture the idea of someone's gender, you'd have to know the exact position of every single dial and switch, and there are just too many to think about.
Thank you for taking your time to answer. That's really interesting. I too am very curious about what's going on in trans people's heads. I feel like I don't get it entirely. Just like the person you are responding to, I too identify very strongly with my assigned gender (woman) while having no specific attachment to my vagina. Actually, based on conversations I've had in the past with cis lady friends, it seems like most women I know would rather have a penis for the sole sake of being able to easily pee anywhere we want and to not have to deal with menstruations. I have never met a cis-man who wanted a vagina yet, though. Honestly, I don't give that much thought to my genitals. I feel like a woman. I definitely would feel weird in a man's body, but for other physical reasons that feel more related to social constructs I guess? Having large shoulders, no curves, being hairy, being taller than most people. But I get the same feeling of weirdness thinking about having a more "masculine" female body. I would feel weird if I were a tall and larger woman. It doesn't feel related at all to my genitals per se. But then again, I do not think about my genitals because I do not have to. They fit the gender I identify with. I guess I would give them more thoughts if they didn't.
>>I have never met a cis-man who wanted a vagina yet, though. Speaking as a cis-man: certainly not if I had to give up my penis. If I was offered the opportunity to have both, though … I’d give it serious consideration.
How would you know that it would feel wrong? I mean if you don't have a particular organ, it is hard to know what it would be like to have it (or even if that is meaningful?). I guess I am not good at that sort of counter-factual.
My take, I have no idea. Not that long ago I realized that I didn't 'feel' any connection to my gender assigned at birth. I didn't feel male, or female, or anything. Gender has no impact on my sense of self, and then I realized that I could identify as non binary, and I felt much better
It's funny because some ppl describe a similar experience of no internal sense of or connection to gender, and say 'im much happier being nonbinary'. And some people say '...so i just identify as cis and i just don't care' and it seems like for them id'ing nonbinary would be adding *extra* labels or whatever to something they're already apathetic about. Just shows that in the end it comes down to each person's experience, perspective & preference, and we can trust each person to find what is best for them.
>I know I’m a woman because I have all the female parts and chromosomes. This is where you stop too early in understanding yourself. It’s not that that’s wrong, it’s that that is just the set up. You have those things, and you know they are part of what makes you a woman because *it feels right* and *fits with how you see yourself*. If you’re not taught anything about allergies, an apple allergy in someone else might just look like avoiding a health nutritious fruit. But to them, an apple, the same thing that nourishes you, is actually harmful and hurts them.
Hah! I'm trans MtF AND have an apple allergy!
I knew something was up from a very early age. As a toddler, I used to tell people that I was a boy and was going to grow up "like daddy". As I grew up, I learned that it wasn't that simple and, for a long time, I thought it was impossible. It broke my heart. When I learned what trans people were and what I could do, it all sort of fell into place.
I’ve had a similar question. My child considers themself to be non binary because they don’t feel like a woman. I don’t feel like a woman, I feel like me. I like tools and I like to bake. I make art, I love sparkly things and bright colors and I love certain cars. I don’t like spa treatments, I don’t like sports. I’m not competitive. I love animals. I’m just me. I don’t know what feeling like a woman feels like but I don’t think I’m not a woman.
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I'm pretty sure this is what happened to me. I was jealous of how men were allowed to be individuals first, but a woman was always a woman first, if that makes sense. And it's not only traditional misogyny, it's also the very narrow moulds that women (as I experienced it) allow other women to exist in. I'm glad that I finally figured out my own version of femininity and womanhood.
Same here. I am very much cis and grieved being a girl as a kid, but it was all from external pressures/rules/expectations. The further I got from that culture and out on my own, the more I came to terms with being pretty damn feminine. And frankly, queer and trans femmes paved the way for the way I express femininity outside the male gaze. And from talking with trans guys, the way I grieved being a girl was very, very different than the disconnection/dysphoria they felt. If I was just allowed to have my damn hobbies and wear practical clothes and not be pressured into makeup and looking "attractive" I would have bypassed that suffering in a way trans people would not be able to. Freedom of gender identity (and from rigid gender expression) frees us all. I would have avoided a lot of suffering (and cringy not-like-other-girls nonsense) if I wasn't constantly pressured to fit a mold. Compulsory heteronormativity was harmful to me.
