Susan's Place Transgender Resources

This is the story about how I got here. It's a very long post, because I am 60 years old and non binary took most of that time for me to work out. I've posted it as a new thread because I don't want to push everyone else's stories off the page. Somewhere in here are most of the things I have learned and what the mechanisms are behind the learning and if they are useful to anyone, I'll be glad. Otherwise read it and perhaps it'll help you go to sleep.

I grew up in a mostly rural environment and my parents had a stable relationship. Dad can be serious fun and I get my sense of humour from him, but with him it is either his way or the highway. My mother's side of the bargain was and is to agree with him 😊

It sounds funny put like that and it very often was, but though it was mostly benign, you can imagine what adolescence is like growing up with an uncompromising father and a mother who cannot openly support you if it would go against your father's wishes. As part of my survival kit I gained expertise at some of what I would regard as the worst aspects of machismo, but beyond a lot of shouting, there was never any abuse in my family. Assuming you exclude my father's tendency to sulk, occasional fits of depression and his mercurial temper – the latter I inherited by example and have been suppressing ever since – life was okay to good.

My mother sounds like a complete cypher, but she was and is very liberal and extremely tolerant. Full access to either of these aspects of her personality would have improved my life beyond measure, but she more or less locked me out of them because she was primarily loyal to my father and would always back up his point of view – even as she disagreed with him. If it sounds maddening, I assure you, it was.

The first time I wore a dress was when a bunch of us (the rest were girls) and I swapped clothes and compared notes, so to speak. It was hilarious, we did it a few times without telling anyone and I'm still in touch with some of the women who were involved a lifetime later. For most of them and for me, the event was no more than normal childhood curiosity, but in me it awoke a spark which wouldn't burst into flame for a few years.

What does being brought up as a man or a woman mean? It means that from the moment we are too young to have an opinion on the matter, let alone ask questions, we will be bought clothes that match our sex assigned at birth (SAB) and taught how to behave according to society's rules for our SAB. So, if you are assigned male at birth, you will be brought up with the masculine gender rule set, and if you are assigned female, you will be brought up with the feminine gender rule set.

These sets of rules are known as 'scripts' and after thousands of years during which only two sexes have been assigned at birth, the masculinity and femininity scripts have become concrete and so embedded most people don't have to think about them. Your family won't think about them when they are embedding them in you, your friends don't think about them, and you won't think about them. Until...

...the fateful day when there is an impossible to ignore head on crash between the gendered script you have absorbed and how you would behave if you'd never been exposed to it.

For me, that fateful day came somewhere in my teens, when I began to deal with the issue that while I was comfortable with wearing women's clothes, almost no-one else was. Apart from my one friend from the original group, who used to invite me around, let me have the run of her wardrobe and who introduced me to the idea of wearing bras and knickers and much else which I'll leave out because of site rules. We'll call her Ginny and she acted like my key to Pandora's box and I to hers. We lost touch over our university years but she went on to run an airline.

Ginny was a tomboy right through her teen years and – perhaps because she had the inverse femininity/masculinity gender balance to me – helped me understand I wasn't abnormal or unique. She'd been brought up with feminine scripts and had the wardrobe and the makeup skills to match, but she was happier with many masculine traits, while I was the other way around. There was nothing conscious in our friendship about this, but we both knew it, even if neither of us could put it in words.

For those in search of more detail, the masculinity script encourages agentic traits and behaviours including independence, assertiveness, courage, ambition, leadership, rationality, dominance, emotional control and willingness to take risks.

Femininity, by contrast, is about valuing communal traits and behaviour including dependence, docility, empathy, sensitivity, modesty, humility, unselfishness, supportiveness, cheerfulness, emotional lability and a nurturing, yielding nature.

So unconsciously does this process happen that by the time most of us reach the puberty, we have absorbed masculinity or femininity so well and identify with them so completely they are part of our inner being and define our core concept of normality. The key here is that no halfway states are allowed between having a male body coupled with masculine traits and having a female body and feminine traits.

Which means people's responses to gendered situations become like reflexes, because they only have to look at someone to work out whether they will behave like a man or a woman. Fear, uncertainty and doubt follow if that person does not dress or behave as expected. Why the FUD? Because rules have been broken and reflex emotions are involved.

Once an input triggers our learned gendered behaviours, we have little control over our response because the scripts are buried so deep they have become innate. As in they are part of what makes us, us. The gotcha is that if we consciously try and go against a gendered response, a part of our mind will instinctively rebel against it as a reflex – however natural the behaviour might have been for us before all the gender learning we were exposed to growing up took root.

The worst thing about this reflex response is that when internal rebellions like this happen, they don't wave a flag to identify what's happening and they happen so fast they can be hard to spot. Often, a rebellion can feel like an intense phobia over something trans associated, or manifest as disgust with yourself or some part of your behaviour.

I couldn't help noticing that when I was with Ginny, with me dressed in her clothes and she in mine, I felt good about it, high even. But afterward, I would sometimes experience waves of disgust at having worn her clothes, despite the fact I'd enjoyed it and she'd done so too. This was my masculine gendered scripting operating the way it was designed to do. My subconscious was shouting, 'How dare you break my rules? I was programmed with these to keep you safe!'

I also knew there was no way I could experience that high dressed in Ginny's clothes walking down the street, or with my parents, because other people's reactions would not be welcoming. They wouldn't think it was normal and to add insult to injury my own masculine script reactions would hair trigger in that situation and beat me up too.

This is what the experience of 'incongruence' feels like – your learned gender says 2+2 is unquestionably 4, but your natural gendering is equally emphatic the answer is 3. Neither side will compromise and outright warfare can be the result, with innocent bystanders including your self-respect and – particularly – your mood getting caught in the crossfire. Your brain fries trying to reconcile the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object and exhaustion and perhaps depression loom.

At any age, the experience of this clash is moderately catastrophic, so it isn't surprising that so many trans people suffer mental health issues. People who discover they are gay when they have been brought up straight go through a similar and equally painful experience.

It isn't just you are at war with yourself, the responses of everyone else and their cat will very likely lie along the spectrum from denial, through visible discomfort, to active hostility. It takes a self-confidence most of us lack to get past that and assert yourself and that too can be exhausting.

Most of us reach this trigger point some years down the line from our birth. If the mismatch between how we naturally would behave and how our learned gendering has taught to behave is big enough, the trigger could happen pre-teens. In many of us it will happen during our teens, and if the incongruence is weaker – or our gendered scripts are particularly strong – it will happen later.

In me, the shock of incongruence was diluted by Ginny being the darling she was. I rationalised if she was fine with it, there must be other people who were fine with it too – I just hadn't met any. She made me realise that being me in her room hadn't caused the earth to stop revolving or the sky to fall in. Being me was fine – it was other people who were the problem.

This one intervention mostly got me off my own case, leaving me only with one less battle to fight, but a whole bunch of unanswered questions.

Working through the cascade of scripting failures that happens after your trigger point is reached is tough enough if you have a binary gender incongruence – as in were assigned female at birth but are more comfortable being male, or vice versa. But what if you aren't comfortable being either? Somewhere in between the two? Or completely off the scale?

Even people within the trans community can be at a loss over this. So many battles have been fought over the concept known today as gender dysphoria (medical-ese for your gender identity being at odds with your sex assigned at birth) that it is easy to end up with the impression that gender and sex are the same thing.

Equating gender and sex works well for people who have resolved a binary dysphoria through sex reassignment surgery, which swaps physical sex to match gendered sex through sexual reassignment surgery (SRS). As challenging a road that SRS can be, following it is about as much use as a chocolate teapot for anyone with a non-binary gender identity because you don't have a 'right' gendered sex to swap to. You don't actually identify as either a woman or a man.

This is a big issue, because some of the most recent research suggests that within the US at least, the most numerous group of trans people identify as having a non-binary gender identity. According to the US Transgender Survey early insights report 2022, 38% of trans people are non-binary, compared to 35% trans women and 25% trans men. Within the non-binary group, the majority were assigned female at birth.

Very early on – in the bits of my relationship with Ginny I will draw a veil over – I realised I like a lot of what goes with being a man and that I was comfortable with a slice of the masculinity scrips. It helped she was more or less the reverse of me and we used to joke about getting married. In our shared dream, she would buy my clothes and I would buy hers and we would be whoever we wanted when we were alone with each other.

But it did end and we didn't get married.

No-one had entertained the idea of non-binary gender identity then, but the more I think of that relationship, the more I realise that's what we both were. Sheer chance had made us next door neighbours. It was one of my luckiest breaks, looking back and I hope it was for her too.

If you experience the binary incongruence of being trapped in a female body and and would find life 100% more liveable if your body was that of a man – or vice versa - there's a whole medical pipeline set up to help, difficult though it may be to find the portal and tough though it may be to transit.

But some of us aren't comfortable with the body and gendered behaviour package we've been handed and have imagined what it would be like to be the 'other' sex – only for it to offer us no clear answer and even introduce complications.

That's me and that was Ginny. But I had one other experience that pushed the door further open to realising I have a non-binary gender identity and that was with someone I had an intense relationship with. She had complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS).

This time it wasn't chance, because by then I had gone to medical school – I met her wandering around a corridor trying to find outpatients. To cut this relationship very short, she was male genetically and had testes internally, but because her body was insensitive to testosterone she had a female body. This is complex and I can go further if anyone wants, but when she told me she had AIS I replied I didn't care and to make us even, shared my 'secret'.

We had a relationship which was as fun as all got out, dominated by mutual crossdressing and a realisation that for the first time in her case and the second in mine, we'd met someone who was supportive of how we were and got it that sex and gender aren't synonymous and can be completely disconnected.

So how can you tell if you have a non-binary gender identity?

At one end of the scale, if you could be magically transformed into a man, assuming you were assigned female at birth; or could be transformed into a woman if you were assigned male at birth – and the transformation would resolve every single one of your problems (bar the intractable social ones, like fixing relationships, work and responses of cis-people) you likely have a binary incongruence.

If, however, the snap of a finger transform leaves you thinking, 'Hold on, I'm gaining much here, but there's a bunch of things I'm gonna miss and would love to hang onto, but I can't do that if I have the body of a different sex!', or 'I feel this way one day and that way another, help, because I can't have a woman's body Tuesday and a man's Wednesday!', or 'I don't feel comfortable in the girls' room or the boys' room,' then you should consider the possibility you have a non-binary gender identity.

What have I learned from this mess and what can you learn from my journey?

I've had the occasional, 'I'm trapped in the body of the wrong sex!' moments, but they've been inconsistent and fleeting compared to how dominant they can be in people I know with binary gender incongruence.

If like me, you have a non-binary gender identity, your balance point may not lie exactly in the middle ground, but may instead have a tendency in one direction or the other, or even play hard to get and drift around. Just as some people are mostly attracted to their own sex, but are attracted to some members of another sex, so may your gender identity work.

Again, if your gender identity is non-binary, full sex reassignment surgery is quite likely not be a solution for you in the same way it would not be a solution for me. Yet I've had abstract discussions about this scenario with professional colleagues over the years and the majority have come up with the SRS route, despite it being unlikely to fix my issue. They equate sex with gender and their solution to any mismatch between the two is to swap the physical side as if it was as simple as the terminals on a battery. In me, all that would happen there is I would end up looking at the same problems, but from another sex.

I've not gone through therapy myself, but my past professional experience and talking to others has also taught me you risk ending up with a slew of different labels if you don't raise the question of having non-binary gender incongruence. If that is you, then getting that understanding in place within yourself and your team will have benefits all round.

What is the future if I am non-binary?

The end of the line is learning to love yourself for the unique person you are and helping those who love you to love you for being that person. That will be a big step for the people who love you (though nowhere as big as the leap you made) because they will have to throw out all the certainties of gender binaries they've taken for granted all their lives. And which – crucially – work for them.

They will make mistakes along the way, but their journey will be the reward for everyone, so be sympathetic, though firm. Accept a compromise if they learn to love you for being gender different, even if they don't fully understand the difference, which about half of them will not. Regrettably, some will refuse even to start on the journey and you'll have to reconcile yourself to the possibility they will have to be left behind.

This is so much easier said than done, but if you have a non-binary gender identity, then whatever the sex you were assigned at birth, you will never feel quite right until you can adapt what you were taught about living that sex to your new lived equilibrium. That will involve learning to accept who you are, trashing some old gender scripts and adopting new ones, but every win along the way makes the next hurdle easier to jump. Reaching your destination may even involve some hormones or surgery, but hold off on them until you understand what non-binary means for you.

One final thought. I've escaped some of my worst moments by thinking through what my life would be like if I was the only person living on a planet where I could get off my case and live (as in dress and behave) as I would like to do. Then I add the people back in – but only the ones who are comfortable with me living like that. In neither of those two worlds do I experience any problems with not having particularly male or particularly female gender expression or behaviours.

My current relationship, which is decades old now, works along those lines and I do everything I can to make my partner feel valued, supported and understood in return for her doing the same for me. I've still got more male scripts than female ones and I do a great act as a man, but I've discovered I prefer swimming in the middle of the pool. Or near the middle. Somewhere that isn't at one end or the other, anyway.

It took me a lot of years to get there, but if I can do it, so can you.

@TanyaG
TanyaG:
I think it is wonderful that you started your own personal Blog Thread.  Just writing details out like you have is not only a good recap for your readers and followers but it also can be good personal therapy for you as well. 

As you might already be aware, I have my personal Blog Thread here on the Forum but I also keep an "old-school" pen & paper journal at home complete with colorful doodling and appropriate snapshot photos.  I have kept a personal journal since I was in Junior High School... we called them "Diaries" back then.
I find that when I have difficult issues that I am working through that writing down my thoughts helps me to ponder and to formulate positive solutions.    When things are going well, I certainly write about those things as well.

As your Blog thread develops more regular readers and followers you can expect joyful and congratulatory responses to your good news and when your news is not-so-good, you will find your readers and followers offering their ears to listen and their shoulders for you to lean on.

On cold and rainy nights when I am staying in, I often find myself in my comfy chair in front of my fireplace thumbing through and reviewing my journals, that is when I can gain insights as to what I need to do to overcome future difficulties and to see how to avoid future problems....  I can spend hours just reminiscing about my past life events.... sometimes with tears in my eyes.

I will be eagerly following your new Blog Thread, and please, if you will, continue to keep it updated as you feel comfortable doing. 
Your new Blog Thread will be in essence your HOME here on the Forum where your readers and followers can find you and leave their comments and thoughts.
Here on the forums you will certainly come across many like-minded members here, some can become very good friends as you share your thoughts with one-another on the various threads around the Forums but also in Personal Message exchanges.

Thank you for starting and posting your new personal Blog thread....
...you will find it quite beneficial to yourself and perhaps it will provide help and encouragement to others that read it.

HUGS and well wishes,
Danielle [Northern Star Girl]
The Forum Administrator  (Email: alaskandanielle@yahoo.com)

Thanks Danielle, you know, I have never kept a diary? It is one of those things I am always going to start but it never quite gets to the top of my list...

  @TanyaG
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I'm glad you're here, TanyaG. Everything in a strict of a patriarchal society is a product for sale, including feminity - the more highly ranked male, the more beautiful woman he can buy. Right-winges are slaves to their delusions and will never understand if you will swim into the middle of the pool. They don't understand why you're suddenly living for yourself and not for the good of the store, you're destroying a century-old commercial infrastructure.

Some systems are built so everything is stacked against you and the people doing the stacking won't give anyome else a break because if they do, they fear losing their priveleges. Masculinity and femininity are like that, a system which makes women second class citizens and which has evolved for the benefit of men. Anything that threatens that balance is going to be resisted and if the concept of gender is unbound - set free - then the foundations of the system collapse.

We both have experience of systems which work against us and the ones we love, you more than me, I think. But the more of us who live for ourselves, the less power the people keeping the systems in place will have. So keep at it and don't lose hope - just by existing, you are proving them wrong.

I had a soft intro into being trans, helped by two relationships at the very beginning. Some of the rest of my journey was made in a world which was less friendly. So, like all of us, I developed coping mechanisms.

Some of those mechanisms were good, some were not so good and a few were broken from the start. What I learned from the broken ones is that once you start using a coping strategy to disguise your gender or your uncertainty about your gender, it is almost impossible to change the strategy later without causing distress.

This is especially the case in close relationships, which – even if they are platonic – often involve gendered roles. In very close relationships sexual roles will be coupled with the gendered ones, leveraging something which once was simple into a monster of a problem.

What sort of coping mechanisms did I use?

In my experience, if you are not fully out as trans, it is easy to fall into the habit of denial and concealment. Don't ask, don't tell (DADT) is such a tempting path. Why is it so attractive? Because the early reward of DADT is it is nonconfrontational. The catch is it may involve a lot of stress to someone else and you later on if you rely on DADT within an intimate relationship.

In many cases DADT is justifiable on the grounds that say, the cashier at the supermarket has no right to know of your gender non-conformity unless you wish it so, nor has your next-door neighbour. Any more than either has a right to know your sexual preferences.

If you are an adult, you have a choice and it is your right to disclose or not, but you also have responsibilities. If you aren't out, you could decide, 'I'm not going to tell this person I'm trans, because the relationship hasn't gone far enough to justify it.' Which leaves the onus on you to identify the point where a relationship has gone far enough. That point won't be easy to judge and it is all too tempting to keep kicking the decision further down the tracks.

The catch is that when you take down a DADT strategy by coming clean, from the other party's point of view you are whipping away the curtain behind the stage and saying, 'Everything I showed you till now was an illusion.'

To put in another way, in many respects, changing or abandoning a coping strategy which disguises your gender is like announcing you've had an affair – all of your partner's certainties vanish, leaving them adrift and without a key confidante in a world where all their trusted certainties have become meaningless.

What happens next will depend on the duration of the relationship and how much gendered scaffolding has built up around it, but at some level it has to involve a loss of trust in you by the other person. In a relationship which is recently established and isn't sexual, then the fall out will hard enough to deal with, but if the relationship is long term and it is sexual...

Look at it from their point of view – how can they possibly believe anything else you say if you could conceal something as big as this?

Some will take it okay at first, only to have doubts when they work through all the changes to relationship labels and scripts – the easy end being a feminine sister becoming a masculine brother. Did I say easy? Only by comparison, because it gets much, much worse. With partners there's a whole new dimension because of changes to sexual relationships, especially if hormones and or surgery are involved.

Friends and family will struggle because of beliefs, be they political, religious, moonshine or madness. There will be a substantial group who suffer emotional distress similar to grief because of the sense of relationship loss. How much insight you get into what they are going through – and what they are thinking – will depend on their character but realistically, you should prepare for some people to say little for a long while and then split. Others will be openly hostile and some may whip up campaigns against you.

Knowing this, why did I use coping strategies instead of being open, honest and transparent? In the beginning, the motivation was I wasn't totally sure I was trans and that was complicated by my lying on the non-binary gender spectrum, a concept which pretty much did not exist in the 1970s and 80s. I didn't understand it myself.

So when many of my lasting relationships were formed, I couldn't totally work out whether what I was experiencing was some kind of phase, or even what was going on in my head.

Or so I told myself.

I've got lots of excuses and here are some. If they sound lame, that's because they are lame.

Back in the seventies, if you'd begun to say the word 'trans...' everyone in the room would have completed it with '...vestite' and a series of pictures would have formed in their heads that didn't apply to me, but there would have been no convincing them of that. That one was uppermost in my mind.

