Identity

submitted by loveSloaneDebate King from self.GCdebatesQT

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[–]peakingatthemomentTranssexual (natal male), HSTS 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (33 children)

Being a woman or man or female or male is more than an identity, it’s a physical reality, but someone can still have or develop the identity I feel like.

When I was little, I felt really strongly that I was a girl inside and was supposed to be one. Looking back, it seems like it was because my behaviors and interests that were labeled as feminine and I felt closer to girls. They were always my friends and we usually liked the same things. My parents would try to create situations where I would become friends with boys, but I didn’t like it and the boy usually wouldn’t want to play with me either. It was more confusing later when I started having feelings towards boys. Like, as an adult you can look back and be like this was just a effeminate gay child, but when you are a child you don’t understand things like stereotypes and, if you aren’t shown ways to be yourself and be a boy, the way you see yourself to make sense of it would just get stronger and stronger. I feel like trans identity for children might be more likely to develop for children who are raised religious and/or with strict ideas about gender. By the time a parent gets that child to a therapist, even if, as in my case, the therapist didn’t affirm the identity, I feel like it’s too late to really have any chance of shaking the sense of self. Or maybe the stubborn ones become transsexuals and that’s why we do. Maybe there are 9 other boys who go through the same thing and just become gay men. I don’t know, I’m just thinking out loud about it. I don’t know all the answers. I think the trans adults are more confusing because adults know more, but I don’t feel like I can say because I’d really just be speculating.

[–]MarkTwainiac 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (8 children)

When I was little, I felt really strongly that I was a girl inside and was supposed to be one. Looking back, it seems like it was because my behaviors and interests that were labeled as feminine and I felt closer to girls. They were always my friends and we usually liked the same things.

But it wasn't that you "felt closer to girls" in general, was it? Sounds to me that you felt closer to the particular girls who were your friends and who "liked the same things." My hunch is that this means the girls you gravitated toward and became were friends with and "felt closer to" were precisely and solely those who had "behaviors and interests that were labeled as feminine" just as you did. Not any of the many girls who could be called "tomboys" or any of the the much greater number of other "regular girls" who might have been forced to wear "feminine" attire, play with "girl toys" and behave as "mummy's little helpers," but who amongst themselves away from adult supervision would express discomfort and disdain for the sexist expectations put on them - and who when left to their own devices did not necessarily play with dolls and other "girl toys" given to them in the kind, gentle, dainty and delicate "feminine" ways assumed of them.

Seems to me like big circle was operating in your life and psyche: as a little boy, you had interests and behaviors that the unfortunately sexist - and dare I say homophobic? - adults in your lives labeled "feminine"; and you were drawn towards and felt kinship with other children who had similar interests, behaviors and likes too, which is completely normal for kids. In your case, the kids you were drawn to and felt an affinity with happened to be girls. But not all girls - just the subset of girls who "liked the same things" as you, meaning things adults and you designated as feminine.

It sounds like something happened in your childhood that prevented you from recognizing that there are many types of girls, that girls can have all kinds of personalities and interests and behaviors. And from seeing that there are some boys who are "feminine," sensitive, delicate, fussy, timid, fragile, small and vulnerable - far more so than a lot of girls. Which is one of the big lessons in the way that in To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee depicts her own rough-and-tumble alter ego, Scout, and her more demure and, excuse the term, "wimpy" male playmate Dill, based on Lee's RL childhood best friend Truman Capote. Instead, for whatever reason you got the idea fixed in your mind that girls in general and in whole had/have the behaviors, interests and liking for what's "feminine" as you - in other words, that girls innately have/had the same sensibilities as you. From there, you somehow made the leap that having a "feminine" sensibility means having a female sense of self.