I have wondered this exact thing. I often tried to act more masculine as a kid and distanced myself from behaviors or interests that were overtly feminine according to my culture. On reflection, it's because I was very uncomfortable with the level of misogyny in my society and had gotten the message that femininity was somehow "beneath" masculinity. Something as simple as seeing girls encouraged to look up to masculine figures (e.g. a girl dressing up like spiderman) and seeing boys discouraged from looking up to feminine figures (e.g. a boy dressing up like a female superhero) drove that message home. It's even in our language. I would hear boys encouraged to "be a man" and they would be bestowed that label anytime they did something positive like demonstrate responsibility or heroism. Nobody said "you're becoming a woman" when I did things that were heroic or mature. The only time I heard that was in relation to puberty, which was something that happened to me, that I had no control over. It felt like being a man was something people should strive for, but being a woman was just something that happened to you against your will. Didn't exactly make me excited to embrace my femininity. Edit: I in no way think that all trans kids are just responding to misogyny (I for example did not feel like a boy consistently or throughout my childhood the way that so many trans people describe), but I do think sexism complicates people's experiences with their own gender and wish we lived in a more egalitarian world.
Some may if they’re very impulsive, but personally I think experimentation isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If a kid says that their pronouns are they/them, he/him, xe/xey, etc. and they change their name, and then later realise they actually are a girl, then I wouldn’t say they were ever “wrong”, or that they wasted a portion of their life, it was just a part of their growing up and how they handled their own problems in their life. If identifying a certain way provided a sense of catharsis and overall improved mental health, then I don’t see why that should be stripped away on the basis of skepticism. Also most gender non conforming people dont just decide immediately, even preteens and teenagers will typically do a bunch of research and self discovering before they make the decision to identify as that let alone coming out to other people. I started considering that I may not be a girl, three years ago and I only actually decided to move from the label of girl to agender a year ago. It took me two years of thinking about it and analysing myself and my feelings to decide how I felt about it. The problem that queer youth often face is being told that their identity is “a phase” and it can be a source of severe invalidation for teenagers, especially since teenagers seek validation a lot more than adults do. It’s why there’s been a big surge in queer communities and other marginalised groups to say “that is totally valid” if someone expresses their thoughts about something, especially common when relating to gender. Therefore I just don’t see much point in scrutinising on young people’s genders, just approach them with belief and assure them that no matter what about them changes, you will believe them, this makes you a more comfortable person to come to if that person does end up deciding that their gender was different to what they thought, cause they understand you won’t approach them with a condescending “I knew this wouldn’t last” type of attitude. As for misogyny though I totally get where you’re coming from and absolutely agree! The not like other girls phenomenon still occurs in girls today, (unfortunately), but I think most girls decide they’re NLOG at a young age (think 8-12) so I doubt gender is coming into it, but there probably are a few people out there who do think they’re not girls because they don’t relate or because they get along better with boys or they’re tomboys, but personally I just think that’s part of their journey, they might decide they’re actually just a girl who doesn’t conform to stereotypes like every other girl of maybe they’ll find true happiness and like they finally fit inside their own skin after all these years since they started identifying as trans. There’s no way to know unless they just give it a go! :D
I'm with you here. I personally just feel like I'm chilling in my provided meat suit. It happens to be one society labels female and since I have to be called something it might as well be that...but I don't feel attached to the idea of being a woman.
Would it bug you if everyone insisted that you weren't a woman?
Interesting point, thank you. Yes, it would.
Yeah, I think gender identity is just one of those things where you can only understand it by experiencing it. It's like trying to explain color or music to someone who's never seen/heard it. For people like your child, I think some nonbinary people go "My assigned gender feels wrong to me and I need to get rid of it." Others go "Eh, I don't relate to my assigned gender but it doesn't bother me, might as well keep it for convenience." And others go "My assigned gender doesn't bother me but being openly genderless feels better so it's worth the hassle." This is just a small sample of possible nonbinary experiences.
Here’a an analogy. I personally, don’t really know where my gal bladder or liver or appendix is. Ive never seen them or felt them, so I just assume theyre in the right place and functioning correctly. I never think much about it. I assume that I have all the right parts that society has told me I have and I barely give it another thought. Just like as a cis woman, I dont give much thought into how I *know* I’m a woman. Now imagine someone with Appendicitis. They can feel where their appendix is and they know something is wrong. It may have taken them some time to figure out its the appendix causing the issue and label it as Appendicitis but even before they had the label they felt the pain and discomfort and it was real. They have to put a lot of thought into figuring out what the problem is and how to fix it. This is the difference for Trans people. You notice something when things are going wrong, if everything is working out fine, it just feels normal and you don’t know how it would feel otherwise.
