From my social science background, i look it as gender is ones sexual identity. Gender role is the society's life style for each gender. For me as I feel that my gender is female even though I was born in a Male's body. As a female, who spent most of her life trying to live as a male and being uncomfortable in that role all of my life, I am face with how I will live out my role as a female who was born in the United States in 1946 now that I have outed myself as a transgender female. Having been a teacher who has lived in and has experienced teaching from K-12 grades in many different ethnic communities from the German/Norwegian rule ethnic communities, to the Native American communities of the Dakotas to the Navajo communities in Arizona/New Mexico, to the Black schools in the Southeastern urban area to having lived in mixed ethnic tourist based communities, I have been influenced a wide range of what it means to be female. Some of these communities are based upon female authority being dominant and some are based upon male authority being dominant.
Females have a multitude of ways to express themselves. On small rural farms in the Dakotas in the past the women have labored just as hard physically as the males at many of the same physical activities such as on subsistant farms gathering eggs, milking cows by hand, ringing the supper chicken's neck and plucking the bird, even driving the tractor which was more typical of farms during the 1950s.
I have lived in communities where all of the men sat on one side of the room and the women sat on the other and the children just ran all over the place.
So when transgender men and transgender women try to work out how they will live their lives they have lots of choices in how they will live. This includes a transgender women being some what butch if that fits her personality.
I know I find myself falling into the Hollywood version of the 1950's woman trap that influenced my mother, but that role was not healthy for her and its not for me.
So as we feel free to publicly identify as our gender, than like any other male or female we need to decide what that means for us with in the context of maleness and femaleness within our society. I, as any other female, in the United States have the right not to live out a traditional stereotypical female role and keep my place like a good little girl. I have a right to express myself as a female, but being realistic, I know that not everyone will accept me as one. But so what at my age of 66 what does it really matter.
People at different stages in their life cycle have different issues to face in finding their way to develop their gender identity. But transgender men and transgender women search out the magnitude of choices you have when you decide what kind of man or women you will be. It may help to turn off the television and stop going to the movies and avoiding situations where males and females are abusive of themselves and others.
It also helps to become yourself as you live with your family and friends and everyday experiences or as I was afraid of I would become victim of my own imagination and and fears. I have learned in my life that reality never exists as I imagine it to be in my fears and anxieties.
Just be the person you naturally feel yourself to be and let the chips fall where they may.
Now the medical aspects of my being a female born in a male's body, I have to decide how female my body has to be for me to be comfortable with it. Is my lack of a woman's body mean that I have a medical disorder which can only be corrected with surgery and hormones? And how will making these physical changes affect my overall physical and mental health? This is the struggle.
Thoughts of a grandma.