In those days, very few sexual reassignment (SRS) procedures had taken place in the UK and the only ones anyone knew about were sensational and had been male to female. As far as most cis people were concerned, transgender only affected men, all drag queens were trans and everyone involved was gay.

It didn't help that in the early seventies a legal case had been splashed across the tabloids about a marriage involving a partner who had had male to female SRS. In a flood of approving news reports that marriage had been annulled on the grounds that in the eyes of the UK law as it stood, the couple were both men.

It was another world.

I raise this stuff because although things are way off being ideal in the UK today, they are light years ahead of where they once were. Yet in many countries attitudes haven't got to where we were fifty years ago and in some jurisdictions, being trans still carries the risk of imprisonment or death. Other countries are going backwards as vocal conservative and religious groups have raised trans as an avenging spectre threatening everything from the destruction of family life as we know it, down to but not including (as far as I know, but we only have to wait and they'll come up with it) original sin.

In the days of LGBTQ+ dating apps, you can declare yourself to be trans on your profile and be better assured of finding a sympathetic audience, but what happens when you are not out and discover yourself in a developing relationship where you didn't expect things to go as far as they did?

This has happened and will happen to many of us and it happened to me. One relationship developed so fast that if work related issues hadn't got in the way, we'd have been married in a month. We're still married and besotted with each other decades later. I didn't tell her I was trans when we met because it didn't cross my mind because we were so into each other. Our relationship rapidly strengthened to the point where my trans issues faded into the background.

'Great!' I thought.

Not great. My issues came back about 18 months later, by which time we were married. I still wasn't out of the stage where I was sure my gender identity was settled, facing me with introducing her to a subject I couldn't name and for which there was then no terminology.

So for a few years my coping strategy was closet crossdressing. It wasn't difficult because of our jobs and because I can play tunes on the masculine scripts deeply embedded within me. In those times, hormones and surgery were out of the picture, but my non-gender conforming inner nature eased that by sending signals that I shouldn't rush to SRS.

The more time passed, the more I knew I had to come clean and the less I could justify not having done so. Came a point when I realised I owed it to her because if she said no, at least she could start again before we had the complications of a family and too many more years of history to ramp up the hurt.

Call me a coward, but I just kind of let it slip out. Forgive me because I was stuck between the Scylla of knowing I couldn't carry on pretending I'm someone I'm not and the Charybdis of losing the best relationship – and friend – I have ever had.

In my dreams, we had a heart to heart in which I told her straight out. I chickened out of that. Why? I judged it had too much risk attached. It would have been so much easier if we had had some of the streaming boxed sets we have around now, but they lay in the future. I could have used one to raise a discussion point and busked it from there.

I opted instead for curating a slow realisation in her that my enjoyment of her wearing nice clothes and lingerie might have more dimensions to it than met the eye. The whole thing is hilarious in retrospect. Which is good – it shows I've learned to laugh at things that once made me uncomfortable.

One day she picked up on a comment, edging the conversation close to a point where I knew I could act, so after a deep breath I went for it, 'You know, I would enjoy those against my skin, too.' Her response? 'You poor thing!' Then lots of kisses etc, but I do remember her gut reaction was, 'This is trouble for you.'

Inevitably, the road to follow was not smooth, but at no stage was our relationship under serious threat. An elephant did not lurk in every room any more, but it did take a while for her to work through what amounted to a grieving process for who she believed I had been.

There followed a period where we lived a modified DADT coping strategy by mutual consent. She knew I crossdressed and that it made me feel better (Good? Right? I can't think of an apt word) but while she was processing it, I didn't do it in front of her. If she came home early and found me it was no biggie, but I did my best to avoid it happening. Which as it happened was fine because our jobs and lifestyles allowed it.

That part of our journey took a few years to traverse, during which time I took care not to overcook things and was always prepared to compromise (as I am now.) It was one of the reasons why I didn't come out to all the people I could have done, because I didn't want to leave her in the position of explaining our relationship to anyone else until she knew exactly what it meant to her.

How are things now? I've learned a lot and her adjustment is complete, together with a realisation that all the key things that matter to her about me have not changed. I'm still funny, supportive, do my share round the house, fight on her side no matter what, and we're still best friends and lovers. She's fine with me being as female or as male as I want around the house and has embraced the idea of my rather complex and shifting non-binary gender nature.

It could have gone so wrong, but thankfully, it did not.

A part of why it has worked is she knows I'm not going for SRS, including why I won't – which makes a big difference. What our situation would be if I'd opted for SRS I can only imagine, but I have to look at it from her point of view because I let our relationship become very deep before I dropped my DADT strategy. Which means that if I had gone for SRS, she would have had every right to end the relationship.

In retrospect it is important that the one coping strategy I've been able to use all the way through is I've been able to crossdress for at least some part of most days, so I've had a safety valve to stop me going crazy. Without that valve, I would have had some dark and challenging times, as other trans people here have experienced. If you lack any outlet for incongruent (maybe discordant would be a better word) gender then the friction between your sex assigned at birth gender and the gender you feel most comfortable will slowly barbecue your brain.

I'd hazard that the reason we don't read so much about women crossdressing as men is not that it doesn't go on and not that it isn't also used just as much as a safety valve, but that if you are FTM, the gender police aren't on your case as keenly as they are if you are assigned male at birth. If you wear a shirt over a chest binder and use a packer, you can go under the radar to a much greater extent. Clearly that would break down as badly as any type of crossdressing usually does within a close relationship, so if this describes you, maybe some of my experience will help.

If I could do everything over I would set my birth forward by forty years and reach my teens in the 2010s. If that happened I would be forming my relationships at a time when it would be easier for the 40 year younger me to identify as trans right at the start and for the people I met to be more accepting of it.

Sigh. But it still wouldn't be easy, and...

... if I could do set my birthdate forward, it would delete the best relationship I've ever had and deny me the chance to sit through the last couple of seasons of Sex Education as they dropped with the woman by my side jumping up and down saying, 'This should be compulsory viewing!' Not to mention I wouldn't have been able to watch her defending her view about the box set at a party where most everyone else was saying it was too made up to believe. Or be there all the times she has backed me up when the subject of trans and toilets comes up where I've been, 'What? I can't believe we are even talking about this!' and she's been, 'C'mon, guys, its 2024, not 1824!' Or having her nick my heels because she likes wearing them and feeling me on her feet.

It has to be faced – I was lucky. I should have been honest about my gender non-conformity right at the beginning of our relationship, because it would have been better to risk blowing my chances right there, than to risk trapping the love of my life into a doomed relationship through my failure of honesty. There are extenuating factors, but looking back, they aren't extenuating enough.

All of us have gone through dark times when there are no solutions in sight and the future looks bleak. We've also gone through times when we've had feelings ranging from shame through intense self-loathing about being different. This blog is about how I learned to understand where those feelings come from and how to stop them chewing me up and spitting me out.

If you've read my earlier posts, I used crossdressing as a coping strategy and safety valve for my gender dysphoria, but it was never entirely successful as a solution on its own. I felt better crossdressed, but as often felt bad about doing it.

Several times I threw away everything associated with my crossdressing as the self-loathing kicked in, only to experience acute despair at what I had done, quickly followed by the financial and social agony of rebuilding my 'coping kit'. In those days the social agony came from braving the quizzical looks of shop assistants because mail order in the UK wasn't well established.

After a while, I began to wonder why I found crossdressing so helpful as far as my mood went, while at the same time experiencing nearly equal and opposite 'this is disgusting' brain flips when I did it. I wanted to do this, it was benefitting me, so WTF was I on my own case for?

The knights in shining armour that rode up and dug me out of the hole were William Simon and John Gagnon. In 1986 they suggested many complex thought patterns and behaviours we take for granted as being 'natural' are no such thing. Instead, they are learned.

Hello to scripts and how they run your life without you ever having heard of them

In their paper Simon and Gagnon called these learned – and very deeply integrated – thought patterns 'scripts'. One way of thinking of a script is as a dormant computer program in your brain waiting for the correct input. When the input comes along, the program wakes and executes, causing you to think or do a thing so instinctively you have no idea why you responded that way. That's why scripts feel natural.

Scripts dominate our lives to the extent that if you come from many western cultures, if one man holds out a hand to another man in greeting, the second man will have trouble suppressing the urge to shake it, even if they dislike the first man.

Scripts are gendered

But it's more complex than that – there's a second script hiding there, which is 'men who don't know each other don't hug and men don't kiss each other'. If two women meet in the same scenario, they activate a different script and will embrace or air kiss, but will be very unlikely to shake hands. It's a trivial example, but greeting scripts are widespread and often so long established that we call them customs.

So scripts are not only gendered, they are affected by culture, which is why men from southern Europe are more likely to kiss or hug when greeting each other than Brits. Greetings vary around the world, but within each culture the scripting is usually consistent and will most often be gendered.

Scripted responses are different to logical and emotional responses, but some can feel like emotional responses.

Take a cup cake. Logical response is: 'I should not eat another cup cake because I'm trying to lose weight'. Emotional response is: 'But I love cup cakes? Surely one more will do no harm?' I'm not aware of a scripted response to cup cakes, but if there was one, surely it would be gendered (read on) and something like: 'Its got pink icing. Real men don't eat cup cakes with pink icing', or 'You're a girl, pink icing is safe.'

One of the things scripting does is to take the uncertainty out of situations by giving us something to do and by making our reactions predictable. If the scripts weren't there, our stress levels would go through the roof every time we met someone new, while we tried to work out what to do next. Imagine trying to air kiss someone in greeting when they suddenly decided to stick out a hand with no warning at all. Oooof!

We learn hundreds of scripts as we are growing up, most of them before we are old enough to remember anything we have experienced, so much so by the time we are in our teens, our brains are packed with scripts interacting in complex cascades over which we have virtually no control.

A sophisticated example is that a man grows up to see a sink full of dirty dishes as a mess – while a woman grows up to feel the dishes are a job that must be done. It isn't so much that men are naturally lazy, it is many men are scripted that doing housework is not masculine and other people should be looking after their needs. This is a script cascade.

Scripts are taught us based on sex assigned at birth

One group of these scripts controls our gendered responses. People assigned female at birth (AFAB) are brought up with feminine scripts, while people who are assigned male at birth (AMAB) are brought up with masculine ones. Girls are dressed like girls and boys are dressed like boys because of clothing scripts which vary by culture, the important take home being there are hardly any cultures where the sexes dress alike.

At a deeper layer, if you are AFAB you will, for example, have learned female speech patterns and internalised that you should not be pushy amongst a complex mesh of other scripted behaviours as you grew up. If you are AMAB, you get a different program.

Society's gendered scripts only come in two flavours – feminine and masculine.

I notice on Susan's people sometimes use 'opposite sex', as if male and female are the only possibilities and so are binary. It shows how deeply scripts have their hooks into us that even trans people can't help thinking like this, despite there being members of Susan's who were born intersex.

Masculinity and feminity are collections of scripts

'Masculine' and 'feminine' are umbrella terms which describe society's understanding of how a man or a woman is expected to appear and to behave. We learn to be one or the other through collections of scripts we are taught as we grow up. Very little of this teaching is conscious at either parental or child level and it is reinforced continually by our playmates and schoolfriends, none of whom are aware they are doing it either.

This continual drip of scripting makes it feel as if our masculinity and femininity (gender) are directly, even genetically, linked to the sex we were assigned at birth. Yet scripts are no more than a set of people-generated rules.

If you doubt this, what about a genetic male who has complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, whose body appears female at birth and who will be brought up with feminine scripts? Or someone who with nonbinary gender dysphoria, for whom neither feminine nor masculine scripts provide a solution? Or someone born with one of the many genetic variations that result in intersex, who was assigned a sex at birth to make it easier (for everyone except them) and then loaded with gendered scripts to match a sex someone else chose for them at a time when they could not object?

A problem everyone here shares is our scripts are appropriate for our sex assigned at birth, but inappropriate for the gender we most closely associate with. Which is why our scripts play a massive role in generating our gender dysphoria – to the extent that when something triggers our scripts, it's like having your own robocop hunting you down that no-one else but you can see or get hurt by.

Why your and my scripts are out to get us

In my case, for many years, when I wore women's clothes it would trigger my masculine scripts. Out would come my robocop, armed with the latest weaponry, and shoot me up with disgust and shame rounds, because I was breaking the masculinity rules. The impact was shocking because those scripts lay at the essence of my being – at times it felt I had committed an offense comparable to murder.

Why am I not surprised so many trans people have prolonged mental health struggles? Pesky scripts.

What happened next was even worse. I'm struggling with this crossdressing solution that partially fixes my gender conflict, albeit at the price of setting my robocop on the loose, when somehow, my parents found out.

I gathered later my mother got an inkling of what was going on and instead of talking to me, spoke to dad. I very nearly walked into the kitchen at the exact moment his masculinity scripts kicked off at the idea of his child being gender nonconforming, only it came out of his mouth as a rant ending with, '...our hermaphrodite son.'

I'll never forget those last three words, because how inappropriate was that comment? I checked inside my pants in case I'd missed something. Definitely male. That was my problem, male below, female in my head. Sorta.

This was great, now I have my parents on my case with dad thinking I am intersex? Being intersex would have made how I felt marginally easier as it happened, but all I thought was, 'What a mess!'

Dad's outburst in the kitchen happened no later than 1975 and I still remember like it was yesterday. But – and this is wild – nothing came of it. I lay low, expecting the hammer to fall, worried about everything from being handed over to the religious authorities (a risk, I was at a faith school) to being paraded down the street in a dress for public ridicule.

Something stayed my father's hand, which I suspect it was my mother's hand, though I never asked. The event was never discussed with me, but I took the precaution of hiding all my female clothes somewhere so secret I would have to kill you if I told you. Okay, it was with Ginny, who – angel in human form as she was – who took her provision of comfort to a new and breathtaking level.

Despite the Ginny driven positives, the event had negative psychological consequences, one of which was to underline how bad things could become if word got out about me. If it reached school, I was dead.

On the other hand it taught me, through Ginny, that feminine scripts had much to offer that masculine scripts did not. Including sympathy, support, unconditional love and helping others feel good about themselves. I once got into a fight over something some other guy said about her and if they hadn't pulled me off him I would have killed him.

How we overcompensate when we experience a scripting clash

Without realising what I was doing, I had doubled down on my masculine scripts, even though they had unleashed robocop on me. If you were AMAB and ever found yourself building muscle bulk in the gym early in your trans experience, you were suffering a script ambush equal in force to mine. And if you were one of the crowd that pulled me off that guy, thanks from the depths of my heart, because he had no idea what he had walked into.

But I still had to deal with my dysphoria, which I did by crossdressing in extreme secrecy – even as it triggered more disgust through my masculine scripts operating – because that was way better than losing all my friends and being bullied into oblivion.

That coping strategy and the ever accommodating Ginny helped mark time until I left both school and home. In some ways, that's where my life began.

Simon and Gagnon's paper about scripting came out not long after I qualified. It was the first time that anyone had ever put the idea of scripting up in lights so clearly and with such definition.

The paper isn't light reading and its title is 'Sexual scripts: Permanence and change' so it only touches on gender, but it opened up a whole area of research, much of which would be about gender. I'd love to know how many other people who read the work at the time suddenly understood themselves.

Welcome to your personal, script generated RoboCop and how to deal with it

For me, it was like the sun coming up and illuminating the smoking wreckage of my gender issues. Instead of being trapped in a maze of twisty little passages all exactly alike, with a mad robot at loose within them and appearing at random, I could see the glimmerings of a way forward. I realised my robocop was powered by my masculine scripts and why its shots were so uncannily accurate – my own scripts were telling it where to aim. What I saw as random was nothing of the sort – my robot's appearances were absolutely predictable.

I was making myself miserable. When I saw it, I laughed. Unfortunately, it was during a postgrad lecture about something else entirely and I had a mouthful of coffee. But boy, was it liberating even if they never got the stains out the tablecloth.

My episodes of disgust were happening when robocop hit my 'real men don't wear women's clothes' script and my shame was being triggered when it hit my 'no other man will think of you as a man if they find out you don't follow the rules' script.

Yet if instead I had been brought up as a girl, my robocop would be on the rampage against me wearing underpants instead of panties, or having a crew cut instead of letting my hair grow long, or for wearing a binder or a packer.

It is all the same to robocops because their program says, 'If thought or deed does not match scripts loaded for sex assigned at birth, open fire until ammo expended.' That's the good news. The bad news is robocops have an infinite supply of mags and their weapons are set to automatic.

Sexual reassignment surgery was an impossible dream in the UK then, so that wasn't a way out. However, I rationalised that meantime I could disarm my robocop and be a lot happier if I overwrote some of my more troublesome masculine scripts with feminine ones, or just trashed them completely. I became a script hacker of a sort.

Sure, it didn't deal with the risk of other people's scripts experiencing a meltdown if they saw me dressed as a woman, but most of the hatred I experienced was coming from within. If it worked, I would no longer be torturing myself. I could deal with everyone else later.

I was fortunate because most of the skills came with my job, so I could do the mental hacks needed myself. No longer is there a need for that, because these days an entire support network has built up around treating trans people and dealing with their scripts – even if your therapists don't call use the word around you.

Be aware of scripts, because when you experience strong 'anti' emotions about being trans, it is your scripting at work.

Quote from: TanyaG on September 27, 2024, 02:30:30 PMIt took me a lot of years to get there, but if I can do it, so can you.

So much of your story speaks to me Tanya and what an amazing and interesting story you have.  Thank you for sharing.  Definitely helps me in beginning to understand who I am and where I'm heading.  So much to digest.

Big Carolina Giirl Hug
Tracie 💗

Tanya,

As a retired hypnotherapist I did much of what you explain. I use self-hypnosis to help me rewrite scripts and to desensitize many of the triggers that cause me the most distress. It has helped me get to a point where I can function. I highly recommend that people seek out a therapist with experience in gender identities and related issues. It helps in so many ways.

Thanks for sharing!

Quote from: Lori Dee on October 01, 2024, 10:42:32 PMI highly recommend that people seek out a therapist with experience in gender identities and related issues. It helps in so many ways.

It is as important as hormones and surgery. It seems to me that being content with yourself and identifying what your gender issues are lays down a firm foundation for working toward GAMC and how to deal with relationship and peer group consequences.

Being trans means coming to an understanding about what makes us different, but it also means understanding that different can be normal. Understanding that difference and normalising it in our own minds can take years, so imagine the difficulties others experience?

By others, I mean partners, sibling, parents and people in the street who 'read' us, if you want to use that word.

Throughout recorded history, people have been brought up to accept that gender is linked to sex in the binary model that for a long time went with 'sex assigned at birth'. It works for the majority of people but it isn't necessary to read much history to realise there have been those it hasn't worked for, including women who have lived large parts of their lives as men.

In the past, that has often been because gender roles were so strictly enforced that women couldn't do many things men took for granted – it was illegal for a woman to own property until the early 20th century in the UK, for example. Men who wanted to live as women were more visible, but we've never been talking large numbers here and almost everything written about them was speculation.

Drag in British theatre in Shakespeare's time

That didn't stop crossdressing being the accepted rule in British theatre, where until the late 17th century all the female parts were played by young men or boys. Ironically, this was because gender stereotypes made it impossible for women to be on stage, which was considered shockingly indecent. It wasn't against the law for women to be on stage, but gendered culture was so strongly against it that it might as well have been.

