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 -  (3 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.

[–]loveSloaneDebate King[S] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 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.