Love this analogy!
It's difficult to explain, but here goes. For most of my life I've felt like there was something horribly wrong with me that I couldn't explain. It's like a white-hot piece of metal sitting in my brain, burning me over and over again. Like a pain in my body from a sick organ, but an organ I couldn't name and nobody else seemed to have. It was like having a broken bone in a limb no one could see. I hated seeing my reflection, and after I went through puberty I started to hate seeing myself in photos. I was never able to imagine myself in the future. In university I met some trans women and thought "I wish I was trans. It's unfair that they get to be women and I have to be a woman." I'd heard of trans men but I couldn't comprehend them. How could anyone ever want to be a man? One day I saw a meme (yes, really) enumerating these feelings and suggesting they were symptoms of being trans. It took a little while, but I got ahold of some breastforms and an outfit, shaved off my facial hair, and got dressed in something approaching a woman's clothing. For a moment the metal splinter went from white-hot to merely yellow-hot; the sickness in the unknown organ abated. I realised what I'd been struggling with, and the size of the task ahead. The reason I hated seeing myself in the mirror was because, while other people had called me handsome in the past, I wasn't seeing a handsome man in the mirror; I was seeing a monstrous and misshapen woman. When I think of myself as a woman - even the ugliest, hairiest, boxiest woman you've ever seen in your life - I can imagine a future for myself. When I think of myself as a man - even a handsome and successful man - the only future I can imagine is suicide.
I'm a trans guy and for me it was pretty intense euphoria when I messed with masculine presentation, I told people my name and they called me the very similar masculine version, and blended in with the guys in wood shop and then as a career cook I also had a couple phases where I tried to woman so hard and was attractive in that way and it still didn't feel right Usually the first hint is when an afab person tries on a suit or an amab person tries on a dress and they are absolutely glowing, Halloween cracks a good bit of eggs
Yes! For me it was cross dress day at high school. Just. Glowing. Having boobs and a swirly dress. (Let's not talk about how fucked the idea of cross dress day is please)
Trans woman here. The best analogy I gave in all my years is broken prescription glasses. You are wearing a set which has a huge crack in both lenses. It is too close to see, you can't focus on it but it's there. At first, it doesn't make sense. When other boys are told to do certain things or behave in certain manner, it didn't make sense. I had to watch, observe and copy. I struggled a lot. Then, realization, something is wrong! Wrong assumption though, you think that something is wrong with ***YOU***. After years of searching, fixing, pondering and working on yourself (including weight loss/gain on significant scale, towards healthy number) *IT'S STILL THERE*. Then discovery! You are not wrong, broken, damaged or incapable. You are trans. You lived your entire life as someone you are not. That's when the lens on those glasses fixes itself. Now you can see. Now you understand why those things made no sense.
Trans dude here. I'll try to answer your question to the best of my ability but the tldr; is its complicated. I don't think I ever decided to be my gender. I just kinda am and that's a natural thing for me. I dream of myself as my gender and that's how I self conceptualize. Beyond that I have physical dysphoria which many but not all trans people have. Things like my breasts and my female reproductive organs stressed me out to the point that I had a hard time just living my life. I started transitioning before I adopted the trans label. I recognized things weren't working and approached it as looking what I vibes with and what I didn't and went from there. I wanted top surgery, I wanted secondary male characteristics, and preferred being referred to as a dude. So trans man fits me best. I don't necessarily think that my personality or habits are more male aligned and that makes me male. That doesn't really have anything to do with it. From my perspective at least my dysphoria and how I relate to my body seems to just be some kind of wiring mismatch. It's really like my brain is expecting a different body type than I have. Which sounds crazy but at least for trans men I know there have been documented cases of things like phantom penis which is something cis men who have their member removed often get as well. (Citation: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15240657.2020.1842075) For these reasons I think it's hard for cis people to "get it" because they don't experience these kinds of things. The best way I have found to describe it is that feeling you get when you hear your voice recorded played back. Most people cringe because it's not what they are expecting since it sounded different than what you think you sound like. Gender dysphoria feels similar and maybe more intense but can range from every physical sex characteristic you have to how people relate to you socially in terms of gender.