Part of the fun of the theatre then was that actors playing actresses would ham it up to the limit – some of Shakespeare's lines are jokes only when delivered by a crossdressed man.

The key was everyone knew what was going on. When gendered norms about actresses on stage relaxed, enough people still loved the old tradition for it to continue through pantomime dames (who are always male in the UK) and in drag.

Drag in British comedy and pantomine

In the UK drag wasn't quite the extreme eye makeup show it can be today and through my childhood in the 1960s and 70s it was routine for comedians to include a drag sketch or three in their show and for nobody to blink an eye at it. A great example is Danny la Rue, who personified drag in the UK for decades and drew big audiences, even in the most industrial parts of the north. Especially in the industrial north.

Danny could be howlingly funny, one of my favourite comments of his being when a woman in the audience asked, 'Do you enjoy dressing as a lady?' and he shot back, 'Not really. Do you?'

Drag is a fantastic example of how acceptance of 'different' gender expression can be normalised. Half the appeal of music hall, stage and club drag lies in the audience knowing they're watching a man dressed as and behaving like a woman. The gag lies in the ways the artists leave a trail of cues they aren't women – by letting the audience in on the 'secret' everyone involved can let their hair down. It also lies in the thrill of watching taboos being broken – like a man exposing a stockinged leg through a slit dress – without anyone objecting. Drag wouldn't be drag without that.

Why didn't all this drag change attitudes?

Drag was so pervasive on TV in my childhood I was exposed to it on at least a weekly basis. My dad was not sympathetic to gender dysphoria in any way, yet I've seen him howling with laughter at jokes told by crossdressed comedians. Figure that out.

Like many people who took (and take) drag for granted, Dad did not accept the idea of crossdressing off stage. It sounds like hypocrisy, but the way scripts work means that Brits pigeonhole drag in a different place to many Americans, who (I believe) don't associate drag to anywhere near the extent we do with comedy and pantomime.

For us, drag is about making Christmas fun for kids and about laughing until you wish it would stop – such gendered connotations as it might once have had are so weakly scripted now they are gone. We all have good memories of drag from our childhood, so much so I cannot look at an act without visions of trees, decorations and wrapping paper. It is that powerful an association.

How, if history of drag goes back hundreds of years in Britain, can it have done so little to increase acceptance of the trans community? Because drag isn't – or at least wasn't – about transgender. On the face of it, it seems it should be, but once you know the history, you can see how classic British drag never was.

Which is why the same people who compete for tickets to the best pantomimes for their kids to enjoy at Christmas can insult a trans person to their face should they read them in the street.

Drag didn't set out to shift the dial on trans until recent years in the UK when the beginnings of a change have emerged. I'd hazard that's because we're reverse importing elements of the drag scene that spread from here to the US, a country which doesn't have the powerful cultural heritage drag does here. I may be wrong about this.

What on earth is going on?

What I do know is that as I was becoming aware I was gender non-conforming, the rules were impossible to figure out. People detested seeing men dressed in women's clothes in the street, yet paid money to watch them on the stage. The only model around for crossdressing was called transvestism, which didn't apply to me because some numbskull had tacked a sexual gratification element onto it. Even more mystifyingly, transvestism was only for people assigned male at birth, so where did that leave Ginny? She was as keen as dressing up in my clothes as I was in hers and I was more than familiar enough with her to be sure she was a girl.

Something was off. It took me years to find out what it was.

When the medical model of trans identity began its evolution late in the nineteenth century, it was rooted in the idea of 'opposite' sexes. Female and feminine and male and masculine were the only alternatives because gender and sex assigned at birth were treated as synonymous. We've come a long way since then.

Beyond some vague scoping exercises in which psychoanalysts became mired in Freud's ideas during the late nineteenth century, the first medical model of gender incongruence was Hirschfeld's concept of 'transvestism' published as The Transvestites, the Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress in 1910. Hirschfeld studied both people assigned male and female at birth, of at least four sexual orientations, and helped some through the earliest recorded gender affirming medical care (GAMC). For a psychiatrist of his time, his books, some of which have been translated into English, are remarkably readable.

Hirschfeld and transvestism - 1910

Hirschfeld's theory was based largely upon seventeen individuals who had either been referred or had corresponded with him, so he did not meet them all in person. Though their stories are of their time and some are fantastic, most would pass without remark here, complete with the same emotional rollercoaster experiences and mixed reactions from families and friends. Although nine of Hirschfeld's cases were married, reading their accounts, the first reaction one experiences is how sexually repressed people were a century ago – and how it coloured their entire experience.

Male crossdressing was illegal in Germany and many other countries then, so sixteen of the seventeen were doubly challenged. The other was assigned female at birth.

One of the group, case 13, 'John O' from San Francisco, wrote such a perceptive account of gender dysphoria that if Hirschfeld had highlighted it, the transgender model would date from 1910. But alas he did not. Three of the seventeen were into BDSM, virtually the entire group viewed masturbation with horror and people with same and mixed sex attraction were overrepresented. The title of Hirschfeld's book came from something his 17th case said:

'Except for my erotic drive to cross-dress, I suffer from no sexual deviation from the norm. But this drive, too, does not serve directly as an intensification of sexual feeling but rather is connected with the primary fact that in my mind and in my emotions in many respects I am feminine.'

The majority of Hirschfeld's seventeen patients told similar stories, right down to identifying their conflicts between masculinity and femininity. So did others he recorded later, including more assigned female at birth. Yet despite Hirschfeld writing that across his group of seventeen, '...the awakening of the sex drive... had little to do with the drive to cross-dress,' and despite his explicit disconnect between crossdressing and fetishism, and his clear explanation that his subjects, sought 'the emotional comfort of feeling and performing what is feminine,' it would be the wearing the clothes of another sex for sexual gratification that captured the imagination of the press and psychiatrists for fifty years.

Hirschfeld did everything he could have done to prevent his far-sighted concept being hijacked, writing a long chapter about the gendering of clothing and even quoting Rousseau, who had much to say on the matter. It seems likely Simone de Beauvoir's famous line, 'One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one,' was inspired by Rousseau's 'We are born as it were, twice: the first time to exist, the other for sex.'

Despite Hirschfeld's efforts, transvestism did get hijacked and twisted into a lesser concept than the one he had in mind, but even so, it helped make gender non-conformance a psychiatric diagnosis.

Transvestism survives in DSM-5-TR more than a century after Hirschfeld published, preserved by the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic criteria which - despite borrowing Hirschfeld's term - have little to do with the concept. Hirschfeld specifically included women and excluded fetishism from transvestism after thousands of words of explanation. The APA does the reverse. Why?

I find it hard to imagine the APA used the definition they did unknowingly, because for decades they took the same approach with homosexuality, only dropping it as a pathology when public opinion had turned heavily against them. The one excuse the APA have is the subtitle of Hirschfeld's book, The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress, didn't help his case, but even a superficial read reveals he didn't use the word in the same sense they did. My belief is the APA has as often been a part of the problem as it has been a part of the solution, especially where sexuality and gender are concerned. We're looking at an example of that here.

So often does the APA allow conservative caution to trample its capacity for independent thought that two psychiatrists I have worked with independently described entire sections of the DSM as an albatross hung around the profession's neck. But the DSM has its place, even so.

Transsexualism - 1966

Against this background, transsexualism seemed a big advance when proposed in 1966. The term wasn't new because Hirschfeld had used it, but the sixties version made it explicit gender was the central issue and dropped the link with fetish.

There was immediate and predictable pushback from the usual suspects, yet while it was a helpful idea at the time, transsexualism continued to identify what we call gender dysphoria today as an illness.

At one step transsexualism opened a therapy pathway, but at the price of reinforcing transvestism's implication there's something mentally wrong with people whose gender doesn't align with sex assigned at birth. Sure, transgender people most often do have mental health issues, but they are mostly side-effects of not being able to express their gender, or caused by society's reaction to them expressing their gender.

This time around, the media reacted more sympathetically, even if it couldn't resist being sensational. 'Feeling trapped? It's the body that's wrong, we have sexual reassignment surgery for that,' was how transsexualism came to be understood by the general public – and by many doctors. While this drastically simplified how our community saw ourselves, we embraced transsexualism because it was better than the alternatives.

Remember, without transsexualism, there would be no gender clinics and no gender recognition certificates. Two massive steps there alone.

However, a weakness of transsexualism is it is binary, dropping the middle ground Hirschfeld realised must exist. Under transsexualism's umbrella lie solutions for people who feel trapped in a female body and would like to be male, and vice versa. But there is no place for anyone else and about a third of people diagnosed with gender dysphoria are non-binary.

Transsexualism distorted treatment because of the pressure it put on people going through the system to conform to the one path on offer to them. That pathway was determined by sex assigned at birth, which meant that by the 1970s, many medical decisions were based on how well people conformed to the stereotype of their chosen gender. Logically, this was indefensible, so because of that and all the reasons above, people began questioning transsexualism in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Transgender - 1990s

One of the most powerful arguments against transsexualism was put by Boswell, who wrote 'It is our culture that imposes the polarization of gender according to biology. It is our culture that has brainwashed us, and our families and friends, who might otherwise be able to love us and embrace our diversity as desirable and natural – something to be celebrated.'

What Boswell and others did was truly radical. They laid the blame for gender dysphoria squarely at the feet of society because its ruthless imposition of gender conformance on us all. They proposed that people with gender dysphoria did not have a medical problem, but instead had issues some of which can potentially be treated medically, along with others which would not be issues if society got off their case.

And so, with a single, well-timed blow, sex assigned at birth and gender were split asunder, opening the way for people with non-binary gender dysphoria to make themselves heard.

If you grew up with the transsexual model, which many of us did and which persists even in definitions recommended on this site, it can be tough to see blue water between it and transgender, but in a nutshell:

The transsexual model sees gender as binary and gender dysphoria as a psychiatric syndrome. The person is the problem.

The transgender model sees gender as a continuum and gender dysphoria as a reaction to intense discrimination. Society is the problem.

A bunch of benefits have come with the idea of transgender, including space for non-binary people and a logical, non-judgmental home for crossdressers of any sex. However, transgender's biggest contribution has been to reframe gender dysphoria as a condition made worse by society's stigmatisation.

That last mechanism – highlighting the stigma – brought many, though not all, in the gay and lesbian community on board with us and played a major part in creating the new LGBTQIA+ community. Which is united against discrimination. Well... more or less united. Somewhat united.

Sure, the transgender model isn't perfect and it too is likely no more than a station on a journey toward something better. One issue with transgender is that people with binary gender dysphoria, for whom sexual reassignment surgery has worked, can feel defensive toward the idea. That's understandable, because transsexuality was a perfect fit for them, but looking at the demographics they need not fear.

Transgender has allowed a middle ground of non-binary trans people to emerge. This group was invisible before, but in no way does welcoming them dilute the reality that just under two thirds of our friends are binary. This enlargement of the pool, with non-binary people becoming visible, has caught the eye of governments because with its growth, gender services have come under strain. An awareness of non-binary formed part of the motivation for the Cass Report, yet the revelation that two thirds of trans people in Britain were assigned female at birth and that half or more of them are non-binary has hardly registered with media.

I'm not a supporter of the Cass Report. It has some sense in it, but like every inquiry in the UK this last century it churned through vast sums of public money before bogging down in a mire of the inquiry's own making.

Where next?

The biggest issue with the sunset of transsexuality and the sunrise of transgender is funding for care because the latter is vulnerable to changes in discrimination legislation. Under the transsexual model, the person is seen as unhealthy and in crisis, so medical care is appropriate. Under the transgender model, the person is seen as healthy and agentic but equally deserving of medical care.

Should we swing back behind the transsexual model for fear discrimination laws might be changed? Surely not – instead we should fight against laws being changed should they threaten funding. There is massive funding for other anti-discrimination programmes with large investments in medical care attached and transgender should be no different. Not only that, if society can own and walk away from its discrimination issue, it will ease the pressure on the people whose gender dysphoria makes their lives so much worse than they need be.

Having funding for treatment coming down the medical pathway is and will continue to be necessary, but it has distorted both diagnosis and treatment by portraying our experience as a mental illness.

I don't want to be seen as having some kind of psychiatric illness, firstly because I don't have one, and secondly because it grants permission to every conservative and their dog to paint me as having a mental or a sexual problem – before extrapolating to me being a threat. In doing so conservatives distract attention from their issue, which is their long campaign to preserve discrimination, including but not limited to slavery, racism, the lack of equal rights for women, and most recently their intense opposition to gay rights.

History tells us that while we might the latest target of conservatives, we will not be the last. I shudder to think what the group after us will be put through, but whoever they may be, they will most surely deserve our support. Let's not make the mistake some of the LGBTQIA+ community have made and side with the people who made our lives such hell.

The future

The need for gender affirming medical care will persist even when society relents and accepts gender and sex assigned at birth as independent things which sometimes do not align. Once society accepts that, being you or me will be much, much easier. Don't hold your breath waiting for it, but the day will come, as it did for slaves, people of colour, women, and the gay community.

What I'd love to see is a change from a system whose origins lie in deciding whether people assigned male at birth were fit for surgery, toward one in which sex assigned at birth is irrelevant and the aim of therapy is to help us make sense of our gender – while leaving a choice of solutions open. We are moving toward that, but an end to discrimination would open another, powerful option, commonly known as acceptance or tolerance.

One sign we have reached that point will be the number of people joining Susan's Place when they are desperate and lack any kind of social support falling away to nothing. Instead, people will introduce themselves with questions like, 'All my friends think I might be transgender and I've been exploring it, can we talk?'

In my opinion, the main problem of the full legalization is that the conservative society doesn't separate people who desperately need to to find themselves by choosing genuine gender/s from the people who have come here just for the satisfaction of their sexual kinks (there are people who go back to being homophobic puritans after the satisfaction). Conservative society doesn't realize that transgender people have the limits and morality, sometimes their moral values are higher than homophobes. The deep state society is afraid to allow transgenders into power, cause they think that the state will be destroyed, in fact in the basic fundamentals of the national existence nothing will change. Choosing gender is like a musical taste, you don't care what kind of music a person listens to in order to love and respect this person - when all of the society realizes this, the struggle will be over.

I left my bio at the point where I'd told my partner I was trans. To begin with, she was incredibly sympathetic and we agreed I could crossdress around the house, which worked for me by allowing a safety valve for my dysphoria. In retrospect, this period delayed us dealing with the situation properly, but we've always been best friends as well as lovers and turning to each other for advice and support before we turn to anyone else is built in to how things work. Neither of us wanted to consider anything that would risk that.

It helped I'd married one of the most logical and understanding people on the planet, and although that didn't prevent some turbulence along the line, it limited its amplitude, if this makes any kind of sense.

Having been through a long period where I had disguised my gender incongruence and everything that went with it, I found it temperamentally difficult to adjust to the more open situation I found myself in... and missed an open goal.

This is going to make you laugh, but it happened because my wife, while unmistakably a woman, is primed against some feminine scripts as deeply as I'm committed to them. She's a riot as a partner but if she was the only customer on earth, there would be a cull of fashion and underwear stores such as has never been seen due to lack of trade. Yet at that time, we'd set things up so a consistent part of my expression of gender incongruence was through clothes and to a lesser extent, lingerie.

Our failure to join the dots meant we never discussed this difference in our gender expression led to a compromise where I could crossdress in the house, but didn't ask if we could set aside some space in the bedroom for my clothes. Nor did she volunteer it as an idea. Looking back this partly happened because we hadn't got used to talking freely about how we both felt, but mostly because neither of us wanted to say or do anything which might rock the boat.

By that stage I had mostly worked my way through myself and my partner had accepted I was gender incongruent, but then I tripped her wire because there were days when the really feminine side of me gets let out and it's broderie Anglaise time. Big mistake. I would never have gone there if I'd realised what I was dropping her into.

I know a lot of people are going to read this and wonder, but I have never been in a position where the benefits of the relationship I've had with my partner have not outweighed the disadvantages by a considerable margin. We get each other to the extent friends laugh whenever we have to share food – the closest we ever get to a fight is when we are each trying to give the other the nicest bit.

It took her a while to process the trigger and as she did, we went through a period where she rejected the agreement we'd had where I could crossdress while she was around. This was really difficult for me, but I still had enough opportunities to crossdress to prevent gender dysphoria overwhelming me.

Looking back, those opportunities were crucial, because if my dysphoria had lacked a safety valve, I would have taken a completely different path. I'm not saying that path would have been better for me or worse, only that I would have opted for GAMC – because once I was settled on treatment, any arguments against my crossdressing would have been null and void. Why? Because after GAMC I would have gender appropriate expression.

I'm not offering this as model reasoning, it was what went through my head.

Somewhere along the line I broached the idea that gender incongruence was part of what makes me who I am and taking it out of me would make me someone else she maybe wouldn't love. That hit the nail on the head. My partner dropped her objections to me crossdressing when she was around – accepting it was normal for me and no challenge to her.

This still left us with her dislike of frills and lace, which was fair enough as her preference for herself, but maybe not so fair on me, because I'm fine with either or both. Again, we both missed an opportunity here and it's only in recent times she's seen why and relented. Now and again she'll tease me to flash some item of underwear that would have triggered her in the past and it's become an in joke.

Then we had kids. Once they were no longer babies, we decided I should no longer crossdress around the house when our daughter was there, so we went half a step backward, though only half of one because my wife was okay with me making space for my clothes. So we were open to each other, but somehow never got around to introducing our children to the news. Our explicit motivation was we didn't want them bullied at school, but it turned out they inherited quite enough of our personalities to stand on their own two feet.

Again, looking back, it would have been a better idea if I had at least partially crossdressed so they got used to the idea that was how I was, but there were other areas of my life where coming out would have caused chaos. Back then, if you had shouted the word 'gender incongruence' in the high street, clocks would have stopped. It was a different time.

Rightly or wrongly, our shared view was, 'Let's minimise the risk by keeping our heads down and raise this new family being we have created.'

Bringing up children who have no idea you have gender incongruence is difficult, but our life circumstances made it much easier and again, my safety valve was never compromised. It was at this stage we fully explored areas that helped bring my partner's empathy fully online, with her fully accepting my gender incongruence as a part of me and how dysphoria was something I was highly motivated to avoid experiencing. Together with my need for a safety valve.

From that moment on, any tensions between us vanished. Result!

As I wrote earlier, if I had had few opportunities to crossdress or heaven forbid, none at all, I'm sure I'd have pitched into dysphoria and taking avoiding action would have altered my path. There have been times when my dysphoria has been as strong as anything I've read in posts here, but the way we've lived our life has always provided moments that have allowed me to relieve it. It's helped a lot I've disconnected every unhelpful script I could find - that's still a work in progress, but I'm down in the small print these days.

It took a long while for me to appreciate who I am. Gender incongruence is an ICD-10 concept I find helpful – it applies to me because my natural gender expression is female. If I could snap my fingers and live my life over as a woman it would suit me.

Yet thanks to my safety valve having kept my dysphoria in check for as many decades as it has, I've come to appreciate I have as many non-binary features as binary ones. Reaching deep into my subconscious, if I could snap my fingers again and have the body and voice of a woman but still have sex as a man, I'd settle for that, too.

