Comment author:TheOtherDave
01 December 2010 05:23:59PM
25 points
[-]
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.
Comment author:arethusa
13 February 2011 07:19:18AM
3 points
[-]
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.
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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.