Ah, oysters ... love 'em, especially on the half-shell with cocktail sauce and something spicy added, or just really spicy cocktail sauce! *smile*
These threads always grow like topsy. Nothing like maintaining one's own validity. Of course, doing that in a thread that basically asks that we assert we are "not like that" is heading for recrimination. And the less assured someone is who reads this, the more activated becomes their intolerance for difference. The easier it is to set up others to be "not quite like me" and that normally means someone gets hurt in turn.
Do I think there are different levels of intensity of the feeling we discover, sometime or another, in our lives that mean some never undergo any surgery, only dress? That others have surgeries, as many as they can afford, very early, that some never start hrt yet are blessed, at least for a while, with "passable" looks and builds, that others, try as they might, never quite make that passable level and tend to be discarded by others or used by others as examples of "what not to be?" Do some never get bottom, or top surgery, but maintain their TSism till the day they pass into some other plane?
All of the above. Yes, I do think that. It is, and we are, what it, and we, are. No amount of tearing down another, making comparisons with another's looks, style, choices can make me one iota more real than I allow myself to be anyway.
I think Nero's question was placed as an attempt to discover something about himself; most of our questions are. It doesn't seem like he tossed a Molotov Cocktail just to see how big the fire would get. And he should be able to ask questions like that without my getting so activated with comparisons that I just have to insist on my own superiority.
If that superiority were there to begin with, I suspect it would be evident to all without my having to shove it under everyone's noses. Instead, what I imagine I do in such a situation is I feel, keenly, my own sense of inferiority that needs comforted and the best way I know to do so is to grab the distinction and place myself in the superior position, or at least place others in an inferior position.
I spent a lot of time early in the process of trying to be in that "real TS" or high-intensity group. I didn't really need to bother though. My life was what it was. An early attempt to move toward transition ended in a terrifically horrid double-rape and I went totally within my own shell at 19, unsafe I KNEW, to be out because to be out was to be violated and abused for a very long period of time. I connected transition with being brutalized and helpless.
Thank Goddess that Mr. Benjamin never made that a criterion for being "high-intensity" or "real." (Ever notice how the guys avoid these threads like the plague? Ever wonder why? Maybe because they haven't been raised to feel they absolutely have to assert they are "the best?")
Yet, my dissonance would never go away, no matter how many resolves I made to be 'him.' It haunted me and in spite my efforts, within a year or two it was always eating at me. That was not safe either. At some point I realized that rape wasn't inevitable and that the world was no safer for other women than it was for me.
As I was living that life I was truly miserable and totally disconnected form others. Not a good position to be in for someone who is "a social animal," as humans are designated. Ever wonder why "Human" isn't categorized into low and high intensity models?
So, these sorts of threads can be used to discuss something that actually matters to an honest individual who really has a concern they wish to discuss. Or they can be used as one-upmanship ploys by those who just need some sense of self-efficacy one cannot seem to find in any way except by making distinctions between one self and other selves.
Anyone for oysters? *grin*