Reaching even deeper, if I could pass without effort as a woman, then I would be good with that also, but I'm only halfway through thinking that one out and it's likely a proxy for, 'If there was a magical way to avoid being discriminated against for diverse gender expression.'

I'd also be fine with being a native American two-spirit, which is hands down my favourite cultural concept.

It was thinking through all these possibilities that finally led me out of the maze.

Your blog should be mandatory reading. My personal "our h son" moment was when my father called me a 'sissy.' Not quite the same graphic content but equal emotional demolishment. I don't cross dress around my daughter either, and she's 36. I need to ruminate a bit on your suggestion for de-scripting by being more honest in my coming out. I've told everyone. But no one believes me.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 02, 2025, 02:07:36 PMI've told everyone. But no one believes me.

You take the words out of my mouth. Why does no one believe us? I think maybe because if they don't it spares them the effort of having to adjust their framing of us, because that's more challenging than persuading themselves we're playing April fool. If they interpret our behaviour as being us fooling ourselves, they remove their own conflict entirely.

I've had this conversation with a daughter, where I was at home wearing a dress and heels and I was like, 'Do you honestly think I would go to all this effort to prank you when there are so many other ways of doing it?' Even she had to laugh!

It is like the silly notion that we go through therapy to get a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, so we can take hormones, spend huge amounts of money on laser/electrolysis, voice training, top and/or bottom surgery, dress up in feminine clothing, put on our best makeup, do our hair/wig, etc. ...

so we can sneak into the women's bathroom and watch someone sitting in a closed stall peeing.  :icon_no:

Yep, Lori, I can't think of any other reason. TanyaG, I must confess I was a bit smitten with Ginny as I journeyed through your blog. If she's ever in Montana...
I was also intrigued by your take on the Cass Report. It essentially mimicked mine upon initial review. Although I looked askance at conclusions and recommendations, I couldn't fault design, methodology or statistical analysis. Since then, I visited several sites that claim the study was fatally flawed throughout, including claims that Ms. Cass undertook the project for the purpose of dismantling transgender healthcare throughout the UK, especially for children. Do you share that perspective?

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 03, 2025, 12:15:26 PMTanyaG, I must confess I was a bit smitten with Ginny as I journeyed through your blog. If she's ever in Montana...
I was also intrigued by your take on the Cass Report. It essentially mimicked mine upon initial review. Although I looked askance at conclusions and recommendations, I couldn't fault design, methodology or statistical analysis.

Ginny could not have happened at a better time for me, in almost any way I can think of, from helping me understand that gender incongruence wasn't original sin, to understanding that much else wasn't original sin, either. This being an all ages site, I'll pass on the 'much else,' but she's sui generis. Part of why I'm who I am.

Yeah, I agree with you about the Cass Report. It was a committee of course, not just her, but the design, stats and methodology were sound, as you say. The recommendations though... they read like there's a disconnect and come across like someone stepped in at a high level and said, 'You must reach these conclusions.'

One of those disconnects is the mental health aspect. For something so central to gender dysphoria, mental health is thinly covered and there's barely any consideration of how much suffering someone who is trans will be put through if they have to undergo a puberty they don't want to experience because it reinforces the gendering that causes their dysphoria.

I felt the report trivialised that experience, in the same way people have trivialised the experience of you, Lori and I, as we've shared in the posts just now. Only the trivialisation was done on a national scale, making it feel as if it was trivialised to justify stopping prescribing of 'puberty blockers' at scale and reduce them to a (much needed, but smaller scale) prospective clinical trial, which can't be blinded because the effects are so obvious.

At various points the report does its best to assert that mental health problems are what cause trans people to become trans, when as we all know that's putting the cart before the horse as far as the vast majority of us are concerned.

Maybe the government panicked in the face of the numbers of people assigned female at birth who were entering the GAC pathway. The service surely needed rescoping, if only because of the explosion in referrals, but if I was going to conduct a trial I knew would only produce grade 2 evidence at best, I'd have done it in parallel with ongoing care and acted on the results, rather than shutting everything down the way they did. It could take years to get any meaningful results, and the sceptic in me says, maybe that was the aim.

A short guide to how understanding terminology may help with therapy

All of us come across these terms through contact with professionals, or on sites like Susan's, but they mean different things to different people. This post in this much neglected blog is here because Mrs Oliphant inspired it, by prompting me to remember back. You may or may not find any or all of this useful because it's written for all trans people and so considers everyone including 'intersex' people, who face many of the issues we do. This is just one model but it was the one that worked for me and for people I worked with.

English words are as fluid as the language itself, which is why the Oxford English Dictionary has pages of definitions for many. 'Sex' is a perfect example, because while it means the sexual act to some, it can also describe whether a person was assigned male or female at birth. It gets more complicated than that, because 'sex' is weighted for many trans people, not only because most cultures see it as binary, but also because 'sex' is sometimes taken to be synonymous with 'gender.'

At the core of problem I live with every day is I was brought up to be gendered masculine because I was assigned male at birth. Others will have been brought up the other way around, while a lucky few will have been understood by their parents and brought up with a gender that is not congruent with their sex assigned at birth, but instead congruent with their wishes.

The success of trans people brought up like the latter group shows it's possible to bring up someone in a gender which is not aligned with the sex they were assigned at birth, if they wish it so. The dysphoria the rest of us suffer shows how badly it works if we aren't.

To go further we need some definitions, so I'm taking three from the WHO, variations of which are increasingly used by health and social care organisations.

Sex

Sex refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs.

Gender

Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed.  This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time.

Aren't gender and sex the same thing?

Yes... and no, but increasingly pyscho-social professionals, researchers and health and social care bodies are splitting them apart to reflect the lived experiences of their clients or groups they study.

Gender and sex are related to but are different from gender identity, but the key message is that in this sense gender is an expectation by society of someone's behaviour, down to the most nuanced of interactions, based on which sex they appear to be. People are so used to reacting to the smallest clues around gendered behaviour that if even slight mismatches occur, they feel awkward because they don't know what to do. Behaviours that awkwardness will trigger range may extend through denial to flat out rejection at the most extreme, with non-binary trans people often finding themselves in the firing line because they don't conform to any gender.

Gender Identity

Gender identity refers to a person's deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person's physiology or designated sex at birth.

That's it then? You've run out of definitions? Surely?

Not a chance :-) If this was that easy, none of us would be here, would we?

To show how complex the interactions between sex and gender are, gender needs even more definitions, because even here, many people default to a masculine and feminine binary. We've touched on this already, but maintaining that sex and gender are the same orphans a substantial and growing slice of trans people who are non-binary, as well as people who are intersex, many of whom are genetically male, but are taken for granted to be female at birth and so are brought up gendered female.

Whatever flavour of trans we may be, a split between sex assigned at birth and gender is something all of us have spent decades coming to equilibrium with, whatever our preferred gender may be and even if we believe gender and sex to mean the same thing.

Why?

Conservatives would spit gender into a binary, with masculinity and femininity as polar opposites. So the 'more' definitions we need are masculinity and femininity.

Masculinity

Masculinity is a cultural/social model defined by agentic traits and behaviours including independence, assertiveness, courage, ambition, leadership, rationality, dominance, emotional control and willingness to take risks.

Femininity

Femininity is a cultural/social model defined by communal traits and behavior including dependence, docility, empathy, sensitivity, modesty, humility, unselfishness, supportiveness, cheerfulness, emotional lability and a nurturing, yielding nature.

These definitions of masculinity and femininity reflect how society sees masculinity and femininity, not how things are in all human beings. This is because, as the WHO definition makes clear, masculinity and femininity are not innate, nor fixed across all societies and all time.

Once you are onboard with this, you'll understand there's no biological reason why someone who's assigned male at birth (AMAB) cannot be brought up to be gendered feminine should they wish to be, nor any reason why someone who is assigned female at birth (AFAB) can't be brought up to have masculine behaviours and traits if that's what they want. With parents who are supportive of their trans children's wishes, that's often what happens and doing so eases gender affirming care enormously for their children by cutting off a major source of conflict at the pass.

Which is not to say it's an easy path to tread even so, but that's because of other people's prejudices about gender. If you want examples of this, look at the news, which is full of social conservatives (small 'c') who feel so threatened by any challenge to society's equivalence of sex and gender and who are so committed to the sex/gender binary and so threatened by having to change their own attitudes, they feel free assigning criminal motives to anyone who challenges the status quo.

The majority of members of Susan's find ourselves here because we've been brought up gendered in a way with which we disagree. But we are members of society too and so how we understand our personal situation will vary. At one end, some trans people are so strongly binary they feel they've been born in the wrong body and commit to fixing that so they can at last align their gender identity and sex. For them, sex and gender are equivalent, or become so.

At the other end of the scale are non-binary people (rapidly becoming the most common group of trans folk) for whom that solution will not work in any way, for reasons I need not explain. In between are many trans people who feel sidelined by other groups, who aren't truly non-binary and could be described as gender fluid. Some of this group will have found themselves labelled as crossdressers but they are as trans as everyone else here. If you are in this group, you are experiencing another flavour of an issue we all share.

Whichever situation you are in, all of us finds ourselves left to deal with the psychological wreckage of having absorbed at a subconscious level a set of gendered thought patterns, values and behaviours with which we feel no affinity, but which have become so deeply embedded we can't switch them off, leaving them to gnaw away at us.

Sexual orientation

Finally, we have sexual orientation, in some senses the last frontier of transgender. With the exception of a few authorities, right up to the moment Alfred Kinsey published in 1948, the assumption was that if you were, say, AFAB, you should be brought up to be gendered feminine and would be heterosexual. The bad news is little has changed.

Notice I don't say "attracted to the 'opposite' sex" as you often read even here. 'Opposite' implies a belief in binary and few things in nature are binary. Kinsey was one of the first authors to develop the idea that sexual attraction lay on a spectrum and people might lie at any point along it.

Kinsey wasn't a god and not everything he wrote was right, but his assertion that sexuality was not dictated by sex assigned at birth still holds up all these years later. He wasn't the first to suggest it, but was prominent among those who helped make the concept stick.

The 'normative' triad

Despite that, in the binary world our culture regards as 'normative' today, there's still the triad of expectation that someone AFAB = should be gendered feminine = will be attracted to AMAB. Or conversely, if you are AMAB, you should be gendered male and attracted to people who are AFAB. The 'normative' alignment of the triad lies at the heart of assumptions in society about roles and social relationships and exerts an almost irresistible subconscious pressure to conform to the expectations we sweep up under the header 'gender'.

We experience the power of this equation within ourselves because conflict between the first two elements of the triad form the wellspring of our gender dysphoria. But on top of being brought up to internalise being gendered in a way we do not wish to be gendered, we've had pounded into us the expectation we'll be attracted to another sex than the one we were assigned to at birth. This is the least of our worries when we're struggling with the massive issues around gender, but one which has the potential to catch some of us out at the worst possible moment. Why?

Because the normative equation has such power, many of us only came to accept we were trans once we were well into adulthood. Many of us had no choice, because our parents wouldn't countenance the idea of us being trans and there are members here where the acceptance has happened as late as their sixties and seventies. This adds in another dimension, because the longer it takes us to overcome the equation and reach acceptance, the more likely we'll be to have formed a long term relationship... and because the normative equation applies as powerfully to our partners as it does to us.

When someone in an existing partnership accepts they are trans and particularly when they enter gender affirming care (GAC), their partners often smash up against the normative triad so hard the impact destroys the relationship. This is another challenge of being trans which must be faced and it's a complex one, but be aware it's there and with most partners will have to be dealt with. The only advice I have is choose your time and it's better done sooner than later.

Be aware another axis of sexual orientation may also come into play during GAC. A few members have found their sexual orientation has changed to some extent after they've begun the GAC pathway and the change has come unexpectedly. This is possibly the influence of hormones, but it may also happen that when we at last overcome the gendering decided for us at birth some of us also loosen the 'normative' alignment between our gendering and our sexual attraction. They are part of the same triad, after all.

For anyone experiencing this, one way to look at it is just as many of us try to submerge our dysphoria by overcompensating our adoption of the gender we've been brought up in (as in someone AMAB who goes through a period of being hypermasculine) some of us also submerge being mostly straight or even gay using the same process. Hey, it's no coincidence some gay people come out in mid-life, it isn't something that just happened to them, instead, they've finally seen past the pressure to be normative. Just like we did. Their relationships take a similar hit.

This post is an advert for therapy and in the next, I'll explain another part of my journey which contributed to it. Therapy is a powerful part of gender affirming care because if we don't get our heads right, what we do with our bodies will never be enough. Only through engaging with therapy will most of us be able to navigate the minefield the triad has laid at our feet and at the feet of those we love and who love us.

Perhaps one day a court of human rights will declare it a crime to bring up someone in a gender they do not wish to be brought up in. Why? Bringing someone up in a gender that's wrong for them is surely a form of abuse and while it's (wrongly) sanctioned today, societies of the future may look back on it kindly.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 04, 2025, 06:21:44 AMFor anyone experiencing this, one way to look at it is just as many of us try to submerge our dysphoria by overcompensating our adoption of the gender we've been brought up in (as in someone AMAB who goes through a period of being hypermasculine)

This was absolutely true for me, even though I had no clue that I was doing it. In my mind, I was trying to avoid physical assaults, so I adopted the role. To prevent being bullied I had to become a bully. It wasn't until after three failed marriages (and several other relationships) that I sought therapy to figure out what was wrong with me in these scenarios. I was shocked to learn that gender dysphoria was at the root of it all.

Thank you for this post!

Wow! I inspired that? I feel like Little Jack Horner. And I needed to hear all those words. Lori's words, too. Like her, I overcompensated (what normal sissy boy joins the Marine Corps at 17?). But then there is this: as a male, I am heterosexual. The woman I dream I am is also heterosexual. So, I have dreamt, as a woman, of being with a man. Of falling in love with a man. And, living as a man, I have fallen in love with more women than I can remember. Here's the rub, when, as a woman, I am intimate with a man, the experience is sensual and romantic with little to no eroticism. The few times I can remember dreaming of being with a man as a man and the one time I have engaged sexually with a man while awake, there is nothing romantic or sensual about the experience. It is more violent than erotic. And, afterwards, dreaming or awake, I feel as though my body was violated. Even worse, so was my spirit. Where do I fit on any spectrum?   

Quote from: Lori Dee on April 04, 2025, 09:35:58 AMIt wasn't until after three failed marriages (and several other relationships) that I sought therapy to figure out what was wrong with me in these scenarios. I was shocked to learn that gender dysphoria was at the root of it all.

There go we all Lori. I only escaped this rabbit hole by accident and also because I had the luck to meet Ginny early on. It gave me a window into something I'd never been able to see before, or if I had seen, couldn't comprehend. All this psychology probably reads like crap, but it was only through it I found I could understand myself and the motives which drove me.

The hardest thing in the world is levelling with yourself about who you are for the first time. I was as bad as anyone at that. Yet once you've done it, all the pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into place, because you have to level to see its a puzzle. I think?

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 04, 2025, 10:42:10 AMWhere do I fit on any spectrum?

I have no idea where I fit on any spectrum, but I know I'm not as straight as I used to think I was. It's seeing the normative triad of sex, gender and sexuality as a set of clothes you're given to wear, that allows you to imagine, 'Well, what would happen if I had another set of clothes?'

That's where your dreams were taking you. In dreams, we can be whoever we like and wear whatever clothes we like, because we gift ourselves the freedom of fantasy. So in dreams, your masculinity scripts could be unchained, allowing you to have sensual sex with a man (with you a woman), but in real life, you couldn't unchain the scripts, so the experience was completely different and deeply affected by them. I can have a go at explaining that another way if it makes no sense.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 04, 2025, 10:58:39 AMI can have a go at explaining that another way if it makes no sense.

"Twas brillig and the slithy toves..." I'm not sure dreamscapes are amenable to logic and your response was more than cogent and certainly adequate. The man of my dreams is a character I created almost a decade ago and we've been together ever since. But it's not really like I created him or even the woman he holds in his arms when we are together. It is as though they are creating me, and I am compelled to tell our story. Actually, TanyaG, my dream world seems to be the healthiest part of me. Not that the rest of me is seriously impaired or even unhappy. But in my dreams, we are no longer old. BTW, I added Ginny to the long list of women I love. I can do that, now that I am old.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 04, 2025, 12:39:09 PMBTW, I added Ginny to the long list of women I love. I can do that, now that I am old.

I just checked your age and the good news is you don't have to worry about the age gap, because if she's still around, she'll only be a few years younger than you  :)  For me, she'll forever be in her late teens and daring the world to submit to her will.

I'm still in my late teens, too. Might just be a match made in heaven. Even better news: tomorrow, my daughter and I will shop online for a pretty summer dress for my profile picture. I owe you big time, TanyaG.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 04, 2025, 04:13:53 PMEven better news: tomorrow, my daughter and I will shop online for a pretty summer dress for my profile picture.

Zowee!!! Tell her she rocks! And all the other things I'm sure you know exactly how to say to make sure she knows how much she has done  :)

Quote from: TanyaG on April 04, 2025, 04:21:55 PMZowee!!! Tell her she rocks! And all the other things I'm sure you know exactly how to say to make sure she knows how much she has done  :)

I will tell her. And she does rock. Now, back to the issue at hand--I was thinking of something long and flowing. A summer dress. Modest, but bright and beautiful.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 04, 2025, 04:47:46 PMNow, back to the issue at hand--I was thinking of something long and flowing. A summer dress. Modest, but bright and beautiful

Any result that ends up with the pair of you happy with each other when you walk out with the purchase is going to look good on you. Do you know what turned her head on this?

Empathy and therapy for those who love us

Much of the stress of being trans lies in how others react to us and it can be particularly acute with people we've known well and for a long time, especially partners. My experience of being trans is it takes us years to adjust, despite the constant stimulus of dysphoria. If it takes us that long to come to terms with ourselves, despite having such a strong driver toward acceptance, imagine how long it takes for someone else to adjust when they don't have dysphoria?

It's tempting to dismiss people who are dismissing us. I should know, I've tried it. When we reach the stage where we accept we're trans, we're a caterpillar yet to metamorphose into whatever butterfly we will become. At that point, our acceptance of being trans allows us to see the possibilities and rewards of metamorphosis, but others, even people who know us well, only see the caterpillar. It would be asking more of them than the average human is equipped to see to expect them to be enthusiastic at that stage.

I did psychotherapy with trans people from the late 1980s after a UK organisation asked for professionals willing to do it. I never told anyone I was trans because it's about the client, not the therapist, but the skeleton of the story everyone told me was the same regardless of which way they were travelling (as in whether they were assigned female at birth or assigned male at birth). It was a story I shared, so much so I experienced repeated déjà vu.

Sometimes, we need to support others to support ourselves

A significant burden trans people face is in order to retain friends and family, we end up doing their psychotherapy. It happens because contacts of trans people don't sit up and think, 'Hey, I should seek help with adjusting to my partner/relative/friend's' revelation', instead they are usually so overwhelmed they dwell on the impact upon themselves. Which is logical, because for people close to us, the revelation we are trans can feel like a bereavement.

This impact often happens at the worst possible time for most relationships because it leads into a period where the trans person has accepted they are trans and is in need of support, but their significant other (SO) is in emotional turmoil and rarely in good shape to provide it. SOs understandably become wrapped up in dealing with finding solutions to their own questions about how the relationship will work for them, leaving the trans person feeling isolated at a key time.

