Have you ever realized just how much your own world view is shaped by your own experiences?
When you really get down to it, all that you have in life is your own experience... the way that your own mind works, the way that you feel when certain things happen, the way that you see the world. And whenever you are looking at someone, whenever you are talking to someone about their own problems, whether you realize it or not, you are trying to frame their experiences, to empathize with them, based on your own similar experiences. They might talk about how a breakup felt to them. And maybe in your mind you're remembering when you went through your own breakup, trying to tap into those emotions and therefore understand how the other person is feeling. In reality, though, you will never know exactly what other people are feeling or experiencing. When they speak of joy, you have no idea whether it's the same feeling of joy that you get or not, or whether it's the same kind of depression, or the same kind of love, or the same kind of dysphoria. All you can do is take the experiences they describe and try to understand them within the context of your own experiences.
For example... when I first started experiencing sexual thoughts at the age of 14, I just assumed that I was heterosexual, because I was looking at naked women just like other guys. So therefore I just assumed that everyone was attracted to women for the same reasons that I was. So I assumed that every single guy experienced sexual excitement toward women as imagining that they were them, of looking at the body parts that they didn't have and being fascinated by them, wishing that they could have them. I assumed this was what it meant to be attracted to a woman. And had I been in the same position of power as, say, Freud at the time, I might have very well written an article about how guys are born with an inherent "vagina envy" and that this was where their subconscious sexual desires came from. I was completely shocked when I discovered that other guys weren't experiencing this... that they were actually imagining sleeping with the woman, touching the woman, having sex with them as a male. And it was only then that I started to realize that my own natural way of seeing and experiencing the world was "different" or "abnormal."
I imagine that this is why many men can so easily write off trans women as just being sexual deviants. Because their only experience is that of looking at a female body and being attracted to her in a sexual-fantasy way. And so they just automatically try to frame the experience of trans women within that own limited experience, and therefore think that trans women are just men who have some sort of kinky desire to turn their bodies into sexually-desirable female bodies, to become the person that they would want to sleep with.
When you think about it, this is very similar to the experience of what having a "disorder" is like. Just look at the word "disorder" in itself. That word can only exist if there is already an established "order" that something can therefore not be a part of. When you think about it, a "disorder" is nothing but a bunch of doctors sitting in a room and arbitrarily deciding what is "abnormal" based on how it deviates from their own views of what is "functional" and "normal." If every single person in the world were transsexual, then my experiences would be completely 100% normal, and it wouldn't be seen as a disorder. To me, what I experienced was "normal." And other people only see me as abonormal or disordered because they don't think the same way as me. And this is similar to the way that a person with asberger's or autism or bipolar disorder sees the world. To them, they are normal. This experience, this way that their mind works, it is the only way that they've ever interacted with the world, the only thing that they have ever known. So they probably don't understand why everyone sees them as not "normal," because they too at one point probably thought that everyone thinks in the exact way that they do. And it was only when they learned that others don't that they realized there was anything "wrong" with them.
This is the way that we understand the world. We have only our own experiences to go on. To us they are normal. But we can categorize ourselves, align ourselves with others who have the same life experiences that we do, because society gives us a label to fit under. Thus we come to have a defining label for who we are, based on how well we empathize with the shared experiences of others under that same label. When we realize our experiences are different from those who are "male" or "female," we look for what label does have experiences like ours.
We currently live in a binary system. Currently there are only two options. Male or female. So we try and define ourselves by which of these options are the best fit for us. If those that we label as MtFs grew up in India or in a Native American culture, they wouldn't identify as "female," they'd likely have an entirely different label... hjiras, or "two-spirit." Likewise, FtMs in early-century culture might be "proclaimed virgins" rather than "male." What we identify as is a product of our culture... we are forced to look at the labels of "male" and "female" and decide which one we fit into better.
This is why lots of trans kids have different experiences with realizing that they were trans at different ages. It all depends on how long it took us to realize that we did not fit into the category assigned to us. For many, they realized that they weren't playing with the same toys or wanting to wear the same clothes as others of their birth gender were from a very young age, and therefore they quickly realized that they did not fit the label assigned to them, and adopted the other label which did fit them better. For others like me, it wasn't until the physical differentiation between the sexes happened, where I realized that I didn't want a deep voice, and that the body I felt like I should have was one with smooth skin, without body hair, with a feminine shape and feminine fat distribution, and that my external genitals felt wrong. Therefore in this binary system where I had to choose either male or female to describe myself, the best fit was female. For others, being "female" probably means different things, like being treated like a girl socially, or even just wearing female clothes. It completely depends on what makes each individual trans person feel like they fit the label of their identity gender better than their birth gender.
