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 -  (2 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 -  (1 child)

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.

[–]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.