Quote from: girl you look fierce on March 01, 2013, 10:30:47 AM
Well, like the OP said, for an FTM, not liking any boy things, but having interests in girly things. And the opposite for an MTF, kinda like the thread recently that said "Is it weird that I'm very masculine?"
My son fits the first description, and my sense at this point is that he identifies as a fairly "femme" gay male. He loves to get his hair dyed in all sorts of freaky colors, and does not seem to worry much about how anyone else chooses to see him, except that he absolutely abhors his breasts, or those things he sees as "fat bags" on his chest.
It seems to me it's ultimately about how one sees one's body. It took me several years in therapy, even though I came into my first session expressing how I identified as female, to get through to my therapist on this (and really too, to clarify it for myself). After all, I'd grown up being assumed to be a fairly femme gay guy (though marriage did cast some ambiguity there, but still I felt like various gay friends and acquaintances kept staring at me wondering when I was going to finally just come out, and that colored my therapy sessions too, as I felt that was something my therapist was assuming I would come to embrace eventually... but if I were going to embrace it, why didn't I do that way back when? There's definitely a part of me that is jealous of and wishes I could identify as a gay guy, the more flamboyant the better... I admire femme-y gay guys and often found myself wishing I were one. But it never felt right, and not because I was hiding myself.
I did all I considered possible (apart from actively seeking transition) to live in a social role I considered female or at least strongly femininely tinged. I get almost all the sense of self worth I have from my role and relationship with my kids, and I'm fortunate to have managed to maintain that role and closeness in spite of the divorce that came when they were in the elementary grades. But in many ways that just made the dysphoria worse (and probably also contributed to my huge doubts about how much transitioning will really help, though my recent coming out to a large group of long-time friends, at least in the moment, was so affirming... maybe because I'd been so open about what I wanted, I got much less of the "why?" or "But you're so handsome, so manly..." noise that many have to suffer through. Still, even though I can look back at that and find the positives, I keep pulling out the negatives. Maybe it's because I don't feel I can afford to follow through right now, at least not before I find some way to generate some predictable and substantial revenue, and given my work history (mostly having been a full-time homemaker, errand runner, after-school (and during school) "bus driver" for my kids I just dread trying to market myself, and I tend to fall apart or refuse to toot my own horn on the other skills that I do have, that ought to be marketable.
Some of this is doubtless the social anxiety I feel about going through the more awkward parts of transition, though I'm not sure how sensible that is, considering that I'm already extremely androgynous in presentation...
Anyway, enough digression... it seems to me that it really comes down to the body thing. If it doesn't, then there's probably an easier, cheaper alternative one could consider. For whatever reason (it will probably be nailed down and accepted by the medical community just as my body is being sent to wherever) I look at the body that I was given, and I either try to see the woman in it, or I avoid looking at all. For me, what I want is pretty much in sync with social norms, but that's an accident. When my son talks about the body issues he has, despite them being a flip-flop of my issues, I still can understand what he is saying, because I also don't want to see those features that just shouldn't be there. I over-complicated things by coming up with various rationalizations and alternative strategies, but they never really worked except perhaps to slightly dial down the dysphoria to almost manageable levels... while all the time the water kept rising, and they now don't do much at all.