Sorry if I have made leaps here. I'm not trying to offend, just trying to get a sense of the reasoning that was at work. Coz like Sloane, I just don't get how people can jump from feeling an affinity for members of the opposite sex who fit the narrow stereotypes associated with that sex that they as children learned to place prime importance on to coming to believe that they themselves are that sex too, or have the mind, soul or "inner essence" of that sex - and to claim to be that sex later on in adolescence and adulthood.

[–]loveSloaneDebate King[S] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

It sounds like something happened in your childhood that prevented you from recognizing that there are many types of girls, that girls can have all kinds of personalities and interests and behaviors.

Socialization happened. We get taught that boys behave this way and like this and that and girls behave this other way and like these other things. If you aren’t socialized as a female, and are socialized as a male, the only thing you learn about the opposite sex is what you’re supposed to expect a girl/woman to be (and possibly how you’re “supposed” to treat her), you don’t learn that that’s just bullshit expectation.

It’s why terms like “tomboy” exist. To explain away a girl who has the audacity to not behave the way shes “supposed to”.

I can’t speak for peaking but I imagine most boys (dysphoric or not) assume that “all” girls like the things peaking gravitated to.

[–]MarkTwainiac 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

Yeah, I know all about socialization. But even when I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, the view of males and females I got (and other people I know of my age and several decades younger) was not as stereotypically and uniformly one-dimensional as the extremely narrow, shallow view that you and peaking seem to have gotten - and which you seem to think has always been the norm. Maybe it was because of bigger families back then, bigger school class sizes, the larger role that religion played in general society, the outsized presence of nuns in popular culture generally and in the particular the kind of education I got as a student at convent school, and the fact that kids spent so much time amongst one another unsupervised by adults and thus had the chance to let our true selves out ... I dunno what caused it, but most people I know who are over 45 or so did not get the idea when growing up that all boys were a certain very narrow way, and only that narrow way, and all girls were another kind of narrow way, and only that narrow way.

Also, in the milieu I was grew up "tomboy" wasn't much used. When not in our school uniforms or "Sunday best," most girls dressed and behaved in a wide range of ways, much of them not at all "girly" as it's defined today. Girls could be rough and tumble, sporty, feisty, nasty, loud, bossy, opinionated, obstinate, difficult, bratty, troublesome, adventurous, curious, challenging, irritable, selfish, tart-tongued, foul-mouthed, argumentative and so on just as much as they/we could be gentle, caring, docile, demure, dainty, patient, yielding, accommodating, obedient, considerate, soft-spoken, well-behaved etc. Girls in some milieus and situations might have been discouraged and shamed for certain behaviors that weren't stereotypically "feminine," but it wasn't like anyone thought that girls and women couldn't naturally have a whole range of personality traits that fall far outside the "good girl" or "ideal woman" box. Because we all knew girls who didn't fit those boxes, just as we knew women who didn't either.

When I was growing up, no one I knew seriously believed that girls were actually made of "sugar and spice, everything nice" because just as there were a lot of mean, fierce, powerful and terrifying mothers around, on every block, in every class room, and in the case of big families like mine, there were real live girls who were often mean, hard-edged and behaved in horrible ways. In fact, one of the poems that I heard most as a child was "There Was a Little Girl" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

There was a little girl,

Who had a little curl,

Right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good,

She was very good indeed,

But when she was bad she was horrid.

Now perhaps this poem was meant to shame girls, but to me it was a clear acknowledgment that girls' behavior runs the whole gamut from good to bad - and when we behaved badly, it was in our nature and power to go whole hog rather than just be a little bit bad.

[–]loveSloaneDebate King[S] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Yeah, I know all about socialization. But even when I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, the view of males and females I got (and other people I know of my age and several decades younger) was not as stereotypically and uniformly one-dimensional as the extremely narrow, shallow view that you and peaking seem to have gotten

This is needlessly condescending lol, I’m not saying that people can’t and don’t understand that people don’t have to fit in gendered boxes, I’m saying that we are taught gender and all it’s roles and expectations. Socialization exists and a part of it is very much saying boys/men like/do this, girls/women like/do that. I can remember being told to not sit this way or dress that way or whatever because I was a girl.

