[TRIGGERING] Ever felt "dumb" as a person from your birth-assigned gender?

[Ive]

Helo everyone,

back when I lived as a boy, I felt I was "not getting" a lot of things (together the feelings of sadness and disgust of myself). I remember that since I was 14, I started to feel stupid, respect to all the people living around me, respect all the world. I was a boy, but dumb, I could not understand or "get" the things the other boys got, and even the girls. I thought I was dumb until in my 30s I understood to be a girl with a male body. In that very moment I felt I were like other people, I felt so intelligent, I could get it.

Anyone of you experienced the same "dumb" feeling? How others considered you?
May it be a form of "inferiority complex"?

Thanks everyone, and kisses to all,
Ive

[Michelle_P]

Absolutely. Everyone, other kids, teachers, family members, all thought I was broken or stupid somehow, physically uncoordinated, and generally beneath them.

Add in "behavioral problems" and it was a recipie for building a social outcast. Fun times.


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[Ive]

I cannot agree more, Michelle_P... fun times  LOL
Thanks for your sharing, my friend

[Deborah]

I've never felt dumb at all.  I did recognize that my mind was different than others' though.  It just became a game of acting.


It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.
André Gide, Autumn Leaves

[Michelle_P]

I've never felt dumb at all.  I did recognize that my mind was different than others' though.  It just became a game of acting.

I recognized the difference between myself and others but I'm afraid I was a lousy actor. I do remember trying hard to act interested in "boy stuff", but I had trouble maintaining the act.

My teachers, peers, and spiritual guides did eventually succeed in conditioning me to fully repress myself and construct a solid persona to hide behind.

Yay me, I guess.[emoji850]


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[Ive]

Deborah,

your point is very interesting, and maybe there is something there.
I am thinking since few days (or even hours) about "inferiority complex". I think that, as individuals, some of us have an inferiority complex, independently from gender. That is my case, maybe, and the situation and environment did not help, until now...

[AngieT]

Did I have that "dumb" feeling?  ABSOLUTELY.  That said, I was so intent on repressing the truth that it contributed to hyper-masculinity.  Was I a failure at certain stereotypically masculine tasks? Yep, but I would just redirect attention to those masculine traits that I was good at.   I was horrible at basketball, so I worked to become the first string high school football running back instead.  There was always something that I could use to make up for my obvious shortcomings, and nobody ever caught on. 

After high school I was still horrible at husbandry, but who needed that when I could just throw money at it?  "I had bigger issues to deal with."  I built my life as an alpha male, (military & law enforcement) because the strict adherence to gained authority was sufficient to cover my tracks.  If I couldn't do it, I could order someone else to do it instead.  We all deal with these situations differently. 

[KathyLauren]

I overcompensated.  There was no way I could get motivated by guy stuff like sports, but I learned I could get respect by excelling at academics.  Later, although I never did like sports, I started to do other guy things.  My attitude was always "Heck yes, I can do that."  So I learned to fix cars, and later, to fly jets.  Anything to look masculine enough to not get beat up.  As my need to avoid getting beat up faded with age, so did my interests in those activities.

It worked, too.  At school, the jocks would say, "He's a bit of a wimp, but he did get the school's name in the papers by winning the provincial math contest."  In the Air Force, the other pilots would say, "He's a bit of a wimp, but he sure can fly, and his students never fail their tests."

[SadieBlake]

Until my early twenties absolutely. By that time was sufficiently tired of being a social outcast that I began a campaign to acquire every hypermasculine accomplishment possible.

I did my best to remain sensitive and caring in my personal relationships which was an interesting (i.e. very effed up) contrast to who I became for a while in my professional and political outlooks.

I've just been re-reading the first book that gave me a clue that I might have a feminine brain - "Brain Sex" which I read in '89 a full decade before I realized I was transgender. So I'd had some inklings to having a different brain and emotional intelligence, however I still really then took my male socialization as the more important thing, not then understanding that that had always been a choice and survival mechanism.

[Ive]

Friends,

you are so... BOOOOOMMM!!! Fly jets? Whaaaat? 
You are really great! Maybe doesn't help (as does not help me), but you were able to do all these things... you are very good at doing things, and smart!
I "just" took a PhD in Computer Science, I feel a dummy
Anyway, we are not here to see who's most intelligent, but accept ourselves in our "dumbest" and simplest being. I am thinking often that I could have lived (and live) without culture and school, and then learn what I need, when I need it.

As I was saying previously, that feeling "dumb" may depend on a "inferiority complex". For instance, I always felt "inferior" respect to my male mates, but now, I also feel "inferior" also respect to some female friends, although I don't feel "dumb", but just "stupid"  (yes, improving...)
Why's like this? So, here it comes the "inferiority complex". Let's see if my therapy says something about it.