It's easy to feel victimised by this, but easier and more likely to lead to a good result if you understand it.

The more core the relationship to the trans person's wellbeing, the more abandoned this development can leave them feeling, because a key person has been knocked out and will be unable to provide support at a crucial time. It's common for trans people to become angry about this and I get that, because I've felt the anger too, but indulging that emotion, while understandable, never improves the situation.

One SO who'd sat out a session took me aside after and dragged up a line I remembered from a Monty Python, comparing her emotions on being told her partner was trans to being dropped into a bucket of boiling fat. Unexpectedly and from a great height. Was it just her, she asked?

Around this time I was getting people making eight hour journeys to see me for a one hour session and feeling guilty about that, so this comment inspired me to start asking clients to bring any SOs along, the bait being a free session for the SO.

I openly admit this was mostly out of my own curiosity and I thought it marginally ethical because of that, so I ran it past my psychotherapy mentor... only to find myself having to explain the entire trans scenario to them!

It was long ago now and we were still in the era of transsexualism, where being trans was seen as being trapped in the wrong body and the solution as the hormonal and surgical trope of 'change the body to match the desired sex' aka sexual reassignment, then known as SRS. Right. It didn't last because it couldn't and was replaced within a generation by the idea of transgender and Gender Affirming Care, or GAC.

How our relationships define us - before and after

It was my sessions with SOs which made me realise why many people post SRS were struggling. You could say there are two types of SO, those who've known my clients 'before' and those who had only met them 'after' they disclosed they were trans. I'm using modern language here because 'trans' wasn't a word in common use at the time, but suffice to say neither group had a good understanding of how much distress their attitudes to trans were causing my clients. But because of the dynamic necessary if therapy is to work, I could understand why the 'before' group felt the way they did. Less so the 'after' group, but they have a point too.

The 'before' group had a mountain to climb because they were having to adjust and cope with memories of how my clients were before the revelation as well as achieving what amounted to rewiring their entire relationship with them if it were it to continue. On top of that, they had to complete the task the 'after' group was faced with, which was that every trans person who presented to me was having issues aligning their gender to their post SRS self. Their SOs struggled as much as my trans clients did with this.

Learning and unlearning gender

Gender in the WHO sense (https://www.who.int/health-topics/gender#tab=tab_1) takes at least a decade of constant drip feeding and practice to learn even when it is congruent with our sex and we are growing up. No surprise it takes a similar length of time to unlearn one gender and learn another, even if the other gender is an identity you've held much of your life. Guess what? SOs can take as long to adapt.

Some of my clients had had very successful surgery and hormone treatment, but were only part way through reprogramming their gendered behaviours. Even those who had completed the reprogramming (and a lot hadn't even realised the vast extent of the behavioural changes involved) were still having to cope with SOs having frequent WTF experiences because of frequent episodes where their instinct and experience was expecting different gendered behaviour.

WTFs were more frequent in 'before' SOs of clients who had previously overcompensated on gender (either masculinity or femininity depending on which they were going). All SOs were having to adjust gendered responses they thought were baked into a valued relationship and stressing out trying to adapt to the new rules and responses, but if overcompensation had been involved, the adjustment became doubly challenging.

If the trans person an SO had any kind of relationship with had previously gone through a period of hyper-masculinity or hyper-femininity it could turn into a battleground. At times it was because the hyper phase had attracted the SO to the trans person in the first place, at others it was because the scale of the adjustment needed was too great for them to swallow.

Three tasks

The tasks trans people like you and I go through might be laid out as acceptance, transition, and re-aligning of gender (that is, gender as in the WHO defined sense). The three don't have to be completed in that order, and for some the second doesn't have to be completed, but the first and third have to be addressed. What often gets left out is there will be an additional delay after we complete our tasks 'before' SOs can adjust, as they too complete the first and third tasks.

It was within the first task things were and are most likely to go wildly wrong, though within the modern approach of what is now called Gender Affirming Care the process is vastly better than it was the SRS days. SRS was perhaps a necessary step along the way, but ultimately proved  a fire and forget solution and I'm personally glad it didn't last long. As an approach it was fatally flawed because it reduced trans care to a two card deck in which one card read 'sex' while the other read 'gender identity' and the only possible play was laying one card on top of the other.

That's the basic mechanics, how do we deal with them?

Some who are trans have been so traumatised during childhood they react strongly to the slightest raising of the emotional temperature, pushing everyone away without realising it's happening or why they are doing it. I empathise and don't find it surprising in any way, knowing what some have been through, but this avoidant and often hair triggered response can prove catastrophic where relationships are concerned. It is in itself worthy of therapy if you can identify the behaviour in yourself (or your SO for that matter).

Others had never had any dialogue with their SOs because the SOs hadn't wanted to start it, or my client had avoided it (more empathy, been there, done that, just because you know what should be done doesn't mean you do it etc). Or both sides wanted to engage but lacked the words, or both were jointly afraid of the risk of tearing off whatever bandaid kept their relationship together.

This is a road block that must be overcome because it's only by understanding each other's feelings and motivations a relationship can move forward and adapt to future stresses of GAC. Yet the risk of losing the relationship tempts people to avoid sharing even when they know those stresses have the power to blow the relationship apart.

People who aren't vested in us through friendship or love may bail  early on because it's too much effort and if so we must accept it's the right judgement for them. They lack skin in the game, or put another way, share no risk. But people who are vested in us won't find navigating the road block so easy and instead may resort to denial of what's happening to us and to them.

When I read stories here of how adjusting to being trans is tearing members and their relationships apart, I remember how the SOs I met coped and how people I've interacted with in my own life were affected. I'm more understanding now of SOs who think we must be 'going through a phase' or whatever story they create to avoid looking at the roadblock. The stories are created to protect themselves and avoid confronting risk and I get that, because it's what most of us have done at some stage too.

Except, you just can't get away with stories like that forever, anymore than the Titanic could have continued making high speed North Atlantic crossings in thick fog. Sooner or later, an iceberg turns up in the wrong place and when you hit it, the consequences must be dealt with there and then, even as all around you lose it. Which is why it's better to tackle the issue on your own terms, accepting that while there's never going to be a good moment, there will definitely be some bad ones. Timing is all about avoiding icebergs.

Through catharsis, synthesis

I've learned that sometimes we need to help our SOs as much as we need them to help us, making many, if not most trans journeys a multi-ticket purchase. One purpose of therapy involved in our journey with SOs is to help us and those in relationships with us to identify we've applied a bandaid when instead stitches are needed. That's the easy part. The challenge is helping both parties accept that deep down, they know it's not a long term solution and isn't even a good medium term one.

Part of the art of therapy is keeping a working relationship with your client operational at the moment they realise that, because they'll often dump on you all the things they wanted to avoid and must now confront because of discovery.

It can be extremely hard motivating yourself through therapy when you are trans, but it's also tough for SOs because of the investment of time and emotion they have in you. If a valued relationship is to thrive, you're asking them to travel part way with you through the tasks. If they are 'before' SOs, this is something which wasn't part of the original deal and furthermore, may have been quite impossible for them to foresee. When we've been living for years with something gnawing away at us on a daily basis it can be easy to forget that, but it'll make life for you and for your SOs much easier if you don't.

One last thing. This is an approach with some suggestions and it's in my blog because it is part of me. Dip in and out because you'll find some of it relevant and some of it less so, but if it covers ground you've not considered before, then it will have been worth me writing it.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 05, 2025, 03:07:37 AMwhat turned her head on this?

Yep. I waited until she was in a good place before initiating the conversation. I also explained that whether she fully accepted the validity of my asserted self, my wearing a dress was at least as acceptable as Robin Williams donning female attire in 'Mrs. Doubtfire' (she loves the movie). Also, I'm working on a project where it is essential I present myself as the woman I claim to be. Since my daughter supports the project, she realized she needed to support me. Thanks again TanyaG. Our discussions inside this forum gave me the necessary insight to successfully broach this topic with my daughter.

I enjoy your writings Tanya.

Chrissy

Overcompensation or hypergendering

Have you ever found yourself at a party, or in a bar, or a gym, or maybe in the military, and some topic of discussion has come up which quickly spirals away into a group agreement you don't share? Perhaps you know the others well and perhaps you don't, but comes a moment when they all look at you and you find yourself saying something you don't agree with.

Why did you do that??? To avoid being the odd one out.

We've all been there because it's basic survival to go with the pack's decision. Packs are protective, they look after their own and it takes a courageous or foolhardy individual to stand alone against the majority. Especially when the pack might literally kick you out.

That's the risk. If a pack feels its values are threatened, it may go into attack mode, up to and including bullying and assault, so there's every encouragement from the earliest age not to stand out. Equally, there's so much pressure to conform, or, to 'be normal'.

Gender as a team event

Which raises immediate issues, because we all have different preferences in different areas. Sport teams and their fans are a great example, there are hundreds if not thousands of teams, all with a group of passionate supporters. Walk into the wrong bar wearing your team's shirt and sparks may fly as pack mentality engages.

Imagine growing up in a town which has a single team, with a long history and complicated lore, which everyone passionately supports, including your own family, but when you are ten years old you move to another town, which also has a single team, also with a long history and complicated lore, which everyone there supports, equally passionately.

You can do the math as well as I, just how long are you going to last at school if you don't swap allegiance? So you do that, but end up realising must learn the lore of your adopted team too, adding to the task. In doing so, you feel you're betraying your 'old' team and if any friends from the past come to visit, it'll be awkward. On top of which, your parents, who don't have to live in the feral world of childhood, may still support the team you've abandoned.

Perhaps you'll compromise and support the old team when you're home and the new team at school? But what if someone finds out, like your parents, who don't get how difficult it is finding friends when you support a team they don't.

Experiences of pack dynamics like that are one of the many ways growing up teaches us to conform to values society sees as normative. Over time, some of these values have evolved into complex sets of expectations, one of the most complex of all these groups being the norms around gender.

I've been through gender several times in this blog, but it's worth repeating that in this context, gender is a purely social construct. Society as a whole (clearly, I don't support this, but it is the way) regards gender as a two team choice between masculine and feminine, with the masculine team's stadium in a town called Amab (assigned male at birth) and the feminine team in a town called Afab (assigned female at birth).

Enough already with the team analogy, except to say the masculine and feminine teams have evolved their own lore too. Some of this lore made sense back in the day when might was right and the word of whoever wielded the biggest club was law, but in most 21st century societies, the lore is anachronistic because for most of us, it no longer serves a purpose.

Gender as a social construct is a key concept and if you want to hear it expressed in a single short sentence, think how often you've heard the phrase, 'Behave like a man!' or, the even pithier, 'Man up!'.

By contrast, have you ever heard someone say, 'Behave like a woman!'?

Absolutely no way, because in context, those words would have to be said when a woman didn't burst into tears in the face of a challenge. Even writing them feels ridiculous and if I do a spot of self analysis, I'm catching echoes of a cascade of gendered scripts all of which are spitting out, 'Does not compute.' In other words, my masculine scripts, such as are left, do not include ones written for when a woman needs to be told to be more feminine, in a situation where she's folded in the face of a challenge.

Both the masculine and the feminine scripts expect her to fold. Which is irrational, because there's no reason why she shouldn't be as agentic and decisive as any man, as an increasing number of women are.

The masculine/feminine gender binary society built

The masculine/feminine gender binary and all the complexity of its associated traits endures long past it's sell by date because normativity is a powerful force. It is also a conservative one, in the sense normative gender works against change and in favour of hierarchy, even if that hierarchy no longer has any rational base.

Masculinity

Masculinity is a cultural/social model defined by agentic traits and behaviours including independence, assertiveness, courage, ambition, leadership, rationality, dominance, emotional control and willingness to take risks. Masculine dress style is heavily influenced by these traits and often emphasises control, power, and readiness for action.

Femininity

Femininity is a cultural/social model defined by communal traits and behavior including dependence, docility, empathy, sensitivity, modesty, humility, unselfishness, supportiveness, cheerfulness, emotional lability and a nurturing, yielding nature. Feminine dress style is influenced by these traits and emphasises softness, yieldingness and sometimes so impractical that quite normal actions like walking are a challenge.

One cue that masculine and feminine values (again, gender in the context we're using here) run deep is you probably smiled at the idea of anyone saying, 'Woman up!'. But even if you are a naturally effeminate man or a naturally masculine woman, or any combination in between, there's a close to 100% chance you've been brought up to subconsciously absorb all the traits and behaviours above.

It's becoming more permissible for AMAB people to be more sensitive and emotional, but there's no lack of pressure to be the opposite. It's become very acceptable for women to wear men's clothes, but even that took close on a century to stick. Except within very controlled conditions (as in performances) it's not acceptable for men to wear women's clothes and the only way someone AMAB can get away with it on a street is to try to 'pass'. Even then, members of the gender police will be hair triggered on other gendered cues like voice or facial hair, so there's no predicting what reactions you're likely to encounter.

Why is this so? It's because people aren't very flexible and feel unsafe if everything isn't predictable. Put another way, if they know you were born in Afab, they know you'll enjoy talking about the last feminine team game etc. It sounds trite, but one reason gendering became a powerful social construct was because it stops folk having to think too much.

What gender makes us do because of how it makes us think

Let's go back to the party where the conversation went feral. If the participants are gendered masculine, enough beer and A might dare B. Even if that dare is stupidly risky for B, someone who's strongly gendered masculine may feel unable to back out, despite knowing if anything goes wrong they could suffer life changing consequences. B's gendering makes them feel they should be courageous and willing to take risks and also if they chicken, it tells them they aren't a 'proper' man.

If we swap in a group of women instead of a group of guys, different gendered values come into play, but while challenges will be less common and ones involving physical risk even less so, failure to pass normative judgement will usually have social fallout with equally dire effects.

The only reason these situations don't happen more often is most of us are able to spot the early warning signs and also because once a functional pack is sure of our allegiance, it won't waste time testing it repeatedly. A dysfunctional pack with unstable leadership might test it over and over, though, as will the gendering we've been brought up with should our gender identity be different.

How learned gender punishes us for non-compliance

One way those words in italics play out in real life is when someone's first glimmering they are trans dawns on them. If you've read earlier posts in this blog, the growing realisation pulls up all kinds of scripted responses we can't do much about to begin with (https://www.susans.org/index.php/topic,249043.msg2282584.html#msg2282584), assuming we even recognise them for what they are.

This is part of gender dysphoria and comes out in feelings of disgust at our own trans thoughts and behaviours, all of which, I stress, would have been normative had we been raised in the gender with which we identify. In other words, all the lore we've absorbed about our home team (as in the gender we were brought up in) tells us the pack is going to eat us alive if we support the other team.

I'm leaving out non-binary people for this round, because, clearly, this situation is different for them. But for the rest of us, the instinctive solution is to prove to ourselves we deserve to belong to the gender we were brought up in to avoid being cast out.

If the gendering we were raised with was masculine, the moment we start getting thoughts to the contrary, we'll do everything we can to prove to ourselves we're stereotypically masculine, and if we're feminine, we'll opt for being stereotypically feminine.

That's a problem, because basic masculinity and femininity are already stereotypes which leave little room for manoeuvre, so when someone goes hyper, it's noticeable.

What is 'hyper' gendering and why does it happen?

Hyperfeminine women often tend to view themselves as sexual objects, rather than actors. Typically, they see success as being determined by developing and maintaining a relationship with a man and their primary value in a romantic relationship as their sexuality.

Hypermasculinity is called machismo. Mosher et al came up with a long list of characteristics macho men adopt, which are worth quoting here:

...spends a good deal of time participating in games, sports, social activities, and other amusements; does not want to understand many areas of knowledge and does not value synthesizing ideas or logical thought; tends to act on the "spur of the moment," without deliberation, giving vent readily to feelings, wishes, and volatile emotions; wants to be the center of attention and engages in behavior which wins the notice of others; enjoys exciting activity, especially if danger is involved, and does not avoid risk of bodily harm; does not want the uncertainty of decisions removed by definite knowledge since he prefers to rely on guesses or probabilities; enjoys combat and argument and is sometimes willing to hurt people to get his way or to "get even"; attempts to control or influence his environment and to influence or direct other people; does not give sympathy and comfort or offer others a "helping hand"; is not concerned with keeping personal effects and surroundings neat and organized; and does not describe himself in terms judged as desirable.

Most of the qualities Mosher lists are the opposite of being feminine and it's a long list. The length of the list and its polar nature explains the reactions AMAB trans people experience when they first discover their trans nature. Fear often lies at the core - fear of the pack turning against you.

Fear and self-loathing

Self-loathing is more complex, but can be intense in AMAB people who find they feel better wearing women's clothes to express their gender identity. The gender they were brought up in triggers scripts which spit out a 'failed man' output, with disgust the result because you aren't behaving like a man.

The 'failed man' output computes because masculine men don't like soft flowing clothes, so it's not surprising this kind of self-loathing is much less common in AFAB people, because the feminine scripts they were brought up with allow wearing masculine clothes.

Both AMAB and AFAB people who have fully accepted their trans gender identity often also experience intense self-loathing directed at their own bodies, particularly sexual characteristics, such as breasts (or lack of) and whatever nature gifted us below the waist.

They say it isn't the emotions, it's what you do with them, but fear, disgust and self-loathing is a tough combo to deal with. What many do do with them is become depressed, angry, or both... but there's a tempting escape route.

Why not double down on our home team values?

This route is tempting because we all know how we get caught up in the enthusiasm of crowd on its feet shouting the team on, so it's got to work with gender too, right? Maybe if we're more feminine than feminine, or more masculine than masculine, the cheers of approval will drown out the dysphoria caused by our trans gender identity?

This is where the gender being a social construct becomes really clear. When trans people go through a 'hyper' phase, we do it by turning up the volume on the gender we were brought up in (which is the gender we can't live with) and we do it for two reasons. The first is to send the clearest possible signal to others that we belong to the gender we are amping up and the second is to send the clearest possible signal to ourselves that we do, in the hope the noise drowns out that worrying signals we do not. It's the equivalient of buying the home team strip and and making it luminous.

We can do this because as we grow up, we subsconciously learn, through a process of trial and error, how to send gendered signals. It's a powerful form of non-verbal communication we use to send messages ranging from 'don't mess with me!' to 'I think you're cute, but I'm too shy to say it!' Even if the signals we learn belong to a gender that makes part of us dysphoric, we understand at least some of them. People in a hypermasculine or hyperfeminine phase are acting out the strongest, most commonly understood signals core to masculinity or femininity, so what better way for someone who fears they are trans than to send out a deluge of signals to the contrary?

It would be a 'better way', if it worked, but the end result is to lock us into the same loop of denial and disgust we get into when we throw out wardrobes. Sooner or later, the gender identity hyper is struggling to suppress will reassert itself. Although some people go through repeated cycles of hyper, they only repeat because at the end of each cycle they experience a flip back to the gender identity they are trying to escape. If you've been through one complete cycle, it's a hint you need therapy, if you've experienced two, you should book an appointment and if you've experienced three you needed to do it yesterday.

You'll know if you've been to either 'hyper' destination, but within the trans population, my impression is it's more commonly people assigned male at birth who end up 'going hyper', if you want to call it that. I'm writing this because I'm not reading about AFAB trans people going hyper, but that's not to say it doesn't happen.