Peaking and other trans people here have said that their parents or other adult figures tried to make them behave differently or play with different kids/toys because of their sex.

Obviously people of all ages behave differently, but the fact that you listed all those different types of behaviors and said that girls can be either or both should indicate that you understood what I meant when I said socialization played a part in what peaking said- otherwise why separate those lists of behaviors. So I guess I don’t get why you’re now dismissing it?

Gendered socialization and the understanding that not everyone is going to conform to it can exist simultaneously.

[–]MarkTwainiac 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

I didn't mean to be condescending. Sorry!

I am just so confounded by the whole "identify as" thing. It brings out the worst in me.

I also didn't mean to be dismissing socialization. Again, sorry!

It just seems that so many people who have fallen into gender ideology really took what they were told/taught as children totally to heart to a degree that stands out to me as unusual. And I am trying to put my finger on why this is. What changed in the culture between the time I was a kid and, say, the 1990s?

I had lots of strict traditional ideas about all sorts of things shoved down my throat as a kid. Everyone did. But I recall very distinctly being a child of 7-8 or so and thinking "this is BS" and rolling my eyes, and my siblings and friends all doing the same. For all the socialization and indoctrination that I recall happening - and there was a ton of it - amongst the kids I knew there was at a countervailing widespread skepticism, irreverence and a smart-alecky attitude of "of yeah, right, pull the other leg!"

Perhaps one reason is that I grew up in a neighborhood and community where a lot of people were very religious, but everyone practiced different religions - and so there was a lot of comparisons amongst us kids of the different religious lore, rites and rituals in each home, and in each different house of worship. Whatever the reason, we kids often discussed the stuff we all were being taught at home, in school and at church/temple - and something we agreed on from fairly early on - like 7 or so - was how we sometimes had to pretend to go along with stuff we were told by our parents/teachers/elders/priests/nuns, etc said so as to humor them and not distress them.

Again, sorry for sounding condescending and dismissive.

[–]loveSloaneDebate King[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Nah I tend to get agitated when I go back and forth here a lot in one day. I was already frustrated, Took what you said the wrong way.

I do think there was a shift in the late 80’s/90’s. I can’t put my finger on what it was though. I just know the gender lines were drawn and then the early 2000’s was spent saying “fuck those lines” yet somehow we ended up here lol

[–]MarkTwainiac 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I imagine the emergence, spread & increasing popularity of cable TV, affordable home video players & tapes, in the 80s & 90s were a major factor, and with them the proliferation of often sexist & trite media and "children's programming" meant for little kids (by companies like Disney & Saban). And of course the introduction & popularity of home video games. Along with parents no longer setting any limits on the amount of time a day kids could spent staring at screens.

Used to be, there were only a handful of TV stations in any market, and kids at home could only watch the TV shows & movies that adults running the few stations/channels in their area decided to broadcast, and only at the time when that particular content actually aired. So kids would get to see their fave TV show for 30 minutes once a week, and their fave movie on TV once a year. Even kiddie fare that aired daily or most days, like cartoons or Romper Room, only aired for 30 minutes to an hour or two at one time or select times of the day. But in the 80s and 90s, more people got cable, the number of cable channels greatly expanded, and parents could also tape or buy their kids' fave movie and shows, park their tots in front of the TV set and let them watch the same material over & over. In such a situation, the imagery & messages of the mass-produced media consumed by young impressionable minds was bound to sink in deep, and to loom larger in their psyches than what those same little kids might have observed in and of the real world. If, that is, they had much chance to to observe in the real world - a big if because at that same juncture in history, kids became far more indoor-bound homebodies than ever before.