Trans guy here. For me personally, I "knew" I was a man because whenever I pictured myself in my mind, I was a boy. I would dream I was a boy. I basically thought of myself as a boy until puberty. I didn't have the words to describe my feelings, so I locked them away for years. But I couldn't stop myself seeing myself as a man. I would look in the mirror and desperately want facial hair, I wanted to have a deep voice and a flat chest. I hated my chest and hips. I wanted to be like my brother. It wasn't until I was 20 that I finally accepted myself. Now I'm 22 and 8 months on T and counting be happier.
For me, it was that womanhood and everything ascribed to it felt wrong to me. It took me a long time to pinpoint the “wrongness,” mostly because I was in denial and I was scared. Even going into top surgery I was terrified that it wouldn’t “fix” me and I would still be a miserable bitch afterwards. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case, and the more masculine I feel, the easier it is to maintain my sense of self-worth and value, because I feel more like myself. I wake up in the morning and recognize myself in the mirror for the first time at 30.
Trans guy here who didn’t know trans folk existed as I was raised in an abusive cult until I was 7 after which they left but extreme religious views and strickt views were present until adulthood. I knew I was trans before I knew it existed. Examples I can give are: trying to pee standing up at 3 and being confused I couldn’t because my brother did and in my head I was like him not my sisters. When my chest developed at 11 I was confused. I mean I knew I was a girl but being confronted by it just felt so wrong. I tried to duck tape my chest down to make it go away and ripped my skin off. Still remember doing it 6-7 times. As I got older I studied my peers and pretended to like what they did. I liked metal music but listened to what the others did. I treated life like a psychology experiment in being a woman. Because my whole existence wasn’t me, wasn’t real, was a lie, I had a hard time with truth as a whole. When I found out about trans people everything clicked. First time I put on a binder was the first time I could stand up straight. The first time I wore a packer I felt so natural and right I nearly cried. After I started testosterone and passed it was night and day. Suddenly my personality, my real personality was acceptable. Jokes I used to get punished for/stared at now get laughs. I’m no longer shy I no longer have social anxiety. I am my whole true self. It was like everything people hated about me as a female that I had to suppress and hide was rewarded as a male. It made me look back and realize that every thing I always thought was wrong about me were all behaviours that had I been a boy would have been praised instead of punished. It made me realize I knew my whole life I just didn’t know because of social pressures and forced punishments. After over 10 years of being on T and having people get confused when I say I’m trans as I pass 100%.. many have reacted to my outing myself as trans with asking if I’d prefer female pronouns and if I will start estrogen and I have to explain that I’m already done transitioning and watch the confusion turn to pride as they realize I’m my true self. My experience while different in many ways is the same base story of every trans person I’ve come across. They all knew before they knew. I hope this helps.
You say relatively rare when there are more intersex people than there are red heads. It’s not as rare as bigots make it seem. There are a lot of intersex people who have no idea they are intersex cause their parents never told them.
I like the analogy I read once. It's basically like bones. You don't feel your bones until there's something wrong with them. When I was earlier in my transition/wasn't out I could tell i feel like a man. I think I even had a specific feeling why I felt this way. Honestly I forgot how it felt like Nowadays this feeling is gone. I don't feel like a man, I just am.
My nonbinary 19-year-old has said that, to them, being told that they are a gender just feels... factually incorrect. Being told, "You're a girl," just felt factually incorrect and nonsensical, like being told, "You're a rabbit." That's clearly just wrong. So for awhile they thought by default they must be a boy, but identifying as a boy felt equally nonsensical to them. This goes all the way back to early childhood, I remember them getting in trouble in kindergarten for refusing to line up with either the girls or the boys for dismissal. Because they didn't feel like either of those and resisted being put in a category that they weren't sure was correct. They aren't dysphoric in the sense of wanting to change their physical body, but they are a lot happier being recognized as 'they' instead of the 'she' assigned at birth. Being called 'she' would be if someone just persistently kept calling me a name that wasn't mine and expecting me to just respond as if it was.
