Quote from: kerala on March 02, 2014, 08:26:49 PM
Is that any different to a cis-male and cis-female trying to find mutual topics of conversation? I can't see why being trans would make it more difficult than it already is. (FYI, if we ignore the power-lifting it seems we share 5 topics of interest in common. Not bad going!)
Five topics is not bad.
But yes, I think the situation with trans* people and cis people finding common interests is different. I tried to explain why it my previous post, but I must not have done a good job, so let me try again:
Everyone has a whole bunch of past experiences, knowledge, and interests. Those can be at least somewhat gender related. The powerlifting is one interest that probably skews male fairly strongly. If you have been a high school football player, then that also probably skews strongly male too. A detailed knowledge of AD&D rules and variations and whatever else probably also skews male. Women would be in the minority. Let's follow the football example a bit.
If you are on the football team then you will meet some other folks who are also on the team and likely become friends with at least some of them. They will also probably be male because it's mostly men on the team. They will introduce you to other things that you will become interested. Those things will likely skew male too. You will meet others at these events who will be mostly male, who get to be friends, who introduce new interests, and so on.
Have you ever noticed how people tend to mostly socialize with their own gender? Not exclusively, but mostly. A party, for example, will often have the guys half of the room and the gals half of the room. And people's friend circles that they hang out with tend to be majority same gender. It's pretty surprising to see someone who has 90% opposite sex platonic friends. I think that the scenario I outlined above, in dramatically over simplified form, is part of why.
But what this does is it builds up a storehouse of past experience, knowledge, and interests that is heavily influenced by lived gender.
So let's say that our male football player later turns out to be trans* and transitions to live as a woman. Now she goes to a women's sorority meeting where they are talking about arts and crafts. Everyone there is a woman and also has a storehouse of past experience, knowledge, and interests that was influenced by her lived gender. But it was the opposite of our trans* woman. So they both have a whole range of topics they could talk about. But the overlap is a lot smaller because that storehouse was constructed out of opposite gender experiences. So now our hypothetical transwoman is left with few opportunities to find a match on topics of conversation. So she ends up failing a lot more than other women.
I actually saw this scenario unfold at a meeting of a non-academic sorority made up of mostly middle aged women who had a sorority for fun. Very different from what you'd find at a school. A group of about five transwomen came. One of them was able to engage fairly well. The women in the sorority were very welcoming and could not have given all five a warmer embrace. But all except that one ended up standing around awkwardly looking at one another, and not really engaging with anyone else. I honestly did not notice it myself because that meeting involved an art show at the home of one of the members and I live art, so I was pretty engrossed in looking and talking. But I noticed it when the hostesses husband happened to be in one room of the show and I saw that the transwomen had become kind of awkwardly engaged with him talking about video games. Again, an interest that skews male, particularly in this generation. But that guy was the only one she could find to common ground to engage with. I felt awful because I could not figure out a way to rescue any of them and bring them into the socializing that was happening. I didn't know how to connect with them well enough to bridge the gap so to speak.
Now let's turn out hypothetical football-playing transwoman into a cis girl. She might still have gotten interested in football. But most schools do not have girls football teams, so she might have done something like join the cheerleaders to cheer for the football team instead. But she never would have had that whole chain of events with the football players. It would have instead been a group of other girls whose interests leaned female, who would have introduced them to other girls whose interests also leaned female, etc.
That's what I'm trying to get at. Sorry it's so long.
Quote from: kerala on March 02, 2014, 08:26:49 PM
All I am left with, apart from physical appearance (average height, muscle mass, fat distribution, hair sheen and skin softness and the implications they themselves have on movement and self-identity) are some nebulous "ways of being" which, it seems, everyone is having difficulty pinning down. As stated above, I will do some field research into the topic.
"Ways of being" is a term I've heard. I don't know what it means either.
But in addition to differing interests, I suspect my hypothetical transwoman and cis girl above would have developed different ways of talking about the interests they had in common. And that's a whole other kettle of fish. But it's the one I, for one, am more interested in figuring out.
And there is research into different male and female communication styles.
