"i am a woman" or "i want to be a woman"

[lucaluca]

what did you say before you decided that transition is the right thing to do? did you say "i am a woman, i have to transition" or did you say "i want to be a woman, i have to transition"?
i hope you understand the (in my opinion) huge difference. or maybe there is no difference between them, then please tell me 

[Robert Scott]

I haven't transitioned medically yet .. but when I admitted I wasn't genderqueer that I was trans .. I started saying "I am a man & I will be transitioning out of my female body"

[lucaluca]

but at first you identified as genderqueer? why? what was it that made you say "i'm genderqueer" and what was it that made you feel that there is more?

[Robert Scott]

I always knew I wasn't female...saying your genderqueer seemed to be easier than saying I was transqendered.  I think it was easier to say I was a bit mixed male and female .. people seem to take that better ... I don't know .. just the road I took

[spacial]

I said, so many times, this isn't right, I shouldn't be like this, this is wrong, I'm living a lie, I don't know how to live like this. I'd sooner be completely alone than have to live like this any more.

Hope this helps.

Sadly, for me, I fell big time and ended up alone anyway.

[lucaluca]

i know that it is easier to say that you are genderqueer, but do you knwo why in the end you said "i'm transgendered" and not "just" genderqueer

[Nathan.]

I first identified as genderqueer because I guess society had taught me that vagina = woman so it took me about a month to fully get rid of that idea and accept that i'm a man.

[Karla]

I said the former to my self, I'm a woman/girl. Then I sometimes still use the latter but little differently, like "I need to be a woman" meaning to better be able to live that reality because I know who I am.. So maybe the two implied each other.

I realize that may be different than saying "I want to be a woman/man" as being in point A and getting to point B.
The period before transition is intensely turmoil-ful ( ), things aren't really clear and we can say something to mean the other.

[Devyn]

Well, thinking back, I've gone by a bunch of different labels until I realized I was trans, so it was always "I want to be a man" because I thought, you know, girls had vaginas, and since I had one, that meant I was a girl.

Honestly, I went from depressed bisexual female, to depressed tomboy lesbian that didn't feel that she was a lesbian, to depressed bisexual female again, to bisexual uncomfortable genderqueer (fff, I was two people in one perhaps? A boy and a girl? SURE! I still had to be a girl, right?), to confused questioning transman, to genderqueer again because I decided that I was too feminine to be a boy, and then finally back to being a transguy. And that's the way it's going to stay because I'm quite happy as a boy.

Anyway, I have yet to medically transition, but it was always "I want to be a man" because I thought, "I want to be a boy, but I'm a girl, so I can't be, right? Besides, I'm not that masculine."

[Nero]

Well first it was 'I'm a man; I must transition'. But now I'm fully transitioned, much of the emphaticness of that statement is gone. The dysphoria's gone and now I'm just me.

[Eve of chaos]

for me it was always "I want to be a girl" i never questioned the possibility that My mind might be female and that was the reason. I didn't care for the reason all I knew was that I wanted it, my sex was male, and I didnt see it coming true.

Hence what I'm sorting out now, i think its all perspective really. 

[lucaluca]

@ ekuryua

so you never tought that your mind is female or you always knew that our mind is female and because of that you didn't questioned it?

[Layn]

 i think when i was younger it was "i am a girl", then my body kept reminding me that i was born male so it became "i want to be a girl". nowadays it's both. i am a woman and want to be a woman, though with "i want to be a woman" i just mean i want to live my life openly as a woman and have a female body

[Eve of chaos]

@ ekuryua

so you never tought that your mind is female or you always knew that our mind is female and because of that you didn't questioned it?

I just always thought that since I had male parts I was a male. i didn't challenge that questioning untill recently, so It was natural for me to say i wanted to be a girl, i wanted to keep my mind exactly how ti was but with the embodiment of a girl.

whether i could say my mind is female or not is something I think I'll never truly know.