It even took me a long time to figure out that I fit the label of "transsexual." The very first time that I was introduced to this label of "transsexual," it was presented to me as a label involving people who wanted to surgically alter their bodies to become more like the female sex. And so I did not adopt this label, because I did not want surgery, I wanted to become feminine naturally, and therefore I didn't think I identified with it. It wasn't until years later, when I was finally introduced to the label of "transsexual taking hormone replacement therapy" via Youtube and this site, and I realized that the effects of hormones matched up almost exactly with what I wanted, that I knew I had to go on HRT. And I'm still constantly trying to frame my own transition, my own desires, based on reading stories, seeing which ones are closest to my own experience, and therefore trying to decide whether I'm in the "pre-op" or "non-op" group, whether I'm in the "feminine" group or the "androgyne" group, and whether I really am a binary MtF or whether I'm more bigender or genderfluid.
But this is exactly why I believe we should be more inclusive. In any system, the labels are merely best-fits. They are merely describing the shared experiences of some people, and therefore those who feel the same can gather under that same label and say "this is who I am." But again, every single label is a best-fit. "Male" and "Female" don't fit everyone. "Trans woman" or "trans man" don't fit everyone. "Homosexual," "heterosexual," and "bisexual" don't fit everyone. In reality, almost everything is a bell curve, endless shades of gray, with certain aspects fitting but other aspects not fitting. (In case you want to see a great TED talk on this, look up "50 Shades of Gay." It revealed that when a survey gave options beyond "gay" and "straight," and instead gave people a scale from 0 to 100, most weren't exclusively homosexual or heterosexual. The most common answer was around 70% to 80%. So really, very few fit into the label of "gay" or "straight" perfectly. They just adopted it as a best-fit.)
So who are we to say that someone is not "trans enough" because they do not completely fit the label of what we see as being "trans." Because ultimately that label is meaningless... it is just a group of people with shared experiences trying to classify themselves with a best-fit. So maybe to one individual person under that label, being "trans" means identifying as the opposite sex they were assigned at birth, wanting to socially be that sex, having the mannerisms and interests of that sex, and getting SRS. Suppose there's another person who agrees with all of that, except doesn't want SRS. Is this person somehow not trans? Who are people to say? At what point do the differences outweigh the similarities and force people to create an entirely new category? It's all meaningless. It's a binary system trying to classify non-binary people who can exist in any number of different arrangements and no two are exactly alike.
The world won't end by allowing people to be exactly who they know themselves to be, by continuing to go about exactly the way that they are hardwired to go, to not worry about labels. The problem comes when those who do fit into those labels try and tell others that their world view is wrong, that they can't be a "man" or a "woman" because of certain things that they do, or that they can't be "trans" because they don't have the desire to do this thing or that thing. Or worst of all, trying to get people to do one thing or another just for the sake of making them fit the label better. And IMO, this is where so much confusion arises. So many people feel pressured into changing their bodies just because they don't fit into society's ideal label of what that group should be, pressured into suppressing certain behaviors because they don't fit with our own prescribed labels of what is and is not "normal."
Suppose a man wants to get SRS while still identifying as male. What's the problem? Nothing. Just not fitting into some arbitrary label. Suppose a trans man wants to live in the male social role without actually changing his body to be male because he feels comfortable with his body as it is. What's the problem? Again, nothing. He's not doing anything wrong by being himself. The only "problem" is that he doesn't fit into a certain label perfectly. Suppose a trans woman wants to change everything about her body but is fine keeping her penis. What's the problem? NOTHING. They know what they want, and they know how they identify. More power to them. There is NEVER anything wrong with being yourself, whatever that self may entail, and regardless of whether or whether not they live up to certain qualifications associated with certain labels which are ultimately just best-fit creations in the first place.
So this is why I believe we, and EVERYONE, should be more open-minded and be more inclusive. Because you can't ever know what is going on in someone else's head. Just because it works for you doesn't mean it works for them. Just because this is what fitting into a certain label means for you doesn't mean that's what it means to everyone else. And ultimately, the true truth of the trans community, and life in general, needs to be that there is never anything wrong with being yourself and doing what you need to do in order to be happy. Never compromise yourself just to "fit in" better, and never belittle another just because you don't think that they "fit in."
Let people be people. And remember, there's no "wrong" way to be human, to be male or female, to be trans or cis, to express one's femininity or masculinity. There is nothing wrong with being yourself. It only becomes "wrong" because other people can't understand it from their own limited views.
