Quote from: xsocialworker on January 19, 2010, 08:44:23 AM
A few questions:
1) Are natal females socialized to have greater feelings about body issues than people born male. Does this attitude show up in transwomen or not?
Differences seem to emerge quite quickly. But the reasons, as Sandy says, are up in the air.
I recall a small study, a number of years ago.
A number of women were invited to take part in an interview examing language or soething like that. They arrived and were told there was a delay and would they mind waiting, then shown into a waiting room where a young woman was sitting with a baby. The baby was dressed so it was not possible to tell its sex from its clothes. Alternately, the baby had been provided either with a doll or a toy car.
Eventually the young woman said to the other that she needed to use the toilet, would she mind watching the baby.
When the baby had a doll, the woman caring for it cuddled it and they played with the doll together.
When the baby had the car, the women caring for it held it much more losely, allowing it to hold the car.
The study was too small to make any meaninful observation, Though, of course, the university triend to make all sort of claims. But it is intersting.
When a mother changes her baby's nappy, does she treat male and female gentials differently?
I have watched quite a number of young children grow from babies to children over the years. From many different cultures. Young girls seem to want to engage with others through their charm, showing an interest in those that seem to respond. While young boys seem to want to enforce themselves trying to control situations.
The only significant exception was a young boy who was very feminine and is now, as a young adult, very confused, agressive, lonely and homosexual seeking to be a female.
Quote from: xsocialworker on January 19, 2010, 08:44:23 AM
2) Do you think that a woman's experience growing up is so different from what is done to boys and what is expected of boys that even the most polished and successful transwoman can never really understand being female cause they were socialized as boys. My cousin argued this to me at dinner the other night. She accepted that growing up as a "sissy boy" does create a different set of experiences than growing up a jock, but it still isn't a girl's experiences. She also asserted that I am not a woman nor a man, but something else. She knows I am post-op and have been living this way for 10 years. This is not a post about me or whether my cousin is ignorant cause that doesn't matter. I've heard this stuff many times before . I hope to get a discussion on this concept and how other people see this in their lives and in general. In an interview in In Style magazine, Alan Cummings the Gay actor said something like "No matter how feminine you may feel yourself to be as a man, you don't know how masculine you are until you try to pass as a woman.
Thoughts?
I personally take the view that Transexuals are on a journey. We are breaking new ground, largely because we have available to us, for the first time in history, the means to alter our appearance with reasonable safety and success.
But to claim that we are not the sum total of our past is, I suggest a nonsense.
MtFs will never have a period and especially a first period. The significance of this event should never be underestimated.
Now I've cited the example of a first period because it is, by any measure, a dramatic event which I imagine most adults can readly understand.
I still recall the very first time I ejaculated. I really hoped that, by achieveing this mile stone, that other boys calimed they knew so well, I might become normal. The effect of the male climax, as you probably know, creates a sudden relief from the tension that created it. For me, personally, I reached the second point in my life when I seriously wanted to die. Needless to say, the hoped for normality didn't emerge.
In the 70s I researched for and wrote a paper attempting to postulate the place of homosexuals during humanity's feral stage, (99% of human existance).
I tried to suggest that, based upon what is known about the lifestyles of these early humans, examinations of feral humans today and the varying attitudes toward homosexuals among the different principal human families, that homosexuals probably had a very important role in these societies as guardians of encampments while the men went to hunt.
But transexuals today, I suggest, need to understand that we are creating a new society for those that will come next. We cannot presume to be fully, or desired gender. It is unlikely, in the forseeable future, that most hetrosexual people will fully accept us in the way they accept genetic males and females.
But we are creating a society for the next generation. We have a right to be here. We are not ill nor disturbed. We are a funtioning part of society able and ready to contribute in the same way as those of a different race. To suggest we should submit to treatment is as offensive as suggesting to a black man that he should accept skin bleaching.