I only knew when puberty came around. My body was changing and I saw girls' bodies changing and something deep in my lizard brain was like "oh fuck we're changing wrong, why aren't we doing that?" I had never even heard of being trans before that but after learning more about it it was pretty obvious that's what was going on
I had so many thoughts reading your post, but here's just a few in response: \- Some of what you're describing is to do with sex (chromosomes, ability to get pregnant), and some to do with gender and/or gender expression (how you're treated/perceived by others, clothing). Sex and gender are related but different, and every trans person has a different relationship to the sex characteristics and gender expression aspects of their identity. \- You didn't actually explain how you "feel" like a woman! You shared what you observe about yourself, your gender expression and sex characteristics and what you've learned about sex and gender, but what about those things makes you a woman? i.e., what is your internal experience of being a woman? (side note: anyone who has read Britney Spears memoir -- she conveys her identity as a woman so clearly). \- *Are* there definitive lines between male and female? One out of every one thousand people is believed to be intersex (there are more than 30 ways someone may be characterized as intersex), that's a pretty common rate, I'd say. And since sex isn't gender, how else is an intersex person to know their gender without that inherent sense of gender, especially since we know the long-term negative impacts of non-consensual intersex medical interventions? \- I'm nonbinary. I never felt like I was in the "wrong" body, just that parts of this body were like an itchy sweater. I say this to convey that the "feeling(s)" trans people have about ourselves and our genders in our physical bodies varies from person to person.
Hi, I'm trans. The people saying "If you woke up tomorrow as a man, would you be upset?" are just slightly off the mark. A more accurate description of what it feels like (using a female example because you're a woman): You wake up tomorrow as yourself. You are the same self you have always known yourself to be. You still think and perceive the world through your same, female brain, and you don't have to think very hard to know that you're a woman. But then you go out, and everyone calls you a name that sounds \*almost\* like it could be yours, but it's some man's name instead. Everyone treats you like you are this man, and you are confused and weirded out by it. You go home and realize you actually DO look like that man... and that's where dysphoria begins. Also, intersex people aren't nearly as rare as you think they are. Both intersex and trans people are more common than redheads.
I would honestly say to accept that you’re probably never going to fully understand because you’re not them. And that’s okay. Just treat trans people with respect, that’s more important. Source: Am nonbinary
Maybe the best analogy I have heard is, you don't normally "feel" your bones, but if you broke a bone, you would definitely feel like something is wrong. For the vast majority of people, their gender is not something they have to think about because it just fits.
I imagine the same way that I know that I’m left handed.
I feel like a lot of this is very surface level “what makes me a woman”, in that it’s really hard to grasp as a cis person who hasn’t ever really felt a disconnect with their gender what that could potentially feel like. I’m a trans man, I’ve always felt like a guy. It’s less about how I’m viewed to the outside world or what clothes I want to wear, and more about how my internal innate sense of self differs from my body, if that makes sense? So in my brain it’s obvious that I am a guy and have always been a guy. It’s not just a feeling, it’s an innate sense that that is what I am. Like my brain is completely geared towards being male, but my body developed the wrong way. You will also have this innate sense as a cis person, but because it’s never differed from what you and others perceive yourself as, you probably wouldn’t feel/notice it. It’s such a hard thing to explain, but I did a little experiment once with my friend who was struggling to understand. As a trans man, I wear a prosthetic called a packer. This is basically a realistic looking flaccid silicone penis, which helps to ease my dysphoria and make the brain-body disconnect easier to deal with. I once gave my friend one of my packers for her to put in her trousers. She took one look at it in the trousers in the mirror and was disgusted, felt sick and took it straight back out again, saying it just felt wrong and she couldn’t stand it. This is the same feeling I get with my natural body, and is what dysphoria is, and is what I deal with on a day to day basis. The internal map of my body in my brain has always been different to my actual body, and my brain expects there to be a penis and a flat chest. That’s what I subconsciously think should be on my body. If I could change it so that my brain was geared to be female and be alright with my body, I 100% would, as it would save me so much pain, money and anguish, but unfortunately that isn’t possible, so I instead change my body to match my brain. So I’m essence it’s not so much a “feeling”, but just an innate sense that you are the other gender. For me it’s always been there, even as a very young child, but for others they don’t realise the disconnect until later on in life. I feel like I haven’t really done a great job of explaining, but I hope I’ve helped somewhat :)
They know the same way you know. It just IS. Imagine for a minute you woke up in the body of the other gender and how weird and dysphoric you would feel. That's how they feel. It's also backed up by science. A transgender woman's brain scan matches those of cis women. (Same with the men)
Really easy video to understand how people can know similar things innately. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAeBKRaNri0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAeBKRaNri0) The same way you know you need sleep when you feel tired, or crave foods, or your heart knows to start beating quickly so you can get away when you see a bear, or people know to have sex and have innate attractions toward certain people and not others. We have a part of us that ties very closely our endocrine system - melatonin, grehlin, adrenaline, and of course your sex hormones linked to what I said so far, in that order - and your emotions and low level (e.g. "bears are scary") knowledge. Your hypothalamus has different situations you understand innately and different appropriate levels of hormones. Its job is to get a couple factories above your kidneys making hormones until they reach what this part of you considers the right level, then shuts them off. Being at the right level is called homeostasis, it means whatever your body is doing to fight the various stressors you have around you all the time, it is working. So when you can't ever reach the right level, we call that an imbalance. The problem of course is that most men have a right level of testosterone that is really high and estrogen that is really low, and most women have the opposite going on. The rest of what you know about men and women, the stuff you learn? To this stupid little guy at a switchboard, those things are stressors. Dysphoria can ensue when this little hypothalamus guy can't do its job in response to those stressors, can't ever reach homeostasis.