There's a logical reason why people assigned female at birth won't, because often the last thing they want is to become pregnant. Also, because people assigned female at birth are less strongly subject to gender policing, it's may be easier for them to accept they are trans at an earlier age, and finally, trans people who are AFAB are much more likely to be non-binary. That still leaves all the issues with body related gender dysphoria, but those would be made worse by an excursion into hyperfemininity. I'd stress how little is known about AFAB trans people, which is shocking, because they are common.

Blogs and intros here often mention phases where members have gone through hypermasculine phases. I can't write about hyper from personal experience, but at a guess, the reason it didn't happen to me was because of my friendship with Ginny. That rewrote some of my gendered expectations at a crucial age, so I believe I have her to thank for that as well as so many other things. For me, it was maybe an accident I never went hyper.

Does it matter if you went through a hyper phase?

Not unless it's left you dealing with the fallout today and in some cultures, machismo is almost normative, which isn't to say it's healthy. Where it can be extremely unhealthy is when you form a lasting sexual relationship during a hyper phase, because if you subsequently flip a 180 on gender identity, chances are the relationship won't survive. That's too much change for a partner to digest.

Are all hypermasculine or hyperfeminine people trans? Definitely not. Many are either what is called anxiously attached or avoidantly attached (or both), which is something else entirely, but of the rest, a few will be trans, just not yet ready to accept it.

In the context of trans, periods of hyper-gendering are understandable, so if it's happened to you, don't kick yourself over it. Within the path of your self-discovery, there may have been no viable option but to go there, allowing for what you knew then. What you can do is unpick what motivated you to 'go hyper', which could be a useful sub task for therapy, because in completing that task, you'll likely gain an insight you might never have got otherwise.

When sex and gender don't mean the same thing

One of the cultural splits on Susan's is between members who believe strongly that sex and gender are the same thing and members who don't. This post is for those who wish to understand why the 'other' group sees the situation as they do and for people who are trying to work their own situation out before they begin gender affirming care (GAC). It should also help explain why GAC works the way it does.

The argument that sex and gender were synonymous lay at the heart of transsexualism, a model which held sway for roughly thirty years between the mid 1960s and the 1990s. Advances in plastic surgery during the second world war had made offering sexual reassignment surgery practical, especially when hormonal treatment became available. For the first time it was possible to offer something approaching a routine solution and in a nutshell, the solution was, 'You feel trapped in the wrong body? So? We'll change your body.'

Transsexualism as a treatment philosophy (https://www.susans.org/index.php/topic,249043.msg2283814.html#msg2283814) worked for a lot of people, especially in the seventies and eighties, but by 1990s, some rough edges were showing and in retrospect it's clear why. Transsexualism only worked if you were assigned male at birth (AMAB) and wished to be female, or if you had been assigned female at birth (AFAB) and wished to be male.

At the time, the latter were a much smaller group and perhaps no-one could have appreciated how material that would turn out to be.

As an approach, transsexualism still works well for people who are gender binary, because the solution on offer is changing your body to the 'opposite' sex. For people who are gender binary it's natural think of sex and gender existing in two paired states, the first being male and masculine, the second female and feminine. It feels natural for them because gender binary is normative, which is why people for whom that norm is appropriate will often, without thinking, refer to those pairings as 'opposites'.

Transsexualism doesn't work for people who are not gender binary. By the mid 1990s this was becoming an increasingly urgent problem because gender clinics were experiencing the beginning of a sharp rise in referrals of clients who had been assigned female at birth (AFAB) up to half of whom were not gender binary. That trend accelerated so much that today, AFAB people form the majority of new referrals, and non-gender binary trans people have become as numerous as the two other groups.

Why doesn't transsexualism work for people who are not gender binary?

Because there isn't an 'opposite' sex/gender pairing for them to swap to. People who are non-binary present in a variety of ways, but at the core for many is they are distressed by the sex they were assigned at birth in the same way that binary trans people are distressed.

There's a saying if you have a hammer in your hand everything looks like a nail and some non-binary trans people ended up being treated as if they were. They completed the transsexualism pathway and went through sexual reassignment surgery (as the process was then known) only to find their dysphoria no better. What had been a good solution for the pioneering groups during the transsexualism period proved too simplistic to cater for the groups who followed, because the nature of their gender identities was more diverse.

Why is offering someone who is non-binary a change to a sex they weren't assigned at birth not a solution?

To what sex do you propose changing them?

Some of the people the system failed by being too binary are coming back now, asking challenging questions. Their anger is being fuelled by conservatives and that's a problem for us all.

In splitting sex assigned at birth and gender asunder, the transgender era of treatment which began in the 1990s acknowledged the plurality of possibilities. Those who prove to have binary gender identities can still be offered treatment similar to anything they might have received in the 1980s, the crucial change being that those who don't have binary gender issues can be identified and offered different pathways appropriate for them.

Few things are worse than watching someone who has been fed down the wrong pathway filled with anger at irreversible changes made to their body in the name of a resolution they could never have found. In recognition of their experiences and because we know the number of non-binary people is rising I believe we should become comfortable with the idea that sex and gender mean different things.

Yes, for most of the human race, sex assigned at birth and gender do correlate. But for trans people, the situation varies from one where our SAB and gender identity lie at different ends of the spectrum (triggering binary gender dysphoria) to one where the answer lies somewhere in between (as in non-binary gender dysphoria).

Healthcare organisations from the WHO downward have accepted there's room for everyone, which is why they've moved to different definitions for sex assigned at birth and gender. Following their example doesn't stop post transition people being happy their reassigned sex and gender identity are now congruent, that's awesome. What the split creates is space for us to understand, welcome and empathise with members for whom the solution is not that simple.

This is fantastic!  Stupiphying!  Eye opening.  We all know this but I for one could never articulate so well!
Thank you.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 06, 2025, 05:41:49 AMOvercompensation or hypergendering

Have you ever found yourself at a party, or in a bar, or a gym, or maybe in the military, and some topic of discussion has come up which quickly spirals away into a group agreement you don't share? Perhaps you know the others well and perhaps you don't, but comes a moment when they all look at you and you find yourself saying something you don't agree with.

Why did you do that??? To avoid being the odd one out.

We've all been there because it's basic survival to go with the pack's decision. Packs are protective, they look after their own and it takes a courageous or foolhardy individual to stand alone against the majority. Especially when the pack might literally kick you out.

That's the risk. If a pack feels its values are threatened, it may go into attack mode, up to and including bullying and assault, so there's every encouragement from the earliest age not to stand out. Equally, there's so much pressure to conform, or, to 'be normal'.

Gender as a team event

Which raises immediate issues, because we all have different preferences in different areas. Sport teams and their fans are a great example, there are hundreds if not thousands of teams, all with a group of passionate supporters. Walk into the wrong bar wearing your team's shirt and sparks may fly as pack mentality engages.

Imagine growing up in a town which has a single team, with a long history and complicated lore, which everyone passionately supports, including your own family, but when you are ten years old you move to another town, which also has a single team, also with a long history and complicated lore, which everyone there supports, equally passionately.

You can do the math as well as I, just how long are you going to last at school if you don't swap allegiance? So you do that, but end up realising must learn the lore of your adopted team too, adding to the task. In doing so, you feel you're betraying your 'old' team and if any friends from the past come to visit, it'll be awkward. On top of which, your parents, who don't have to live in the feral world of childhood, may still support the team you've abandoned.

Perhaps you'll compromise and support the old team when you're home and the new team at school? But what if someone finds out, like your parents, who don't get how difficult it is finding friends when you support a team they don't.

Experiences of pack dynamics like that are one of the many ways growing up teaches us to conform to values society sees as normative. Over time, some of these values have evolved into complex sets of expectations, one of the most complex of all these groups being the norms around gender.

I've been through gender several times in this blog, but it's worth repeating that in this context, gender is a purely social construct. Society as a whole (clearly, I don't support this, but it is the way) regards gender as a two team choice between masculine and feminine, with the masculine team's stadium in a town called Amab (assigned male at birth) and the feminine team in a town called Afab (assigned female at birth).

Enough already with the team analogy, except to say the masculine and feminine teams have evolved their own lore too. Some of this lore made sense back in the day when might was right and the word of whoever wielded the biggest club was law, but in most 21st century societies, the lore is anachronistic because for most of us, it no longer serves a purpose.

Gender as a social construct is a key concept and if you want to hear it expressed in a single short sentence, think how often you've heard the phrase, 'Behave like a man!' or, the even pithier, 'Man up!'.

By contrast, have you ever heard someone say, 'Behave like a woman!'?

Absolutely no way, because in context, those words would have to be said when a woman didn't burst into tears in the face of a challenge. Even writing them feels ridiculous and if I do a spot of self analysis, I'm catching echoes of a cascade of gendered scripts all of which are spitting out, 'Does not compute.' In other words, my masculine scripts, such as are left, do not include ones written for when a woman needs to be told to be more feminine, in a situation where she's folded in the face of a challenge.

Both the masculine and the feminine scripts expect her to fold. Which is irrational, because there's no reason why she shouldn't be as agentic and decisive as any man, as an increasing number of women are.

The masculine/feminine gender binary society built

The masculine/feminine gender binary and all the complexity of its associated traits endures long past it's sell by date because normativity is a powerful force. It is also a conservative one, in the sense normative gender works against change and in favour of hierarchy, even if that hierarchy no longer has any rational base.

Masculinity

Masculinity is a cultural/social model defined by agentic traits and behaviours including independence, assertiveness, courage, ambition, leadership, rationality, dominance, emotional control and willingness to take risks. Masculine dress style is heavily influenced by these traits and often emphasises control, power, and readiness for action.

Femininity

Femininity is a cultural/social model defined by communal traits and behavior including dependence, docility, empathy, sensitivity, modesty, humility, unselfishness, supportiveness, cheerfulness, emotional lability and a nurturing, yielding nature. Feminine dress style is influenced by these traits and emphasises softness, yieldingness and sometimes so impractical that quite normal actions like walking are a challenge.

One cue that masculine and feminine values (again, gender in the context we're using here) run deep is you probably smiled at the idea of anyone saying, 'Woman up!'. But even if you are a naturally effeminate man or a naturally masculine woman, or any combination in between, there's a close to 100% chance you've been brought up to subconsciously absorb all the traits and behaviours above.

It's becoming more permissible for AMAB people to be more sensitive and emotional, but there's no lack of pressure to be the opposite. It's become very acceptable for women to wear men's clothes, but even that took close on a century to stick. Except within very controlled conditions (as in performances) it's not acceptable for men to wear women's clothes and the only way someone AMAB can get away with it on a street is to try to 'pass'. Even then, members of the gender police will be hair triggered on other gendered cues like voice or facial hair, so there's no predicting what reactions you're likely to encounter.

Why is this so? It's because people aren't very flexible and feel unsafe if everything isn't predictable. Put another way, if they know you were born in Afab, they know you'll enjoy talking about the last feminine team game etc. It sounds trite, but one reason gendering became a powerful social construct was because it stops folk having to think too much.

What gender makes us do because of how it makes us think

Let's go back to the party where the conversation went feral. If the participants are gendered masculine, enough beer and A might dare B. Even if that dare is stupidly risky for B, someone who's strongly gendered masculine may feel unable to back out, despite knowing if anything goes wrong they could suffer life changing consequences. B's gendering makes them feel they should be courageous and willing to take risks and also if they chicken, it tells them they aren't a 'proper' man.

If we swap in a group of women instead of a group of guys, different gendered values come into play, but while challenges will be less common and ones involving physical risk even less so, failure to pass normative judgement will usually have social fallout with equally dire effects.

The only reason these situations don't happen more often is most of us are able to spot the early warning signs and also because once a functional pack is sure of our allegiance, it won't waste time testing it repeatedly. A dysfunctional pack with unstable leadership might test it over and over, though, as will the gendering we've been brought up with should our gender identity be different.

How learned gender punishes us for non-compliance

One way those words in italics play out in real life is when someone's first glimmering they are trans dawns on them. If you've read earlier posts in this blog, the growing realisation pulls up all kinds of scripted responses we can't do much about to begin with (https://www.susans.org/index.php/topic,249043.msg2282584.html#msg2282584), assuming we even recognise them for what they are.

This is part of gender dysphoria and comes out in feelings of disgust at our own trans thoughts and behaviours, all of which, I stress, would have been normative had we been raised in the gender with which we identify. In other words, all the lore we've absorbed about our home team (as in the gender we were brought up in) tells us the pack is going to eat us alive if we support the other team.

I'm leaving out non-binary people for this round, because, clearly, this situation is different for them. But for the rest of us, the instinctive solution is to prove to ourselves we deserve to belong to the gender we were brought up in to avoid being cast out.

If the gendering we were raised with was masculine, the moment we start getting thoughts to the contrary, we'll do everything we can to prove to ourselves we're stereotypically masculine, and if we're feminine, we'll opt for being stereotypically feminine.

That's a problem, because basic masculinity and femininity are already stereotypes which leave little room for manoeuvre, so when someone goes hyper, it's noticeable.

What is 'hyper' gendering and why does it happen?

Hyperfeminine women often tend to view themselves as sexual objects, rather than actors. Typically, they see success as being determined by developing and maintaining a relationship with a man and their primary value in a romantic relationship as their sexuality.

Hypermasculinity is called machismo. Mosher et al came up with a long list of characteristics macho men adopt, which are worth quoting here:

...spends a good deal of time participating in games, sports, social activities, and other amusements; does not want to understand many areas of knowledge and does not value synthesizing ideas or logical thought; tends to act on the "spur of the moment," without deliberation, giving vent readily to feelings, wishes, and volatile emotions; wants to be the center of attention and engages in behavior which wins the notice of others; enjoys exciting activity, especially if danger is involved, and does not avoid risk of bodily harm; does not want the uncertainty of decisions removed by definite knowledge since he prefers to rely on guesses or probabilities; enjoys combat and argument and is sometimes willing to hurt people to get his way or to "get even"; attempts to control or influence his environment and to influence or direct other people; does not give sympathy and comfort or offer others a "helping hand"; is not concerned with keeping personal effects and surroundings neat and organized; and does not describe himself in terms judged as desirable.

Most of the qualities Mosher lists are the opposite of being feminine and it's a long list. The length of the list and its polar nature explains the reactions AMAB trans people experience when they first discover their trans nature. Fear often lies at the core - fear of the pack turning against you.

Fear and self-loathing

Self-loathing is more complex, but can be intense in AMAB people who find they feel better wearing women's clothes to express their gender identity. The gender they were brought up in triggers scripts which spit out a 'failed man' output, with disgust the result because you aren't behaving like a man.

The 'failed man' output computes because masculine men don't like soft flowing clothes, so it's not surprising this kind of self-loathing is much less common in AFAB people, because the feminine scripts they were brought up with allow wearing masculine clothes.

Both AMAB and AFAB people who have fully accepted their trans gender identity often also experience intense self-loathing directed at their own bodies, particularly sexual characteristics, such as breasts (or lack of) and whatever nature gifted us below the waist.

They say it isn't the emotions, it's what you do with them, but fear, disgust and self-loathing is a tough combo to deal with. What many do do with them is become depressed, angry, or both... but there's a tempting escape route.

Why not double down on our home team values?

This route is tempting because we all know how we get caught up in the enthusiasm of crowd on its feet shouting the team on, so it's got to work with gender too, right? Maybe if we're more feminine than feminine, or more masculine than masculine, the cheers of approval will drown out the dysphoria caused by our trans gender identity?

This is where the gender being a social construct becomes really clear. When trans people go through a 'hyper' phase, we do it by turning up the volume on the gender we were brought up in (which is the gender we can't live with) and we do it for two reasons. The first is to send the clearest possible signal to others that we belong to the gender we are amping up and the second is to send the clearest possible signal to ourselves that we do, in the hope the noise drowns out that worrying signals we do not. It's the equivalient of buying the home team strip and and making it luminous.

We can do this because as we grow up, we subsconciously learn, through a process of trial and error, how to send gendered signals. It's a powerful form of non-verbal communication we use to send messages ranging from 'don't mess with me!' to 'I think you're cute, but I'm too shy to say it!' Even if the signals we learn belong to a gender that makes part of us dysphoric, we understand at least some of them. People in a hypermasculine or hyperfeminine phase are acting out the strongest, most commonly understood signals core to masculinity or femininity, so what better way for someone who fears they are trans than to send out a deluge of signals to the contrary?

It would be a 'better way', if it worked, but the end result is to lock us into the same loop of denial and disgust we get into when we throw out wardrobes. Sooner or later, the gender identity hyper is struggling to suppress will reassert itself. Although some people go through repeated cycles of hyper, they only repeat because at the end of each cycle they experience a flip back to the gender identity they are trying to escape. If you've been through one complete cycle, it's a hint you need therapy, if you've experienced two, you should book an appointment and if you've experienced three you needed to do it yesterday.

You'll know if you've been to either 'hyper' destination, but within the trans population, my impression is it's more commonly people assigned male at birth who end up 'going hyper', if you want to call it that. I'm writing this because I'm not reading about AFAB trans people going hyper, but that's not to say it doesn't happen.

There's a logical reason why people assigned female at birth won't, because often the last thing they want is to become pregnant. Also, because people assigned female at birth are less strongly subject to gender policing, it's may be easier for them to accept they are trans at an earlier age, and finally, trans people who are AFAB are much more likely to be non-binary. That still leaves all the issues with body related gender dysphoria, but those would be made worse by an excursion into hyperfemininity. I'd stress how little is known about AFAB trans people, which is shocking, because they are common.

Blogs and intros here often mention phases where members have gone through hypermasculine phases. I can't write about hyper from personal experience, but at a guess, the reason it didn't happen to me was because of my friendship with Ginny. That rewrote some of my gendered expectations at a crucial age, so I believe I have her to thank for that as well as so many other things. For me, it was maybe an accident I never went hyper.

Does it matter if you went through a hyper phase?

Not unless it's left you dealing with the fallout today and in some cultures, machismo is almost normative, which isn't to say it's healthy. Where it can be extremely unhealthy is when you form a lasting sexual relationship during a hyper phase, because if you subsequently flip a 180 on gender identity, chances are the relationship won't survive. That's too much change for a partner to digest.

Are all hypermasculine or hyperfeminine people trans? Definitely not. Many are either what is called anxiously attached or avoidantly attached (or both), which is something else entirely, but of the rest, a few will be trans, just not yet ready to accept it.

In the context of trans, periods of hyper-gendering are understandable, so if it's happened to you, don't kick yourself over it. Within the path of your self-discovery, there may have been no viable option but to go there, allowing for what you knew then. What you can do is unpick what motivated you to 'go hyper', which could be a useful sub task for therapy, because in completing that task, you'll likely gain an insight you might never have got otherwise.

Quote from: D'Amalie on April 07, 2025, 08:56:27 AMThis is fantastic!  Stupiphying!  Eye opening.  We all know this but I for one could never articulate so well!
Thank you.

Thanks for the thank you, D'Amalie. It's a long explanation, but I did my best to put it as many ways as I could, knowing how we all differ. If it helps just one person that made it worth writing, so you've made my day!

Thank you, Tanya!

I agree with D'Amalie that you explained this very well.

As one of those non-binary people you so eloquently discussed, TanyaG, all I can say is 'thanks.' Every one of your posts reveals something about myself I never before realized. Because of your wealth of knowledge and experience, your compassion and insight, I am more complete than I was before we met.