Which brings us to another huge shift that occurred in the 80s, in the US at least. The 80s marked the turning point when kids en masse stopped spending a lot of time, or any time, outside the home unsupervised and unchaperoned by adults. The highly-publicized and tragic cases of Etan Patz and Adam Walsh put and end to the sort of "free range childhoods" that kids of earlier generations had, when children in suburban, urban, small town & rural settings alike all spent a great deal of their/our free time on our own amongst other kids without any adult supervision & input - and when it was customary to walked to school or the bus stop on our own too starting in kindergarten.

[–]loveSloaneDebate King[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I was thinking about this, and I agree with what you’re saying.

I also noticed this, maybe it’s nothing lol

When I look at old photos of my parents and older family when they were kids, they have a lot of similar toys and stuff that I had as a kid, except the stuff I had was unnecessarily gendered. Meaning- i have a pic of my mom when she was 4/5, she’s in a dress sitting in a toy car, just a simple red little toy car (the kind you can sit in and drive). But when I was a kid I had a toy car that was various shades of pink and had hearts and flowers while my brother had one that was black and red and had flames on it lol. Same brand, same price, same exact design and function- but mine was ultra “girly” and my brother’s was “manly”.

Idk just something that was on my mind lol

[–]peakingatthemomentTranssexual (natal male), HSTS 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I feel like this is a really good description. Thank you for taking the time to write it!!

The whole topic makes me sad to think about. I feel like you just grew up in environment where gender nonconformity was more recognized and accepted than I did. I know now as an adult that boys can be like I was and girls can like more rough and tumble things and none those things aren’t natural parts of being a boy or a girl, but I raised to believe they were before I can remember it. If someone wasn’t like that, they were wrong. Maybe it is mental illness to see yourself as another sex, but, if it developed, it wasn’t a conscious choice, and you don’t want to be wrong to the adults around you. You have to make sense of it somehow. You don’t know it’s sexism and homophobia. You think it’s just how the world is and believing your a girl in some metaphysical ways explains how you can exist when you can’t imagine a world outside the one your parents and community have laid out for you. I don’t know totally know what is caused me to be how I am, but it makes the most sense to me. Once I stopped believing that being “born in the wrong body” was real I’ve tried to explain it to myself. None of it matters I guess, but I wish I could know. I want little girls and boys to be taught from birth that they are fine just how they are and to not feel like they have to be one way.

[–]loveSloaneDebate King[S] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (23 children)

I think what I still don’t understand from your answer is how that equals a female identity. I understand feeling out of place or preferring female company and things considered feminine. I don’t understand thinking that means you’re actually a woman or supposed to be one, rather than thinking that you wished you were one

That’s my thing- I could absolutely understand a trans person saying they have dysphoria and or spent their whole life wishing they were the opposite sex/gender.

I will never understand the leap to claiming to actually be or identify as the opposite sex/gender.

It just seems incredibly egotistical/delusional (it’s one or the other, idk which one but it’s got to be one or the other imo) to tell yourself and others that you somehow are so enlightened and aware that despite not knowing what it is to inhabit the body and lived reality of the opposite sex/gender you somehow understand what it is to be the opposite sex/gender so thoroughly that you can claim it for yourself.

It’s not the wanting I don’t get, it’s the insisting you are something you have no actual understanding of outside of your own assumptions that are colored by a discomfort that the people of the opposite sex/gender don’t even experience. How can you claim to be/identify as something just because it’s the only alternative to what you are and you don’t like what you are?

[–]peakingatthemomentTranssexual (natal male), HSTS 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I’m not sure if my identity is the same as a female identity or what that would be like. I can never experience the world as anything or anyone other than myself. When I talk about identity or sense of self, I mean how I see or think of myself. It’s not meant to be a factual statement about me being something (other than maybe a transsexual). It’s just trying to explain how that type of identity develops or could develop. I don’t think it can be totally explained logically because when/if I came to my sense of self, it wouldn’t be through any conscious logic, I was a child. I was hurting and struggling to fit into a world where it didn’t feel like I fit.

