Quote from: Seyranna on June 02, 2014, 09:41:12 AM
Yes because women are submissive, impressionable and soft-spoken huh?... ugh.
When people try to dichotomize their attributes and snap a gender label on personality traits it occurs to me that it's often overstereotypified as if it's blasphemy to suggest that they might sometimes feel like a submissive man or a dominant woman for instance.
This leads to dangerous train of thought: I'm submissive I must be a woman, I'm weak/impressionable/etc I must be a woman, I love wearing lingerie I must be a woman, etc. When in fact none of these things are relevant to gender identity. This is textbook internalized misogyny.
If in your mind your "strong" traits become male and your "weak" traits become female you can safely say that it warrants a red flag.
In discussions about certain times when stress causes what feels like a separation of self, my therapist has noted that what I loosely refer to as she and he for lack of a better way to state it, the usual impressions of definitions of just what are male and female roles goes out the window.
She has noted several times that she has no idea which side of me is which if I don't identify them as she or he.
The roles that one would assume they would play out as don't apply.
I've tried to explain this as although they do seem to separate (a very uncomfortable feeling) they still hold the same threads or thoughts they share, just like they always do, they just deal with the situation as one or the other while still drawing on this meshing of thoughts, strengths and weaknesses that they have.
There really isn't an identity in the way one would think, they are more like separate personalities that are shared in an extreme.
She has asked me on occasion if I think they have switched roles at anytime or sometimes.
This is a confusing thing to try and answer, they don't have roles.
What they are is a very shared sense of self that are separated by their own definitions of gender, not ones that I assign to them.
One is the defender in ways that are in your face, the other is a defender in an intellectual way, yet they both share this same knowledge, because after all, they are just me.
If they couldn't share this, they would be nothing more than split personalities, which they most certainly are not, they are genders, but to define them by standard roles doesn't work.
They share everything that is me, I am me because of them.
They don't define themselves by roles, yet they are different by way of gender.
During times of tranquility, they are one and the same, they are both there, but their thoughts and actions work in unison.
It's only during times of stress that they seem to separate into different roles, but not in the sense that they have defined roles.
They switch hit when they need to.
I don't have a simple way of defining just what that is supposed to mean, I've tried and there isn't a simple answer.
They draw on each others strengths, push down their weaknesses as needed.
My therapist asked me to write her a short story as an example of what that means, as a way to help her understand what it is I talk about.
Over 80,000 words later, I'm still writing that story.
There are only a couple people who have been reading parts of it and one person who is familiar with the story, but not from the standpoint of trying to express what the roles are of my gender.
More of a person who questions my use of grammar and spelling.
She's starting to get the picture of just what my gender is.
But one thing that has become clear to me as I read it over myself, is that I do indeed have a gender that is comprised of not just one gender, maybe more than two genders, but in general, they do seem to be as I write about them as she and he, but they are identifiers, not roles.
It's become more apparent than ever that they have identities, but they share roles in the same way that they share thoughts and intellect.
It's what they do with that shared knowledge at any given moment or situation.
They have an awareness, I have that awareness, they are after all, me.
That's what defines them, awareness, not the roles they play or even how they identify.
The mistake I have made all my life is in referring to them as she and he, implying that there is a role to be played.
It's not that big of a deal and it is an over simplified way of talking about my gender.
But this does lead me to ask all of you, are you assigning a role to your gender?
And if you are, do they really follow the roles that society has them playing?
Or are they their own roles and you feel that they should have at least some of those roles applied to them...
Are they different sides of you? Or are they really female and male? There's a fine line there somewhere.
I trust that you recognize that indeed there are more than just one dimension to your gender in such a way that they define themselves as separate to you and that you understand that they are, that they are more than just the male and female sides to anyone.
Binaries all talk about the different aspects of their one apparent gender and talk about those same things, the roles that the feminine side of them play, the masculine side plays.
I find myself with distinct genders from that point of view, but I can only think of them as my gender, which has more definition than a binary gender has.
But those definitions are not roles that they talk about and the ones that I hear some of you talking about and questioning.
Is the confusion about these roles, is because you feel an obligation to define them that way?
I guess I don't do that, they define themselves in how they interact together as me.
They ignore those rules of roles, so I do too.
I should have never defined them as she and he, it is way too over simplified to do that and I can see how it causes confusion.
I just got used to calling them that.
Because there aren't words in English that I can use, I use those as handy replacements for the lack of better terms.
I don't really view them as a she or he, they just are, I could just as easily switch those words or terms around for them.
I think that's probably what confuses my therapist when I talk about it.
They don't play roles, they have defined their own and they share them.
Ativan