Hyper-gendering post transition

Trans people often go through a period of hyper-gendering in an attempt to suppress their trans side before they enter gender affirming care. I dealt with that in my last post, but some trans people go through a period of being hyper after they transition, too.

When this happens, the motives behind it are more complex, but if it becomes a thing in someone who transitions after going through puberty in their sex assigned as birth, it can turn into an extremely rocky road. I had to watch this happening with an AMAB friend, who made a successful transition only to go through an ultra tough patch because they went into a hyperfeminine phase.

Attachment theory

The sort of people we find ourselves attracted to and how our relationships work out depend to a very large extent on what psychologists call 'attachment'. If we have predictable, supportive parents and family, we most often grow up to be 'securely attached' and will be predictable and supportive of our partners. If we have unpredictable parents, we grow up to be 'anxiously attached' and our relationships can be dominated by us repeatedly seeking affirmation from partners, trespassing into being and clingy. If our parents are abusive, then we'll likely become 'avoidantly' attached.

Avoidant people have problems with relationships because the moment the emotional temperature rises, their childhood experiences teach them it's going to end in screaming and fists, which they want to avoid, so they come over as being buttoned down and cold. Putting on that persona makes them forbidding to approach, so reducing the chance of any accidental emotional overflow.

Needless to say, the combination of an anxiously attached person with an avoidant one works extremely badly, because the former is looking for more emotional validation while the avoidant is looking for less and it can spiral into disaster as the latter tries to escape the former.

There are degrees of each type of attachment and you can find mixes of any two in many personalities, but when someone goes through a period of hyper-gendering post transition it is driven as often by their attachment as by any desire to explore the possibilities of their new sex.

Watching a car crash

This is what happened with my friend, who was anxiously attached and strongly binary. While transition mostly fixed her gender dysphoria, it didn't do so entirely, because of all the residuals people who've gone through post-puberty transitions are so tediously familiar with.

However, one of the things which should have been dealt with during my friend's therapy was that part of her motivation for transition was she believed she would find relationships easier if she was a woman. Don't get me wrong, she would have transitioned anyway, but this motive was there.

I knew it was there because I'd known her a long time and we'd never had a discussion about any of her relationships which wasn't about how crazy her partners were for her and how they were always so demanding and intense it wore her out. I had a lot of time for her and still do, but this story of relationships being demanding and intense, coming as it did from someone who was demanding and intense made my whiskers twitch.

Either she'd managed never to have a relationship with anyone who wasn't as anxiously attached as she was, or she was projecting and I was listening to her rationalise the effect her own anxious attachment was having on every relationship she'd ever had. Which was quite a few, because they never lasted.

If anyone is thinking of the word 'narcissism' here, you are not wrong. Some narcissism can be life-enhancing, but a lot is not.

How gender identity and attachment type can interact

Post transition my friend went all in on hyperfemininity in the way she dressed and the way she behaved. Short skirts, five inch heels and plunging necklines didn't begin to describe it, but the defining factor was the moment anyone showed her the slightest bit of attention, she was on it and so much so we eventually had to have a rule that when went anywhere she would tone it down.

That happened after she made a couple of plays for me, prompting me to ask how she would explain it to my partner, who is also her confidante?

One of the issues with hyperfemininity in particular is people who live it often see their primary value in a romantic relationship as their sexuality. My friend turned her sexuality signals up to eleven and that, together with her anxious attachment made everything that hadn't worked about her previous relationships work even less well than it had. It could have worked had she found someone who was primarily securely attached but she never did, possibly because someone who wasn't ultra securely attached would have run away!

Since her previous relationships had been disastrous, the new normal was not great. She fell off the end of it into a pit of depression, but the experience left a lasting mark on her, which is one of the reasons why I feel if anyone reading this has ever been through a period of hypergendering, it's worth raising it in therapy. Explore why you went there and you'll maybe get an insight into otherwise hidden parts of your core personality, free from the fog of gender.

In general, we're a lot better becoming comfortable with who we are than we will be if we shoot for a stereotypical ideal. Gender affirming care will sort out a lot of important issues, but it won't fix non-gender related characteristics of our personalities. The more you understand yourself, the better your gender affirming care will be in the long term.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 08, 2025, 06:22:32 AMThe more you understand yourself, the better your gender affirming care will be in the long term.

Beautifully written, TanyaG. Is the following perhaps obversely linked to your friend's behavior: In mid-life, after my third failed marriage, I became a 'player.' Hypersexually flitting from one pair of captivating eyes to the next. I'm not sure what I was trying to do, but it sounds much like what motivated your friend. Thankfully, getting old and finally accepting my gender variance resolved these horribly destructive behaviors. But I left so much pain behind in the wake of those passing years, and not all of it my own. 

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 08, 2025, 11:09:34 AMI'm not sure what I was trying to do, but it sounds much like what motivated your friend.

A fun question is, 'What's the explanation I'd least like to have attached to why I did thing X?' That can be illuminating, because if the first answer you come up with may not be right, it'll often be close enough a short putt will get you to the real reason.

Having lots of relationships is neutral in itself unless it leaves one or both sides feeling bad about it. On the other hand, if someone is consistently suffering or inflicting emotional pain because of a consistent theme in the way they approach relationships, then there's a problem worth identifying.

When my friend suffered her head crash, she had no choice but to seek help. Sometimes you have to fall before you can see you need to pick yourself up?

Quote from: TanyaG on April 08, 2025, 12:29:00 PMif someone is consistently suffering or inflicting emotional pain because of a consistent theme in the way they approach relationships, then there's a problem worth identifying.

To the best of my knowledge, I never meant for my head (or my love) to hurt a hare's foot. It just so happens that 'I'm a lesbian trapped in a man's body' is not all that bad of a pickup line. I'm just not sure what I wanted from the women who fell for that line. It wasn't conquest or even really sex. It was just something I never found. During those days, I had a recurring dream about a woman's face gazing at me. Her eyes were enchanting. And I kept searching for that look in other women's eyes. It wasn't until I joined Susan's Place, I realized the woman I was looking for was me.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 08, 2025, 12:29:00 PM'What's the explanation I'd least like to have attached to why I did thing X?'

Darn it, TanyaG! I've spent all day on a psychiatrist's couch (metaphorically speaking, I actually watered a bunch of pine trees) pondering the referenced quote. The explanation I most facilely rejected was that the feelings of these women meant little or nothing to me. But then, I remember being involved with three women at the same time and can no longer make that negative assertion with certainty. But I do remember believing my own feelings meant nothing to me. I loved the rush of romance, but dreaded commitment. I carefully tended the flower garden, while allowing the kitchen garden to go to weed. I console myself thusly: I was left more often than I did the leaving. But that's really not much to cling to, is it? Darn you, my friend. Thanks.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 08, 2025, 06:46:34 PMI loved the rush of romance, but dreaded commitment.

I can't see you've done anything many members of the human race haven't, but our relationships and how they turn out say as much about us as they do about the other person involved. The trouble looking back is we remember things that justify our actions (or paint us in a good light) and forget things that conflict, or don't.

That's why asking a loaded question like that one works, because it forces us to consider all the things we edited out to make the story stack up and read the way we want it to. If you've ever wondered why we keep making the same mistake over and over, the answer's in there, we often edit out the clues which would lead us to reach a conclusion we don't want to reach. That can prevent us seeing things which are right there, in glowing LED characters three feet high, burning our retinas.

I'm looking at biographies posted in introductions here and seeing the same story over and over. People get a hint they are trans at an early age, but have been strongly gendered 'the other way' and sometimes spend half a lifetime trying to live up to that gendering. Along the way they get into relationships which fit with the strength of the gendering they were brought up with, but which often fail because they can't live that gender role happily.

Quite a few AMAB (more than I'd expect, but its just my impression) join the military. Is that in an attempt to reinforce the gendering they were brought up in? Wherever you go in the world, more or less, the services are strongly masculine, to the extent of people denying women should serve in them.

At some point this breaks down for us and the dysphoria begins to overwhelm us. We go into therapy after many years, decades even, of misery, denial and outbreaks of everything from depression to bad behaviour and then we are faced with reconciling how we lived our previous lives with what we begin to realise we should have done.

Except if we knew now what we knew then, we'd have done it another way, right? That's the catch and that's why I wonder if most of the people who get caught in the loop I've described above take so long to accept they are trans. The more highly gendered your upbringing is, the more highly gendered your friends are likely to be, the less easy it is to accept you are with a differnt team, the longer it takes to break down.

For some I'm beginning to understand, it never will. They just end up miserable their entire lives without ever really knowing why.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 08, 2025, 06:22:32 AMHyper-gendering post transition

In general, we're a lot better becoming comfortable with who we are than we will be if we shoot for a stereotypical ideal. Gender affirming care will sort out a lot of important issues, but it won't fix non-gender related characteristics of our personalities. The more you understand yourself, the better your gender affirming care will be in the long term.

This is the best summation.  Reality is okay, if you take it to the level you and your circle can handle.

TanyaG, please don't share anything I've said with Ginny. Hope springs eternal. But about 'good-bye'. I've long lived by the mantra that everyone has a right to say 'good-bye.' And everyone has an equal responsibility to hear the word when it is said. Even if it's said in silence. During the past two years, I have heard so many good-byes. Most of them said in silence. I'm not seeking affirmation, merely assurance. In your personal opinion, is the journey worth the silence? In your professional opinion, should I keep screaming, or accept the silence? I try so hard in my posts to be facile and witty. I am so tired of trying. I am stronger for being here; but I am not strong. I am not seeking advice. But I have said so many words to you I never said to anyone else. So I thought I would say a few more. Hope springs eternal.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 09, 2025, 07:38:37 PMIn your personal opinion, is the journey worth the silence? In your professional opinion, should I keep screaming, or accept the silence?

If you're asking the question, 'Are the highs and lows of the journey toward acknowledging we are trans worth accepting we must live long periods where we can't or don't tell others who we are?' then I think the journey is inevitable. If we were born knowing we were trans, we wouldn't need to make the journey of discovery in the first place.

For most of us, the length of time we spend on the journey depends on the product of all forces pushing us to be normative and how much we need, or feel compelled to obey them.

In therapy, I'd reframe your question and ask you, 'What was it kept you silent and what were the reasons you stayed silent for so long?' Those reasons will all be valid, but understanding them will give you a mirror to see your own attitudes toward being trans, which at one time were prejudices against being trans. See those clearly and you can take steps to dismantle the scripts behind them.

I'll not share anything you said with Ginny, but if your question is instead, 'Is it right to allow a relationship to end without telling the other person why?' I'd reframe that too. 'At the time any of your relationships ended, could you have told your partner why?' For many of us the answer to that question is no. We can't tell our partner why because we don't know the answer ourselves.

Many people here have had such a long twilight period between suspecting they were trans and accepting they were trans they've had time for multiple relationships.

For some, the twilight lasts forty or fifty years. I'd add it's an error to assume all relationships trans people have that fail will fail because they are trans. In some cases it will be so, but in others it will be other aspects of their character or their partner's character and relationships have failed for the same reasons they'd have failed for anyone. Look at the story of my friend: the major component in her relationships failing, both before and after transition was her anxious attachment.

Should you keep screaming? My question would be, 'What are you screaming about?'

It isn't the emotions, it's what you do with them and while screaming in itself is okay for expressing emotions, if you keep on screaming and don't deal with the emotions, then you're going to end up doing a lot of screaming to no particular end. Sure, it'll provide a brief safety valve, but if you keep operating the safety valve without doing anything about the pressure of steam making you open it, then whatever's generating the steam is your problem.

For trans people dysphoria is the steam. It's a symptom, not a cause and that's partly why it's so hard to spot we're trans. We experience the dysphoria, operate whatever safety valve we've come to depend on, the dysphoria lessens, we sigh with relief as things return to normal, but then the pressure builds again and we rinse and repeat. It's so easy to be distracted by the dysphoria some people are missing the underlying cause for half a lifetime.

We have a strong motive for going no further than operating the valve. If we seriously consider we are trans, then we are going to have to upend our lives and those of others and it's too much to contemplate as a package. Some other trans people don't miss the underlying cause, they are aware of it, but instead deal with it by denying it and tolerating the dysphoria as best they can.

That works variously well, but in my experience is liable to lead to a difficult compromise, because to suvive denial of something as core to your persona, you must rationalise why you're denying it and doing so turns your daily experience into an increasingly unstable proposition. People who do it (many of us do to at least some extent) end up juggling a cocktail of dysphoria, denial and rationalisation that can and has led to what are often described as 'nervous breakdowns' where they basically regress.

My answer to 'Should I keep on screaming?' - for me - is no, because of those paras above. But we can find ourselves in a situation where say we're on our second marriage with two young dependent children where the choice is invidious and where screaming (as in operating the safety valve) may be the least worst solution for a time.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 10, 2025, 02:44:33 AMShould you keep screaming? My question would be, 'What are you screaming about?'

Your words were beautifully written and touched my heart. I am on this journey and there is no turning back. I refuse to go back. A few days ago, I sent my three more or less accepting sisters a link to a paper by Dr. Anne Vitale--The Gender Variant Phenomenon. You're probably familiar with Dr. Vitale and the paper referenced. She captured the essence of my experience with such insight and compassion her words brought me to tears and I thought, perhaps, if my sisters read Dr. Vitale's words they would finally understand what I've been trying to tell them for almost two years. So, I 'screamed' at them to finally hear me. None of my sisters responded with so much as 'I'll take a look at it.' In fact, as of this moment, there's been no response at all. Bringing the people I love along with me on this journey is exhausting. And I'm about to stop trying.   

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 10, 2025, 10:56:39 AMBringing the people I love along with me on this journey is exhausting. And I'm about to stop trying.   

There is a difference between dragging someone along with you because you want them there, and allowing them to join you because they want to be there. Be mindful of that.
 

Quote from: Lori Dee on April 10, 2025, 11:03:32 AMThere is a difference between dragging someone along with you because you want them there, and allowing them to join you because they want to be there. Be mindful of that.

Thanks, Lori. My one brother and two other sisters have made it clear they do not support me in my transition. I'm fine with that. If I'm hearing you correctly, you're suggesting I get on with my life and leave the door open to those who choose to enter my world. I like that idea. If I take your advice, tomorrow might be much less stressful today. Thanks again.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 10, 2025, 11:25:02 AMThanks, Lori. My one brother and two other sisters have made it clear they do not support me in my transition. I'm fine with that. If I'm hearing you correctly, you're suggesting I get on with my life and leave the door open to those who choose to enter my world. I like that idea. If I take your advice, tomorrow might be much less stressful today. Thanks again.

Yes, it is your path to walk, not anyone else's. Let them know that they can come with you, but there is no pressure to do so. Some people will never understand, so if they choose not to come along, that is their choice, not yours.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 10, 2025, 11:25:02 AMMy one brother and two other sisters have made it clear they do not support me in my transition. I'm fine with that. If I'm hearing you correctly, you're suggesting I get on with my life and leave the door open to those who choose to enter my world

We can't make others decide the way we would decide and if they've made it clear they're not offering support, that has to be respected. As Lori, says, all you can do is leave the door open and continue your journey.  Otherwise, your life will forever be in their hands.

Nothing you are doing harms them in any way, so you've nothing to apologise for and no reason to look back.

I'm not sure if this'll help, Mrs Oliphant, but a friend tells this story about how he rang to tell me he was a closet bisexual and my response was, 'Thanks for letting me know, what's the reason for the phone call?"

He speaks at public events and he's good at it, usually has the audience begging him to stop telling jokes so they can draw breath, but he says I was the only person who he told early on who didn't reassess the value of his friendship based on his newly-declared sexuality. When he asked why I was cool with it, I told him I had no idea about the sexuality of 99% of the people I knew, so why should I care about his any more than theirs?

I've learned to think like that, some people naturally think like that, but most people don't. They see normativity as a zero-sum game in which if they're associated with someone who doesn't fit their view of normal, they lose somehow. Thinking like that runs deep and is hard to shift, but it's common.

I believe we have a definite duty of care toward those in intimate relationships which we began after we knew we were trans if we didn't tell them before the relationship began. We also stand to gain by doing a degree of supportive psychotherapy to others who want to support us, but are struggling. We owe none at all to those who reject us, whether kin or not, because the rejection is their decision.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 10, 2025, 01:08:32 PMWe owe none at all to those who reject us, whether kin or not, because the rejection is their decision.

I needed to hear that. Also, I've been ruminating about a question you asked in an earlier post: why do so many people like me enlist in the military. I didn't assume the question was rhetorical, but I didn't have an answer until I thought for a time about who I was when I was seventeen. I didn't join the Marine Corps to prove my manliness or validate my virility or because I thought it was macho; I enlisted because I found the order, discipline, and camaraderie so alluring. If someone asked me who I was, I had an answer: I was a marine.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 10, 2025, 03:34:41 PMI had an answer: I was a marine.

That makes good sense because I've not come across anyone who has joined the armed forces because they were trying to escape themselves, though I can see why someone might.

Why am I transgender?

Someone asked this recently and it's a great question. It's also a great way of introducing different theories about why trans people exist at all.

Many psychosocial arguments bog down over what's called 'nature versus nurture' because so much of us is the product of those two things. Yet every time I think about nature vs nurture, I can't help recalling the arguments around the fight for gay rights, where the gay movement came within a whisker of defeat by conservatives. Infighting between those who claimed they were born gay and the rest, split the movement and diluted its message.

So it is with the transgender movement. Some of us believe being trans is a genetic or biological trait we were born with, putting them on the 'nature' side of the argument. Others tend to the 'nurture' side of the argument, which is that something, somewhere along the way, made us trans. Most haven't thought about it at all, because we're too busy dealing with the social and psychological fallout of being trans.

So if you've wondered why you're trans, here's a skeleton to help pick through your own, unique case. Good luck with it!

Nature

One way of summing up the nature arguments is that trans people were born in the wrong body. Underlying the nature argument is an assumption that gender and sex are the same and upbringing has nothing to do with our conflict. Instead, we were born with a female brain in a male body, or a male brain in a female one.

The theory of transsexuality was based on this assumption and the idea that if you altered the sex specific characteristics of someone's body to match their gender identity, it would be a fix. Transsexuality was deprecated during the 1990s and replaced by transgender theory because the latter is more inclusive, but transsexuality works well for trans people who are binary.

In recent times, neuroscientists have flirted with the idea of 'female' brains and 'male' brains, which has been popular with binary trans people for obvious reasons, and then there's the elephant in the room, which is sex hormones, aka what I call oestrogen but many readers call estrogen, and testosterone. Surely, if there are only two sex hormones and women produce estrogen and men testosterone, then there are only two genders?

That would be okay if there were only two sex hormones, but E and T aren't the only players, and second, people with testes naturally produce estrogen from fat and last time I checked, one of the byproducts of breaking down female sex hormones is testosterone, which is why women always have measurable levels of it. You can't even use a minimum level of either hormone to establish if someone is male or female because of postmenopausal women, natural variability and last but not least because of a condition called Congenital Androgen Insensitivity, where you can have sky high levels of T but appear female because your body isn't responsive to sex hormones.

Which leads us to the minefield of intersex, about which entire textbooks have been written and which some binary people would prefer to forget. Things are somewhat better than they were, but the pressure to take quick decisions at birth and bring intersex people up in a binary gender based on those decisions has left a trail of devastation because many of those choices have turned out to be wrong.

The message is nature never makes anything binary in the same way five out of six people are right handed, one in six are left handed and a few are ambidextrous. Nature always has an insurance policy.