Deborah for me is a counter-example in this case: she felt different, but didn't felt dumb. I feel from her words (but of course this is my imagination, also) that she had a different personality, which allowed her to feel with some value, even if in her situation. Maybe value is something I have difficulties to see.
Also, I just remembered how I was happy and ok until I became 3. Then something changed forever. Maybe I am too sensitive, and maybe me feeling "dumb" is also a mechanisms for being protected by other people. I always felt my mother as my only way to survive, but she had lots of issues with her life, and wished me to be strong and a good guy, and I didn't want to become one of her issues.

Complicated...

[Deborah]

I have never felt dumb but I have felt seriously inferior and alienated in some contexts stemming from the feeling of being totally out of place.  I just never connected that feeling of inferiority with being dumb.


It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.
André Gide, Autumn Leaves

[KathyLauren]

Sorry, I wasn't trying to make anyone feel dumb.  It's not a contest. 

I get that it is about having an inferiority complex.  I too had one.  My need to excell was how I dealt with it.  I never felt that I was man enough to satisfy anyone else, so I had to work harder to prove myself good enough that no one could put me down.

[Deborah]

Sorry, I wasn't trying to make anyone feel dumb.  It's not a contest. 

I get that it is about having an inferiority complex.  I too had one.  My need to excell was how I dealt with it.  I never felt that I was man enough to satisfy anyone else, so I had to work harder to prove myself good enough that no one could put me down.

I did the same thing but in the Army.  Unfortunately, my eyes disqualified me from flying so I did the next best thing and joined the Infantry LOL.


It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.
André Gide, Autumn Leaves

[AngieT]

I think many/most of us walked that road at some time in our previous lives...

[Asche]

I don't know about "dumb" exactly, as everyone was always saying I was "smart."  But for my whole growing up, everyone around me was saying "what's wrong with you?  You're so smart, why can't you do what you're supposed to do?"  So "smart" came to mean, for me, "you're deliberately screwing up, just stop it."  So I wasn't allowed to think of myself as dumb.  In fact, I wished I could.  At some point, I started deliberately putting down wrong answers on standardized tests just so they'd stop bugging me.  (But it didn't work.)

In the non-gender things, things started to get better once I moved away from home to go to college and discovered that most people didn't operate the way my family did.  I'm still working on that, though, almost a half-century later.

But I always felt like a failure as a boy, then, later, as a man.  I just couldn't do the whole male thing.  The thing is, even though I felt like a failure, I couldn't make myself want to be able to do the male thing.  I went through hell for a while (serious suicidal ideation, still don't know why I never went through with it), partly due to not measuring up in the boyness area and partly due to my not being able to do some of the other stuff everyone said I ought to be able to do.  I eventually learned to hide most of myself and trained myself not to want emotional connection with anyone and developed some strategies for getting by with a minimum of abuse.  I eventually got out of the habit of even remembering that I had an inner self.

Off topic comment:

They always say you'll understand your parents better when you have kids.  In my case, I ended understanding them less.

My kids had some of the same issues I did, and I muddled through them somehow, but when I think back on how my parents handled those same issues, my reaction is frequently "WTF?"  They got the basics, the no-brainer stuff very wrong.  And they continued to do so until they died.  I can feel sorry for them, but I can't understand them.  I used to say, to paraphrase that supermarket tabloid headline, "I was a space alien's baby."  They always seemed like a superficially human but actually alien species to me.

P.S.:

Did you know that some of the consequences of attachment disorders, especially disorganized attachment, include lack of fine motor coordination and inability to focus?

[Michelle_P]

It's a funny thing.  Others definitely made me feel dumb, but I knew in spite of how I felt at their hands (and fists) that I wasn't.  Heck, I designed and built a shortwave receiver at age 12, built a Tesla coil and later a small accelerator and X-ray source (the coil became the high voltage supply), an EKG, all vacuum tube with a 5" round display, and an organic dye laser, all by age 15. 

My fellow students thought I was dumb, weird, and not deserving of anything beyond the occasional beating.  Like Asche, I was smart, but I didn't fit in, getting that damning "What's wrong with you?"  I had teachers that thought I was a special needs student, not the good kind.  One PE instructor flat out used the "R" word.  (Warning: I've never thought well of college PE majors since then.) When I was caught dressing, the parish priest I was dragged to see said I was a pervert.  This all did wonders for my self-esteem, and my feelings for humanity.

I couldn't really function among all these a**hats until I retreated inside and constructed a bulletproof false front to become another conforming a**hat.  Then I could fit right in with the rest of the human race. 