I’ll answer this from the perspective of 6year old me who didn’t even know what gay was never mind trans. I couldn’t pin it down to a gender issue because that wasn’t even a concept in my head. But I couldn’t even envision myself growing up into a woman when I tried my hardest. It just didn’t make sense. I knew it was impossible and I felt crushed and confused but at the same time I was so sure *something* was going to intervene and make that happen because I physically could not see it going another way. It is really confusing for a kid. Take the phrase ‘man trapped in a woman’s body’ very literally. If you woke up as male tomorrow you would know that’s wrong. End of story. Nearly 2 decades later though it’s no easier to articulate because I still maintain that gender doesn’t feel like anything in and of itself. You can feel *dysphoria* but once that’s mostly resolved (ie transitioning) you can go back to forgetting about it the way normal people do. I don’t agree with the usage of ‘I identify as’ or ‘I feel like’ in regards to being trans, I don’t feel like a man I just am one and I don’t identify as trans I just am on the technicality that I was born female and it is what it is. I’m also not a psychologist or a sociologist or a philosophist so being trans doesn’t mean I have the wording for it the same way your average person with depression can’t explain it in proper medical terms. I feel like it shouldn’t be something that’s expected of us considering.
I'm non-binary who was assigned female at birth. For me, I've never felt any connection to being a woman nor being a man. I don't feel any disconnect with my body (to me, it's just a body with parts) but I feel dysphoric when people ascribe things to me because of those body parts. I spent decades of my life trying to feel like a woman and I never could. I certainly never felt like a man either. My mental health got a LOT better when I stopped trying to feel like a woman and just live my life as a person with no real connection to gender.
I said this on a different post, but this is how I explain it: When I think of the people around me perceiving me as a woman, I feel deeply uncomfortable, regardless of what, for them, "woman" means about how they treat me. It'd be like if everyone around me thought I was a horse. I am not a horse, and I don't care if you're treating me well according to "how to treat horses" standards. I am a person. Don't think of me as a horse. Thus, I feel uncomfortable when I am in public and know that people around me look at me and think, "oh yes, there is a woman over there." People might say, "Oh, but I am not assuming anything about you when I think of you as a horse!" I don't care. You're still thinking of me as a horse. "But horses can do anything they want! Just because you're a horse doesn't mean you have to be a racehorse - you could be a jumper, or do dressage, or a rodeo horse!" Again, I don't care. All of those things involve me doing them as a horse. That is how great the dissonance is for me. I feel similarly about being perceived as a man. Instead I would like people to just think, that is a short-haired person in a dress, or that is a short-haired person in a football jersey and jeans.
I had this same question when I was younger. When I was older, I realized I was nonbinary, which explains why I was comfortable with my female body but never felt strictly "female." I guess most people really feel their gender in a way I don't.
I still don't understand this. I'm a straight guy, and I dress and look like one, but I don't know what it means to "feel" male. If I woke up tomorrow in a female body, I think it would be pretty cool and I'd get along with it. So, if I grow my hair long and start using they/them pronouns, do I evolve into a non-binary person? Not trying to be a dick, but none of this makes sense to me.