[April Dawne]

I think you are getting too wrapped up in language... 'I am a woman', and 'I want to be a woman' or even 'I will be a woman' or 'I am becoming a woman' are really all just a series of words that you can say to a thousand different people and get a thousand different impressions of what you meant. Many people say things differently than you might say them, although they mean the same thing when they say it. The person that it has the most meaning to is the speaker, and their hope is that you understand what they are saying in the same way they mean or are feeling it. For example, you could say "I love you" to ten different people and they might get different impressions of what you meant with those words.

So really, asking us all to give you our own definitions of a specific phrase is going to get you as many different ideas of what it means as there are people who respond.

Personally, before I began to transition, I didn't "feel" like a woman, although I knew that was where I wanted to end up, so I usually said I wanted or needed to become one... once my transition got underway and I became more comfortable and confident my thinking and feeling shifted more to "I AM a woman."

Now that I'm almost 9 months into HRT I definitely FEEL like a woman, and I KNOW that I am one and that transition was the right decision because I'm a world happier now than ever before when trying to muddle through as a man.

~April Dawne <3

[Tamaki]

Yes, it is easy to get wrapped up in semantics and word meanings but I think this really boils down to intention.

Do you intend to become a woman because you're not? Are you a woman but don't physically match most women?


In my case I was told repeatedly and emphatically that I was not female and that I will never be. I was supposed to be male. I still have problems being told that I'm female and thinking of myself that way.

I just know that mentally, emotionally and spiritually I'm not male. So I'm moving away from being male and hope that other women can see me as something other than male and treat me more like one of their own.

[April Dawne]

That's the distinction I missed, and it's important. We often will say things in a way that doesn't match what we feel, but what really matters is our intention and what we do to put our intentions into motion. It doesn't really matter if you say "I am a woman" or "I want to be a woman", in the end, if your intention is to transition then that is what matters, not how you describe it.

[marissak]

what did you say before you decided that transition is the right thing to do? did you say "i am a woman, i have to transition" or did you say "i want to be a woman, i have to transition"?

I realized that all I know for sure is that I fit better on the female side of the world. I am not genetically a woman, and I am not sure if I am a woman in my brain. I cannot say I want to be a woman because I am not sure I can actually be a woman because I cannot honestly say I know what it means to be a woman. I decided to transition following my own logic and my own path.

So when I decided to transition socially (non-op) along with a small dose of estrogen, I did not answer either of your questions. The only question I answered is whether I fit better on the female side of the world or on the male side of the world. The rest is TBD and might always remain TBD.

Now that my gender dysphoria is mostly dissolved away, the relevance of the questions have significantly reduced. I find the concepts of man and woman too superficially constructed by humans, and quite irrelevant. I am just me at this point. The issues I am trying to solve now are with relationships, possibilities of having a family of my own, and my future.

[Tamaki]

I find the concepts of man and woman too superficially constructed by humans, and quite irrelevant.

Except, perhaps, for the biological matters of reproduction I agree completely. However, early on it doesn't feel that way, at least for me it doesn't.

I think one of the huge hurdles to get past in transition is this barrier between the genders. A man in a dress has crossed a line that feels very real and has social implications. A woman in pants hasn't crossed that line but it hasn't always been that way. Gender roles are a group consensus and are therefore fluid.

The big battle for me being early in my transition is to overcome the gender barriers and beliefs that I hold that I may not even be aware of. My fears of external things aren't nearly as great as my fear of internal things.

Sorry if I'm a bit off topic or philosophical, it just one of those days.

[lauren3332]

My transgendered behavior started when I was 15.  At first I was just a crossdresser and that is all I knew I wanted to be.  As time went on, clothes just were not enough anymore.  When I was in school and looked at other girls, I wanted what they had.  I wanted to seen as a girl.  I became a little jealous of girls but wanted to hang around them.  I guess I felt I wanted to somehow absorb their femininity because there was no way I could be viewed as a girl.  I used to read nonsexual TG stories and imagine myself as the character becoming a girl.  The way I perceived it, my Transgendered behavior developed into full Transsexuality.  Most people say that the transsexuality is always inside the individual but I didn't feel anything until 15.  It just seems weird that something so core in someone could lie dormant for years before showing itself.  I don't know how it came to be that I once felt like a man and then started to shift into becoming a girl, but that is how it went.  My feelings for being a girl will never cease.