Getting the heck out of there, losing the religion, and being among other folks like me in terms of thinking and doing stuff was the best thing I ever did.  Keeping the false front up was probably the worst thing I ever did. 

After almost a half century, I'm finally getting better.

Edit:  Ya know, I think this thread might have touched a nerve in some of us...

[Ive]

Michelle_P, and all,

I am sorry if this thread touched some of your nerves... this was not my intention. I really apologise for this.

Michelle_P, I got hit when you said:

It's a funny thing.  Others definitely made me feel dumb, but I knew in spite of how I felt at their hands (and fists) that I wasn't.

That is what I always felt my whole life, and the presence of the "other" in this equation was really invasive, tough and not requested. But somehow society says to you that you should work in a certain way, and the "What's wrong with you?" part doesn't help, and you get doubts for, like, forever.
Feeling dumb is maybe directly related to how the fact that some (and I say, "some") people say that you are "dumb". Maybe the same ones feel dumb too.
It happened to me a lot. Even, and especially, in family (and I would say that is the worst thing).
As I knew how to use PCs and some maths, I started Computer Engineering (also, Engineering, as it was a difficult course, and I wished to prove myself I was strong and smart). Unfortunately for me, a cousin of mine started CE too. He was a I-know-everyhing-you-are-so-dumb kind of person, also very smart, but totally not missing one occasion lo spot your "dumbness" and "you should do it better/the right way". A**h*les. The fact is that I could not do anything about it. My mother and his mother are sisters, and also my mother suffered (and stil suffers) from the competition with them (and that only they want to act). Long story short: I fell in a situation in which I had to be better than him, too. But I wasn't. Eventually, I don't even like the things I studied, which covered me in deep shame respect to him.
I just, still today, cannot get over it.
I think that a PhD is something that I can slap on his face, whenever he talks. But, at the end of the day, I din't want it too.
You see, feeling "dumb" also respect to whom take the life as a competition, and put you in the position of "the loser".
Damn losers! They are losers! They are losing everything wonderful this life has: ourselves. I am a splendid person, why you have to threat me like this, a**h*le!
Why? Just... why? My cousin? And my uncles?

And at last I think that I maybe did the same with my sister and other people I started considering "dumb", being "superior" to them, cause I didn't want to admit that I was not. Maybe one of the few persons that were humans, purely and simple humans, with limitations, problems, fears, and laughs.

But, that is... I still feel the fact that these "superior" people will judge me for what I do and I do not.
And I still don't know what to do about it. I feel I cannot breath.

And relating all this to the fact I should "be male", I feel all this deeply disturbing...

[Michelle_P]

Michelle_P, and all,

I am sorry if this thread touched some of your nerves... this was not my intention. I really apologize for this

Hey, you didn't do anything wrong! 

It's the whole subject, effectively being raised in a viciously conformist and transphobic society, that bugs me. Actual diagnosis and treatment? We're lucky they didn't do that. The "Standards of Care" when I got caught included involuntary commitment, electroconvulsive and my choice of faradic or chemical aversion therapy. I dodged that thanks, I think, to Mom, and just got testosterone injections.

And relating all this to the fact I should "be male", I feel all this deeply disturbing...

Oh, heck yes!  It IS disturbing. Growing up I felt like I was living the nightmare. I blocked out the whole thing, and never talked about it until I started therapy.

It wasn't growing up trans,it was simply growing up DIFFERENTLY than all the conforming cookie cutter kids, in a culture that demanded we fit in as well.

OK, maybe a hot button item for me. (Some folks here have probably seen all this before. Sorry about that.) I'll be on decaf the rest of the day. [emoji8]


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[Ive]

Ahaha! Decaf XD
No problem, I liked your way of expressing things!
Let's be cool on these communities, only with the attention to not hurt the others, to the extent we still are human, and we make mistakes.

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[Sephirah]

For me it was not so much dumb, more... hmm... dislocated. It's a hard feeling to explain, and something I still experience sometimes. Feeling like you're watching the world through someone else's eyes. Knowing it's supposed to be you, but isn't. And feeling very little sense of identification with anything you're seeing. I always kind of saw what people around me were doing with a detached curiosity more than anything, boys and girls alike, and then just did my own thing regardless.

Maybe it was something to do with upbringing, I don't know. I was never really funneled into trying to be, or actively tried to be one way or another. And the dysphoria I experienced was pretty much entirely physical. My mind is: "You do you, just with those bits and that shape instead of those bits and that shape. Because... reasons." And that's more or less how it's always been. Maybe I'm just dumb to how humans behave, more than anything specific, lol. Sometimes I think that.