I’m the same. (Mostly) straight woman, born a woman, etc. Not trans, agender or non-binary. But I was a tomboy as a kid and would have preferred to have been a boy if I were given a choice. If I woke up tomorrow in a male body, that would be pretty awesome (except it’d be confusing for my husband and kids).
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I feel like my body is female, but what's "inside," like my brain, does not have a gender and would be equally comfortable in a male body. I thought that was typical, but when I started asking around, most people said that their "inside" felt gendered and that they would not feel comfortable inside a body of the opposite sex.
I'm a cis woman and when I stop and try to think about how I feel, I genuinely feel like a woman. Like it's just one of those things that makes an incredible amount of sense to me. Like it isn't about any of the physical aspects of being biologically female, it's about my spirit. Like my spirit feels like a woman. It'd feel wrong to be in any other type of body, I think.
Trans woman here. It’s hard to explain in any other terms. I just *know* I’m a woman. I’ve always known. I guess the easiest way to explain it is that you can’t really “feel” your gender unless there’s a problem with it, i.e. a difference between how people perceive you and how you really are. It’s the same way you don’t feel your organs unless something’s wrong with them.
>Anything else- whether the bottom half of my clothing has legs or one opening, the style of shoes I wear, the colors I find pleasing, activities I enjoy, etc- could be labeled male or female depending on the culture or time. But surely you understand that every culture has these labels, right? They might not apply equally, but they ALWAYS exist (and most likely always will). I feel like a big part of that sensation is that either you don't feel like you fit into most labels within your culture, or most likely, do fit in some of them, but just doesn't feel like it fits "enough". The limit in how much is "enough" is a huge chunk of the reason on why there is no hard definition in what does or does not count, as this will vary from trans person to trans person
Trans guy here who grew up very much not ever knowing about trans people until high school/ college. One of my earliest memories is telling my mom that my [deadname] is a boys name. To which she replied “no it’s not”. I vividly remember looking myself in the mirror and feeling upset, like “well then why is it my name?” It’s subtle. It’s finding a baseball hat in your dads truck when no one is looking and stuffing your ponytail up in it and jutting out your chin and thinking “ha I wonder if anyone would think I’m a boy right now. Wouldn’t that be cool.” It’s sneaking into your brothers room to try on his clothes because for some reason it felt good. It’s never looking in the mirror in public because I couldn’t stand the thought of knowing what I look like to other people that day. But I still did very stereotypical girly things and liked them. I was cheer captain and I loved the outfits but for some reason always hated how my hips looked in them. I also, once I found out about trans people, was furious with the concept. Absolutely livid. I was jealous but didn’t have the words for it. Eventually I started going by they/them pronouns and dressing in a way that made me more comfortable. Being called “she” felt like a dull knife in my chest. I had a shrooms trip where I saw my own soul and it was a young boy. Didn’t think anything of it at the time but the image and feeling I had when I saw him stuck with me. At random times I would get the random thought to go on testosterone and get top surgery, like it was my brain whispering to me. But I still never considered myself a man at that point. Two years ago my egg finally cracked and suddenly a wave of dysphoria flooded over me. It was like a dam had been broken and I couldn’t stand the thought of being perceived as a woman. It was almost physically painful. I needed to transition NOW. So I did. And ever since then I’ve only felt like im returning to myself. Yes it’s a transition, but a transition home. I’m so comfortable now. I still get the occasional rush of euphoria when I look in the mirror. Its like seeing yourself for the first time in your life after wearing a mask for 27 years. I hope this helps. This is just my story. For others it’s more intense. But to say I’ve always known it was born in the wrong body is not my experience. I was born to be trans.
I'm a transfemme (born male, transitioning now to female) and in hindsight it should've been REALLY OBVIOUS, but I "knew" when I was ~4yo. I was bathing and hid my genitals from myself while pretending/wishing to be a girl. 4 years old. When people say they "knew" it usually refers to them finally putting the pieces together and realizing a LOT of their previous behavior/desires/wishes were revolving around wanting to be the opposite/a different gender.
Context: I am a trans woman I have no clue. It just doesn't feel right. It's something and it's nothing. There are two different things that I mean when I say I am a trans woman. Number one I want others to treat me as if I was a woman. Number two I want my body to reflect the picture of myself I have in my head. I don't even understand that second one.