Yeah, I definitely get where you’re going here.
If I could thwomp swap lives with a present-day 20-year-old me, without the relationships, career, etc., I’m currently in, I might identify/present more as genderqueer. But the reality is, I’m not 20, I have the relationships I currently have, and I’m able to manage the feelings I have without rocking the boat.
I’m sorry that happened to you.
I can’t add much to this convo, as a cis woman, but it did cause me to stop and think about my gender identity. I identify as a woman, of course, and I’ve never had to question that in myself. If I was forced to live my life as a man, I would feel a great sense of grief, not being able to live the life I feel meant to. Carrying a baby, giving birth, experiencing pregnancy loss, nursing, being a soft figure to my kids, all are things that I’ve been blessed to experience, even if the situations themselves were not always happy, as they affirm my identity. I hate having breasts, I hate having hips, and I think I would still feel very much like a woman without them, because I would still present as a woman without them. But being forced to present as a man would be really tragic for me…and I’ve never really sat with that thought before. It’s been an interesting thought experiment, and I think it’s helped me feel more empathetic toward trans people.
What we are saying that is different is that I believe the only reason I identify as a woman is that I have female body parts. In this, I am very different from my daughter. She feels feminine. She has a strong female identity. I don’t. I “default” to female because I have a female body. She cares whether there are female characters in books. I just identify with the protagonist, who is typically male. I mean, I can identify with female protagonists, too, but most of my favorite books don’t have 'em. To me, what makes me a woman is that I have a woman’s body. 
Speaking of presenting – my voice is deep enough to be ambiguous over the phone. I am routinely “sirred” by telemarketers, on-line user support, and other people who don’t see my female body. I just go with it, and “present” as male for the length of the transaction. It’s simpler than saying anything. And hey, maybe I pick up some free male privilege that way.
Not to be offensive, but I had a friend in NYC that sounds very similar. She actually has a girl’s voice, but her body looks a bit round, and she always has a short, almost bowl cut hair. Her face is also very round. Her body type is a bit round too, but you can tell she has breasts, although the way she dresses doesn’t always accentuate them.
She got called Sir all the time when we went out. I’m not sure how that made her feel. I think my ex at that time asked her if she identified as a girl and she said yes, but I think she said she had higher levels of testosterone.
Anyway, I think she has a boyfriend now, who looks eerily like her. It’s almost like the boyfriend has more estrogen than normal males. They almost look like twins.
As you say, there’s someone for everyone.
Exactly. A social network that loves and supports regardless of what you’re going through. A good social network is empathetic and not judgmental. It is mostly encouraging and critical in a healthy way or they are critical when we start acting against who we are. In my church we call it agape. It is the love God has for us. It is unconditional. Everyone should have people who love them unconditionally in their life. I wish everyone did have that, but my experience over 40 years is that many do not.
Also as for the body image thing I have come to love the way I look head on, but there is one area where I kind of cringe every time looking at myself. My family has big booties and we walk belly first. So I kind of have a large behind and a round belly. I have recently been taking golf lessons and my instructor films my swing to show me things. I feel like I look so fat swinging a golf club. I am a little fat, but golf posture acantuates the oversize parts of my body. So still a little but of that at 40, but it’s more momentary than something I dwell on night and day like in high school.
I have a friend who is a Chinese guy, about my height, very slender, with gorgeous long straight hair on his head, and almost no facial hair. (As in, most Caucasian women have more beard hairs than he has.) When we go to restaurants, the waitress almost always approaches us asking, “what can I get for you, ladies?” He says he doesn’t care.
I probably do pick up some free male privilege, by the way. I’ve had many fewer problems with plumbers, etc. than most of my female friends.
Hah, yes, I view it as more than just carrying a little extra weight, though. And really I’m just comparing myself to my husband. He’s not thin, but he’s not “soft” like I am. I have softer places for them to snuggle with me, they prefer to snuggle with me, and they view my temperament as softer, due to my nature of conforming to a stereotypical gender norm of what women are like. That’s all just me, but I view it all as a part of my womanhood, if that makes sense.
Yeah when I was a little kid I wanted to be a boy. Not because I thought I fundamentally was a boy, but because boys could be in Little League and girls couldn’t. The boy down the street who I was in love with and wanted to marry always wanted to play baseball together and I didn’t know how and wanted the chance to learn.
This is probably part of why I have such strong emotions about girls/women’s sports and ensuring that the opportunities that do exist for people who grow up in female bodies are not usurped by people who grow up in male bodies and all of the inherent advantages that go along with that.
The girls in my neighborhood either didn’t do sports at all or they did more traditionally feminine sports like gymnastics and horseback riding… two sports that also happen to be very expensive and which my parents couldn’t afford. We moved from the affordable Midwest to one of the cities on the Bos-Wash corridor when I was a preschooler ft and we were definitely house-poor the whole time we lived there so neither gymnastics nor horseback riding was remotely within the realm of possibilities.
Nor Little League.
I also consider my body more compact than my wife’s, and my temperament a bit less snuggly, but I don’t know, I feel like generally it’s easy to be as loving or as affectionate, or as anything, as one wants. It’s just that sensitive men are unusual, like sporty women.
That said I do run into an issue when my kid caresses my beard because she’s thinking about marrying me, and it creeps me out.
wait, but you wanted to play with HIM. Having women’s sports will preclude that completely. What you really want is open leagues, no?
Think twig meant she wanted to play -at all-.
When I was a kid, there were basically no girl’s sports. No after school sports, no little league, no peewee soccer…
Yeah, I was damn jealous, too.
But let’s not derail this discussion of gender dysphoria and identity with a rehash of the transwomen-in-sports issue. I think that belongs in a separate topic, and perhaps we should wait until next week to open it, as tempers were running hot there.
(I think the posts so far have been fine, but I see potential for derailment…)
I have a hard time with this. It took my wife to teach me that I can’t wear a striped shirt and striped/checkered shorts at the same time. I still do it sometimes on accident, because I honestly don’t notice.
I am somewhat in the camp of the OP about having difficulty conceptualizing what gender dysphoria feels like. Of course I understand conceptually that it must be awful to feel like you are stuck in the wrong body, but don’t really grasp how you get there.
For my own curiosity…
What is more difficult to conceptualize as a cis straight male? Gender dysphoria or homosexuality?
For me gender dysphoria is obviously difficult to relate to, but at least I can borrow from my experience as a gay man to somehow draw parallels. Just curious how difficult it is for a cis straight person to relate…
I can totally imagine myself as a straight man (like a Kinsey 6) not relating at all to the concept of being attracted to the same sex, even in my wildest imagination.
Personally they’re both pretty abstract, but I think homosexuality is easier just because I’ve had/have a few gay friends. I imagine I could relate more to gender dysphoria if I knew more people dealing with it.