[–]loveSloaneDebate King[S] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I get that, I think you articulate what it’s like to be trans very well. I just wish generally speaking it could be acknowledged that in actuality trans people are identifying as trans, not the opposite sex/gender. I feel like for me personally, a shift like that would make a huge difference in how I feel about a lot of the issues we discuss on this sub. I can understand and empathize with what you described, but I lose a lot of that empathy when what you described is followed by asserting that that means the trans person feeling that way is a wo/man, if that makes sense.

I didn’t mean to imply that you were egotistical/delusional at all, I meant that when people make the leap to claim to be the opposite sex/gender than they are that it seems to come from a place of ego/delusion. I know that’s not much better and I apologize for my wording.

[–]circlingmyownvoid2 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (20 children)

I can’t speak for peaking but as far as the feeling wrong it’s hard to articulate, I just knew.

Like when someone moves a piece of furniture after a decade and the next time you walk In the room it just feels wrong.

[–]loveSloaneDebate King[S] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (19 children)

I guess what I don’t get is that, I get moving furniture and that throwing off the way the room feels- but your “furniture” wasn’t ever moved when you felt wrong. If you started out life as a female person, somehow changed to male and then felt out of place- I get that. But you started out in the place of discomfort without any frame of reference for how it feels to be in the other position (still using the furniture analogy, it’s not going well for me lol).

That’s what my thing always is- I absolutely understand feeling discomfort, I even understand wanting to be the opposite sex/gender, even understand the hormones and possible surgery to present as the opposite sex/gender- I do not and can not understand the leap to claiming to actually be or identify with/as something you just literally have not ever inhabited to understand in any real way. Even post transition, trans people will never know what it truly feels like to be the opposite sex/gender no matter how they are perceived/treated, because they will always factually be the sex they were born and will only be able to view life through that lens. Meaning, even if you (hypothetical you, not you) look female, you’re still a male person who looks female and that is what you’re experiencing- not actually being female and experiencing being female. That difference matters in a lot of ways and for a lot of reasons. And I think that the inability of TW to understand that significant difference is the root of a lot of the growing animosity and the drop in support.

[–]circlingmyownvoid2 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (18 children)

I was just trying to communicate that feeing of wrongness. It’s that but 24/7 for whole pieces of your body. I’m not saying it’s caused the same way just that it’s the closest analogue I have for the feeing that I can express.

As to the rest, I know what feels bad and what feels right. I do think of myself as a woman but even if i didn’t, can you fathom the terrible self esteem required to define yourself as an imposter deserving of lesser treatment? That’s essentially what you are asking of us. Consider ourselves imposters and accept that we should treated as imposters. Surely you see how no person would want that for themselves.

[–]kwallio 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I think for many people the feeling of wrongness that you feel doesn't necessarily mean that you are something else. Being or feeling wrong doesn't logically progress to "and that meant I'm something else". You can feel all sorts of feelings about your body without necessarily making the leap to "and therefore I'm something else". I don't get that leap also, like lovesloan says despite everything you don't really understand what its like to be a female.

[–]loveSloaneDebate King[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (16 children)

Im not asking you to accept lesser treatment.

Im asking you to respect the needs and rights and differences of the people you found your sense of identity in. How can you mold yourself after a woman’s image and claim to identify as them and then undermine them at every turn?

[–]circlingmyownvoid2 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (15 children)

You are demanding changes that lead to our lesser treatment then pretending we have the power to change that result.

[–]loveSloaneDebate King[S] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (14 children)

Im demanding female people be respected and treated equally

[–]circlingmyownvoid2 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (13 children)

You are saying let’s take everything trans women have, then saying it’s our responsibility to build from the ground but also we can’t do anything we did before.

[–]loveSloaneDebate King[S] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (12 children)

Not everything TW have, just the things they stole from women.

Literally every single marginalized group to ever exist had to build from the ground up. Including women. You absolutely should not be allowed to undo our rights that we actually had the tenacity to fight for for your benefit.