Quote from: Jen on February 09, 2013, 05:06:50 PM
I found myself confronted with somebody that felt very unfamiliar to me- in how their thoughts were constructed, the words they used to describe those thoughts, the points they felt were the most relevant to talk about, and how they went about making those points. Yet that person was me of several years ago.
I'm not sure this is similar or relevant, but I remember showing my ex something once from when I was still invested in Mormonism. Granted, it was something I had written in a kind of journal inside my Book of Remembrance (a binder people usually keep their genealogical records in), and was part of something from when I had been the appointed student leader of my seminary class, so it bore a lot of marks from the linguistic habits and cliches of Mormon communication, particularly whenever they think another Mormon might be listening.
It was pretty dreadful and filled with what seemed by then (at least 8 years later) something that felt to me like a foreign person (and one who was way too confident and judgmental). By that time I'd gone through a different kind of transformation in thinking and in being with people who thought and spoke in very different ways from some of the mantras that I'd grown up with, and that I can still hear whenever I visit sites populated mainly by Mormons, or visit Utah and see some of my more distant relatives (most of my immediate family members have left the Church, and those who haven't done so are very aware that bringing it up is generally not a good idea in my parents' house, at least).
I'm sure hormones will affect my thinking profoundly, though I have no idea how. If they don't, in some ways I suppose I will wind up feeling somehow cheated, if I really do not discover anything new or find that I'm communicating differently. And I do wonder this a fair bit, since it's been at least since the early 1990s that I tended, except when I get too long-winded or give into my overly analytical habits, to be assumed female online. Some of that happened even before I felt compelled to come out to my then-spouse more clearly, and in fact was one of the triggers for my beginning to seek contact with other transwomen. Some of it may have been based on the interests I developed in college... my advisor was a co-founder of the Women's Studies program at my college, and the courses I took from her (only one, actually, an Intro Poetry class that led to my becoming an English major) was one of the most deeply influential to my thinking on many different levels, particularly in terms of looking at the writing of others with empathy rather than fault-finding. At the very least, one could say she led to my being read as a woman in many settings, when there was nothing else to indicate my gender.
Still, I definitely hope there are other changes to come, since I don't really want to keep thinking the way I have been, and I worry that perhaps little or even nothing might change about that, which would almost throw into question the wisdom of taking that course. Then again, to me it does seem that so much of the motivation is physical, is about the problem of connecting with people when I am assumed to be male, or assumed to think like one, and assumed to want things that men are expected to want. I've tried very hard to develop a sense of humor about that, or to counter with corrections when someone assumes I want something or am driven in some way they just assume to be commonplace. And sometimes that works for me, but it also remains stressful and an incentive for avoiding people and avoiding physical or visual contact, which is clearly very limiting.
The nail in the coffin, so to speak, seemed to be the encounter recently with the guy who had been playing footsie with me for roughly a year, and the utter boredom I felt somewhere during his second visit, when it became clear to me that he couldn't express what he wanted, and wasn't capable of hearing what I wanted, or bothering to ask, or show much openness when I tried to ask things... I think I also scared him by bringing out my toys. But who can say, when he wouldn't really say anything?
