Quote from: Steffi on February 17, 2012, 09:32:58 AM
I should have transitioned at 24 ....... but I had met a couple of transsexuals by then and didn't want to be one. I wanted to be a woman,a REAL woman and nothing less was acceptable, especially as I was 6 foot and would never pass.
It took another 30 years for me to get to the point where I was driven to transition anyway.
I live life on the assumption that everyone reads me. I present as female to the best of my ability and it's not an act, it's just who I am.
Apart from an occasional transphobic lout shouting insults, people treat me 100% as female and women seem to accept me.
Occasionally, guys have hit on me and definitely not realised, despite my height etc etc.
Have people Read me? Are they Accepting me or are they Tolerating me?
I no longer care or even wonder about it. I am simply ME and you can like or dislike me as you choose.
It's all in ones own mind. If I had this attitude to begin with, I wouldn't have wasted 30 years.
Plenty of women are 6 ft, I have cousins who are about 6 ft.
When you get right down to it, everything is in our own minds. We are each a whole world and reality unto ourselves. None of us get to see reality, just our personal reality.
At the same time, we can't force ourselves to feel what we don't. To some of us, the knowledge that we pass is how we survive. And by pass, I mean that people do not know we are transgender. Not after 3 hours of make up and wigs and stuff, but immediately. The same way 99.9% of cisgendered women get read as what they are.
If you have your own philosophies, coping mechanisms, or definitions of how you want your life to be, in my opinion there's nothing wrong with that. Please don't get mad at me for using the term 'coping mechanisms', it was just an example.
I hate terminology arguments. Nobody wins an argument over what a particular term means or doesn't mean. You just have someone who gives up arguing before the other does. No conclusions can be reached because it's all subjective.
I personally am uninterested in arguing about what words like 'passing', 'reading', etc, should or shouldn't mean.
What I do think needs to be discussed, because it can fill people with false hope. Is how our society by and large thinks and perceives each other. By passing I mean being seen as your gender of identification with virtually nobody ever knowing any different without being told.
In that regard, I think this whole concept of passing being just a matter, of even at all a matter, of your personal attitude, completely false.
A LOT of women are self conscious. I am self conscious. I don't know of anyone, or any situation, where being self conscious, how you walk, mannerisms, etc, has made any difference to how people see their gender.
I think a large population of the transgender community that likes to think that passing, as I defined it previously, is highly dependent on those factors like attitude, because that is something they have a far higher degree of control over than physical appearance.
If this helps them feel comfortable in themselves, that's great. We all have to find our own way of surviving in our lives or we will cease to live. But when they seek to spread that viewpoint to other transgender people. Filling them with what I see as false hope and inaccurate information. I will provide my counter viewpoint as well.
