Quote from: Inanna on December 15, 2009, 06:11:08 AM
It's this kind of thinking that makes society incapable of accepting gender variance of any type. "and you call yourself a-" insert man, woman, FTM, MTF or whatever.
In the case of ts individuals, it's hard to imagine that nothing from the gender we were raised as and lived as for many years had any affect on us. I try to view those experiences as more than just a curse, but as a opportunity to be a more complete person in the end.
Well, for some of us, especially younger people, I imagine, it's hard to gauge just how much differently we'd have been raised, if we were born the right sex.
I only had sisters until I was twelve, and after that, I had two step-brothers, and the youngest was still five years older than me. To make matters even more complicated, at least as young children, my parents and my step-mother took a more "gender neutral" approach to things, so my sisters and I were never told "girls don't do that, so stop", and my step-bothers were never told that by their mother, either. In both families, the father was very adamant that
everybody "better learn how to cook and do basic sewing" -- my father had several rants that could all be summed up with "any man who doesn't know how to feed himself right and fix the holes in his clothes isn't a real man" and "any man who expects his wife to take care of him ought to be ashamed of himself". If I had been born male, I don't see how any of that would have been different, and considering that my own father was both outwardly homophobic *and* a huge fan of Broadway and London musicals, he probably would have turned a blind eye to some of my eccentricities.
There was very little in my upbringing that seemed based on having a female body. As a kindergärtner in Catholic school, I could
read which lavvies were for the girls and boys, and knew what that meant
in theory, but when the teacher lined us up for lavatory breaks, I saw that
in practise this was done by what uniforms people wore, and I was wearing a blouse and dirndl. When I asked my mother why I couldn't swear the shirt and suit uniform, she said "cos that's not the uniform i got you" and went back to kvetching to her mother about how my father was still unemployed, so i just assumed that the dirndl was cheaper. The school uniform was pretty much the only "gendered" treatment that I noticed at the time; like I said, lacking any real brothers, it's hard to say. And "gender neutral" parenting seems to be catching on more and more every year.
