Hey, everyone.
I guess I might go by Ben around here. I'm a fairly reserved, East Coast-based FAAB person who loves choral music and is interested in researching pedagogies and educational practice with regard to gender and nationhood. I'm recently twenty-two and finished up my undergraduate degree about a month ago, and I'm living in my childhood home with my parents and siblings while I look for work and/or consider graduate school. I've browsed Susan's for a while now and have watched the guys' "Official 'Do I Pass?' Thread" with awe, and I've finally decided to be active around here in an effort to explore some questioning I've been doing these past few years.
I'm having a bit of trouble articulating my experience with gender and identity, even to myself. Though I certainly wish that my body shape would take on a more traditionally 'masculine' appearance, and though I think that the parts of me that are traditionally 'feminine' look strange on me, I don't tend to experience really crippling physical dysphoria. My discomfort, I think, is more with having been socialized as a girl and, as I transition into early adulthood, being expected to become a woman. I just don't really see it happening, and the thought of it really gets me down.
I'm not a person who's "always known something was wrong." As far as I can remember, I was a pretty happy kid who nobody would have read as anything other than a little girl. Ever since puberty began, though, I've looked at my male relatives and peers and experienced a sad kind of jealous pang. It isn't so much "But I'm a boy! I've always been a boy!" as "But that should be me... and it isn't."
I'm trying to get my life really started, but I don't quite know how. I often feel like my life, even as it slips me by, hasn't begun and can't begin until I can move through my life and through the world as a young man. But I also feel like I can't with any personal integrity make an informed choice to live as that young man until my life's really begun. So... catch-22.
I'm hoping to chat with and learn from the folks around here. Susan's seems like a great community and a great resource, and it'll be a relief to have people to talk with.
Thanks for having me!
