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TheOtherDave comments on Gender Identity and Rationality - Less Wrong
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This sounds a lot like my experience of coming out in my late teens/early 20s.
I ultimately short-circuited it by deciding that introspection about how to label my sexual identity wasn't getting me anywhere, and in particular that trying to constrain my behavior based on my model of the behaviors most closely associated with a particular label was downright insane... I did better to actually look at the behaviors I actually wanted to perform, establish whether those preferences were stable, and then (optionally) pick the label that most closely matched those behaviors.
To couch this in the language of cognitive bias, I think there's a kind of anchoring effect going on here... you've latched onto some specific attributes associated with categories like "trans" and "male" and "female" and etc. (in much the same way that I did with "gay" and "straight" and "bi" and etc.), and it is skewing your judgments.
That said, I do recognize that "what kinds of people do I want to have sex with?" isn't quite the same sort of question as "what kind of person am I?", but I suspect similar issues are in play. You might find it valuable to temporarily call a halt on trying to label yourself at all, and instead concentrate on how you want to behave and what kinds of experiences you want to have.
In other words, I suspect that questions like: Do I want to engage with the world as a woman? Do I want to be thought of as a woman? Do I want to look like a woman? Do I want to inhabit a stereotypically female body? Etc. Etc. Etc. might be more useful to you, at least for a while, than questions like Am I really a woman? Am I really transgendered? Etc.
Another way of getting at this, I suppose, is to suggest that you taboo "transgender" and see what you end up with.
Thank you!
Both to you TheOtherDave and lucidfox for this great article which has addressed so many of my own doubts regarding my gender identity.
From what I've suspected and have learned from lucidfox's article is that I myself have learned to restrain myself due to my own transphobia. Not that I hate trans people, au contraire, I love my girls, but I've feared to be thought of as a freak, ultimately, being afraid to be me; even though one of my earliest memories is confessing to my mother I had wanted to be a woman, crying -- no -- weeping when told that such thing was not possible even after having pressed if there wasn't some sort of surgery or if God would make things right in the New World.
I am no longer religious. But the reason I share is because even for someone who as long as she can remember has felt inadequate in the body she was born in, the social construct and taboos can still be so strong that they can make you question and invalidate your own sense of being.
Much like lucidfox, I've also ran the "fake or not" argument in my head countless times, and much like her I also consciously rediscovered my gender identity at 21 after years of nearly successful hiding of my "terrible secret longings" from everyone, even myself.
Hey, being oneself can be scary. For a lot of people, the evasive maneuvers we learn as kids depend on giving bits of ourselves up in response to threats; giving those strategies up and reclaiming those bits of ourselves can feel like walking defenseless into enemy territory.
But it can be helpful to be aware of that, acknowledge it, and acknowledge that sometimes as adults we have more and better options.
Good luck on your journey.
Well, there is definitely such a thing as gender-reassignment surgery. I can't speak for conditions in the afterlife, but it's not an uncommon idea that you're sexless in heaven.
I thought about these questions thoroughly before, and the answer to the first three is a resounding yes, otherwise I wouldn't be presenting as a woman now in the first place.
As for the fourth one, that depends on what we mean by "stereotypically". If I were to design myself a body closely reflecting my inner self (I don't say ideal, because I don't think there's a single optimized appearance for me), it definitely wouldn't be oversexualized, and maybe I'd downplay some stereotypically feminine characteristics - for example, settle on below-average breasts, and remain tall, although perhaps not as tall as I'm now.
(nods) You're answering the question I meant; I used "stereotypically female" as shorthand, rather than getting into a whole discussion of what counts as a female body.
And in retrospect, yeah, I was restating things I could probably have inferred from your post were already clear to you. Sorry about that.
I don't have an relevant experience, but I was thinking something along these lines as well. You put it very well.