Nurture

The nurture view is gender and sex assigned at birth are different (read the widely adopted WHO definitions here (https://www.who.int/health-topics/gender#tab=tab_1)) and aren't necessarily aligned in all people. In even using the word transgender, we are aligning themselves with the concept that we aren't born with a gender identity, but instead that we develop one.

While gender usually aligns with the sex we were assigned at birth, sometimes it either doesn't, or can't.

Childhood development

To understand 'nurture' theory, we need to understand a bit about childhood development.

When we're born, many parts of us, both physical and mental, are so underdeveloped we are helpless. We can't crawl, we can't sit up, we can't feed ourselves and our eyesight is so poor we can't even see well enough to learn to smile back when someone smiles at us. Smiling takes at least six weeks.

At birth, we are assigned a sex, but have no concept of being male or female, or any other sex. Very early on we learn from experience who cares for us most and because they're crucial to our survival and usually around, we learn from them before we learn from anyone else.

So far, so good, but at this stage we're a like a computer without an operating system, uncritically absorbing every experience, and intensely narcissistic because our world is tiny and from our point of view, entirely focussed on fulfilling our needs. Our greatest exposure is to our parents, or carers, so if they have traditional gendered roles, our early concept of femininity will be biased towards our mother's traits and our concept of masculinity biased toward our father's.

To use the computer metaphor, the first building blocks of our operating system will be the values and behaviours of our parents, whether we like them or not. They are all we know, so what they do and think is what we learn and their values go in earliest and deepest.

This is why therapists are so obsessed with in our childhoods, even though we rarely remember much detail. What we do remember can be highly significant and sometimes, that's why we remember it, but it may be symbolic, because much childhood thinking is more magical than logical.

If we have wider family, their values and those of neighbours are the next we come across, and as we grow older, so our social circle widens and the influence of our parents, while still important, becomes diluted, although it remains highly influential. The attitudes and behaviours of our playmates and school friends begin to shape us and we learn the importance of conforming (what social scientists call 'normativity') and pack dynamics.

In an earlier post (https://www.susans.org/index.php/topic,249043.msg2298206.html#msg2298206) I went through why it doesn't pay to stand out in any way at school, unless you are making a play to be pack leader and even then, popularity usually means being ultra conforming, while being bullied is usually the result of being different.

Plasticisty

No baby arrives with a concept of being feminine in its head, or masculine, instead we learn them by example as we grow up. During our first few years, we learn boys and girls are different, without any concept of sexuality, because that develops in our teens. Through the whole period during which gender and sexuality are programmed into our operating system, our brains are what is called 'plastic', a state which lasts into our early twenties. After that, the brain is less so.

For most, gender identity is baked in before the end of our brain's plastic phase and is consistent with sex assigned as birth, but the 'nurture' theory allows it to be baked in either way, or not at all.

What do I mean by 'baked in either way'? Your brain can exit the plastic phase with the firmware set to match your sex assigned at birth, to match another sex, or with the variables unset.

There's a book which explores some of these concepts very deeply. It's called Gender by Soft Assembly, but it's written by an analyst and tough going even if you've a background in the field. It isn't specifically about being trans, but I can't think of another work which maps out how the maze of all the different social forces acting upon us to program gender.

Normativity

Ultimately the single most powerful forces acting to program gender are example and normativity. We want to be like people who are like us, so we copy the codes in the operating system they use. Repeated execution of the code makes it feel like nature wrote it, but you can easily make a case that none of the traits and ways of thinking intrinsic to masculinity or femininity need be linked to being assigned male at birth of female at birth. Nature provides numerous examples of species which do the opposite of what we do.

The nurture theory of trans suggests that somewhere in the complex process of programming our gender through example, we begin to follow a different example to the normative one because the alternative aligns more closely with our sense of self.

No smoking gun

Despite having had fifty years to read the literature and life stories of trans people and in the process of digging into what makes me and other trans people tick, I've yet to find a common thread which explains what made us as we are. My bioscience background screams at me that there's no smoking gun because our learning of gender is so complex that tiny stimuli at crucial moments may have made all the difference in some of us, while having no impact at all in others.

If that's right there's no common cause and it also explains why most of us haven't the faintest clue why we're trans, just that we are. If there is a clue, in the vast majority of us it will have faded to the point of undetectability and so much of the rest of our character will be predicated on it that even if we could pinpoint it we couldn't change it without the risk of destroying our entire personality. Think of your own battle with dysphoria and you'll get a window into the epic scale of the forces involved. Fancy going in there again? I thought not.

I've found that a powerful tool when I tell people why being trans isn't an optional part of me, or some phase I'm going through. If others get even a glimmer of understanding of how core trans is to our everday experience, it affects them.

Room for everyone

So, while 'nature' aka transsexualism and a belief we were born in the wrong body is a shorthand that works for some, 'nurture' is equally viable and more inclusive. In my mind there's room for both and who knows, one day we may find the answer spans both theories.

However, even if you are a strong believer in 'nature' being the root of you being trans, be aware when you are accepted into a gender affirming care pathway today, you are entering a world in which sex assigned at birth and gender are regarded as different things by almost all the professionals you meet. In a pathway which as many non-binary people are engaging as people whose gender identity is either male, or female, the binary model underlying transsexualism is no longer appropriate for everyone.

Putting 'trans' before 'gender' leaves you free to anchor your gender where it best fits, or even to abandon the concept as irrelevant to you.

The 'nature' argument has practical uses, just like the 'nurture' one. Lived trans experience involves contact with people who feel they've 'lost something' by having to accept and deal with us. That 'loss' might be discomfort at not knowing how to behave around us, or it might be a feeling of responsibility in a parent who feels they're responsible for 'making us' trans.

This sense of loss is particularly difficult for parents, who've usually brought us up as they did because they thought it was the best way, only to find themselves confronted with a child who isn't normative. Accepting a transgender child is a challenge for all, but the more conservative parents are, the more the challenge scales.

Conservative people tend to have 'zero sum' thinking and can often see a gain in happiness which isn't consistent with their values as a loss in happiness (or even disrespect or an insult) for them. Many interpret our trans-ness as a reflection on them, or as a failure by them, instead of a benefit for us. In that frame, our gain is their loss.

Deploying the nature argument is a tempting way of dealing with zero-sum, because it absolves everyone involved, especially family, of any degree of responsibility. They feel relieved and if they love you still, it might be enough to tip them into acceptance, though it usually won't because their problem lies in accepting your change of gender identity, not accepting the whys or wherefores.

But I'd deploy the argument in a snap if I was confident it would work, because it's a cheap win.

The nature argument can also help us deal with our own doubts about our trans-ness, which, by definition, almost all of us have or have had because they are one of the drivers of dysphoria. Most of us spend a period of months, years or decades moving between a place where we suspect we are trans, which is characterised by doubt, disbelief and denial, to one where we accept we are trans, characterised by resolution and action.

In the space between us suspecting and accepting, the nature argument can help kill doubt and reduce dysphoria. We've seen it can let others off the hook, but it can be a powerful weapon if you aren't good at dealing with uncertainty.

Be aware it can also be a form of denial in itself. The more we deny, the more vehement we become in defence of our denial, the less tolerant we become of others and the more likely we will be to make mistakes because denial shuts down courses of action we might have optioned had we been able to consider them.

The 'transsexuality' phase of care foundered on that very rock, which proved a huge learning point for all the carers involved.

As I wrote in my last post, there's no smoking gun to explain why we're trans and there possibly never will be. The nurture theory of gender identity doesn't explain everything, nor does the nature theory, but elements of each can be extremely useful in understanding why we are the way we are, why modern gender affirming care relies on the definitions it does, and for explaining how we are to others.

You could describe both the nature and the nurture theory as ideologies, but that's close to gaslighting because an ideal is central to any ideology and neither theory expresses or even hints at an ideal.

Instead we're looking at toolkits which we're using to try and fix an engine some madman built with a combination of metric and AF threads, or, if you're older, Whitworth and AF, several of which I've had the misfortune to own. Which tool we use depends on which bolt we're trying to undo and I'm minded not to approach a piece of delicate machinery my well-being depends upon using the wrong socket set when I own both!

I don't disagree with a word you said, TanyaG. And all those words helped me understand myself better. I've always been a 'nature' advocate (due in no small part to my revulsion regarding John Money). So, you offered me the first cogent argument for 'nurture.' That being said, is it possible there is also a mystical/spiritual component to sex and gender? I ask because when my wife was pregnant with our daughter and before we had a determinative ultrasound, my wife passed out while we were waiting in line to rent a VHS movie (that's how old I am). I revived her using Boy Scout first aid techniques, but she was out for several minutes. I was so worried about our baby. That night, I dreamt I took the infant that would someday be called 'Hannah' from my wife's womb and we visited and played together. I thought I was playing with my son but was embarrassed (not for me, but for him) because he didn't have a penis. In my dream, he told me I needed to return him to the womb. So I did. My daughter is the most beautiful woman in the world and she has strong masc tendencies (she never wears a dress and often has a hammer or a rifle in her hands). I don't know. Anecdotes can be used to justify anything and are not amenable to replicable research. But that doesn't make them untrue.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 12, 2025, 11:01:49 AMThat being said, is it possible there is also a mystical/spiritual component to sex and gender?

If there is an answer, it's we don't know. I think it's most likely there's a wide variety of reasons why people are trans some of which are nature and some nurture. The theories offer people tools to help find their way through their personal maze, but it's even if we had a definitive answer, it wouldn't be possible to unwind gender identity any more than it's possible to unwind someone's sexual preferences. Nor would it be logical, or fair because we'd put them through hell twice.

Your mention of your daughter reminds me of another story of Ginny. Her parents were away a lot, so we were often alone in the house, during which time she threw her wardrobe wide and plunged us into a long period where we swapped roles as freely as our clothes. We made all the rules and continually dared each other to go further but it was very affectionate. I vividly remember her saying, 'I'll teach you how to be a girl if you teach me how to be a boy,' so this was definitely a two way trade.

I can remember spinning coins to choose who we were going to be. And staging a performance of part of Romeo and Juliet with her Juliet, but dressed as Romeo, and me the other way around. The audience went to sleep midway, but as dogs go, he was quite old, so we forgave him.

That changed me. It loosened the bonds of how I personally experienced gender and it did the same for her. All these years later, there's some of her about me and, I like to think, some of me about her. It was a good experience.

David Reimer (John Money's patient) was someone who neither by nature nor nurture was trans. If poor David's chilling story is to benefit future generations, it's that you can't bring up someone whose gender identity develops to be strongly masculine as a female, or vice versa without terrible consequences. If you've read Colapinto's book, David's gender id was developing by the time he was about four or five and its no coincidence many here began to experience their first realisation something's going wrong with the way we're being raised at about the same age.

Bringing us up in a gender we're unhappy with is clearly a very bad idea. Why then, is fire and brimstone not descending on the heads of parents who bring up children who are trans as cis?

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 12, 2025, 11:01:49 AMis it possible there is also a mystical/spiritual component to sex and gender?

As a life-long mystic, I believe that there is.

When we understand that our subconscious mind is intimately linked with spirit (Holy Spirit, Vital Life Force, or whatever name you want to use), it makes sense that it could affect the developing fetus in the womb. We know that this link exists because the subconscious is the innermost part of who we are, and that the conscious mind has not developed yet. Yet the body still knows how to fight infections, heal wounds, and do what is needed to survive, long before the brain has had a chance to develop any form of "intelligence". Self-awareness is one of our first conscious activities, so we "know" who we are before we have had a chance to figure out what hands and feet are for. That is just my sense of it anyway.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 12, 2025, 03:24:14 PMWhy then, is fire and brimstone not descending on the heads of parents who bring up children who are trans as cis?

I'm assuming (always dangerous) the question is rhetorical. I am familiar with David Reimer but not Colapinto's book (though I soon will be). And I fully agree; knowing what is in the sausage is unlikely to make it taste better but may very well make you become a vegan. As for Ginny, the more you share her story with me, the more enamored I become. In my experience, Ginnies are vanishingly rare. Maybe that's the answer to your rhetorical question: parents should raise their children, cis or variant, to be just like Ginny.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 12, 2025, 04:08:25 PMI'm assuming (always dangerous) the question is rhetorical.

Semi-rhetorical?

At a logical level I can't see a difference between Money's attempt to bring up David Reimer (whose natural gender id when it emerged was strongly male) to be gendered female and what has befallen many of us here. Plenty of members of Susan were brought up to be gendered strongly male despite having expressed their natural gender id as being strongly female to their parents. Or, conversely, that they didn't want to be gendered strongly female when their natural gender id was strongly male. Or they were non-binary and didn't want to be brought up in any gender.

A large part of what destroyed David (it wasn't all of it, because there was other, seriously bad stuff, if you read Colapinto's book, which destroyed his poor brother too) was a deliberate attempt to ignore a child's expressed wish to live a life consistent with his gender identity.

Read enough biographies here and you can see parents getting away with doing what Money did, except there was only one of him and there are tens of thousands of them. Such parents get to hide behind a screen of compliance with society's norms, their excuse being they are gendering their children to match their sex assigned at birth. Money didn't have that excuse, which is why what he did stands out so much and is so reviled.

But the experience of any child brought up to live with a gender they can't cope is similar to David's, yet no-one is turning around and condemning parents for doing it.

Some members have correctly identified this as what it is, while others have rationalised it. A few have engineered explanations designed to let their parents off the hook and to to give themselves permission to love their family and avoid dealing with what went on. That's a form of Stockholm syndrome and I saw it over and over in people I worked with, as you do in victims of any form of abuse. Some among us took so long to understand our gender identity that our parents can't be blamed because we never told them at the time.

Anyone who did tell their parents and who was ignored was cast into the same fire as David. If you take away the fig leaf of normativity, they were abused at a deep and intensely destructive psychological level. Just as he was.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 12, 2025, 11:01:49 AMMy daughter is the most beautiful woman in the world and she has strong masc tendencies (she never wears a dress and often has a hammer or a rifle in her hands).

That phrase would describe half the women I grew up with and perfectly encapsulates something women can do which men can't because men are so more strongly gender policed than they.

I just looked up the word tomboy and found it emerged with its current meaning in English during the sixteenth century, so women with a mix of masculine and feminine gender identification have been identified for a long time. I guess they've existed even longer than the 500 year history of the word tomboy suggests, given the human race doesn't change very much.

Until the 1914 European war, standards for women's dress were highly gendered, but with every available man in the armed forces, women had to work in factories and you can't work in a dress. They were allowed to wear trousers, boots, work shirts and jackets because they were more appropriate, but it was such a big change government declarations had to be involved and it became policy. So many women enjoyed the freedom that by 1945 the swing of the pendulum was unstoppable and by the 1960s women whose natural gender identity wasn't highly feminine had carved out a slice of fashion for themselves and could walk down any street without fear of discrimination.

In the process, women changed the bounds of femininity as society accepted it. The change they wrought is a good example of why social scientists and the whole GAMC system see gender (WHO sense) as a social construct and not as an innate property of the human race. How we think of gender changes across societies and over time.

Reframing this (I find reframing irresistible because of the way it changes everything you see by altering the angle of the mirror) I could be compared to the assigned male at birth equivalent of a tomboy.

I can't think of a word for it. Janegirl? That sounds crazy, but only because it hasn't been around half a millennium. There was a time when I thought seriously about transitioning. I had laser twenty years ago, or whenever I first judged it was safe. But then I reframed and thought about what my gender identity would be if I didn't have to live with society's definitions and pressures.

It was extremely hard to do, despite being steeped in psychology and life sciences and having an analyst on tap who I didn't have to pay for, but I finally realised I'd spent decades failing to see what our Romeo and Juliet had been telling me. That was a long time ago now.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 12, 2025, 11:01:49 AMMaybe that's the answer to your rhetorical question: parents should raise their children, cis or variant, to be just like Ginny.

For some of us, me included, it would work just fine. Tomboys have carved out a much loved exception that crosses the gender divide, but society's construct of gender isn't forgiving enough to allow the same to happen for people who are assigned male at birth.

I'm beginning to think I should get back in touch with Ginny, if only to find out what she thinks of all this. It's a shame the dog is dead now because he saw at least half our play before he dozed off and he has to have had an opinion of his own  :)

Quote from: TanyaG on April 13, 2025, 04:20:02 AMIt's a shame the dog is dead

That was one lucky dog! I can almost visualize you and Ginny strutting across a makeshift stage filled with sound and fury. I ordered Colapinto's book. In a few weeks, I will read it and, if my memory is accurate (which it seldom is anymore), offer a rebuttal to the possibility of nurture playing a significant role in gender variance. Partly because I equate Money with the likes of B.F. Skinner and even James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. The cruelty so many parents imposed on their children was justified by words such as operant conditioning and conversion therapy. My parents had no awareness of the pain they inflicted upon me. More tragically, neither did I. The excuse of ignorance or using cherry-picked data is no longer viable. Not if we refuse to give credence to such brutal nonsense. I love you, TanyaG, and I am fully aware that the depth of my experience, qualifications, and compassion pale in comparison to your own. But I need to be convinced nurture had a darn thing to do with who I am. At least in regard to my queerness.     

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 13, 2025, 09:27:10 AMBut I need to be convinced nurture had a darn thing to do with who I am. At least in regard to my queerness. 

Don't get me wrong, I don't think nurture necessarity played much if any role in how many of us turned out and you would probably know if it had done in your life. I'd put 'understanding why we are trans' some way down the list of 'things do do' because of what I've written before: there isn't anything we can do about it. But it can be useful knowing about it because of how our gendering develops.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 13, 2025, 09:35:02 AMI'd put 'understanding why we are trans' some way down the list of 'things do do'

And I fully understand that, TanyaG. I'm concerned allowing 'nurture' into the discussion enables the justification for destructive therapies and the withholding of effective treatments. Even Hilary Cass said to provide all the talk therapy a child could endure, just don't give them any puberty blockers and never say HRT until they're so old they need their larynx shaved. You are an amazing therapist. Every time I ask you a question, you respond with a peer reviewable paper. I'm just frustrated. I wish there was a way to get the gender variance discussion out the hands of politicians and back into the hands of the gender variant, their families, and their medical providers. It just makes me sad. And sometimes angry.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 13, 2025, 11:13:39 AMI'm concerned allowing 'nurture' into the discussion enables the justification for destructive therapies and the withholding of effective treatments

It's far better to recognise abuse as abuse than to collude with abusers by allowing them to label what they are doing as treatment. In other words, an abuser should never be allowed to use events in a person's life history to justify treating them against their will, regardless of whether the reason appears logical or not.

The prime issue here is consent, not the theory behind how someone's gender identity developed. The moment you focus on anything but consent, you open the door for abusers to wriggle around their wishes.

Imagine for a moment that we find being trans is a genetic disorder, so it is definitely 'nature'. Now say someone isolates the gene and a Money of the future finds a child whose gender identity is strongly male, but who was assigned female at birth, and this scientist convinces the child's parents to do a gene edit to which the child does not consent. Now where does the argument that believing in 'nature' protects against abuse stand?

Someone who ignores consent, which David clearly did not give once he was old enough to express himself, will ignore every other argument too. Which, if you read Colapinto's book, is what happened to David and his brother. Everyone else involved wrapped themselves up in knots over nature vs nurture and in the process they failed to see what was happening in front of their eyes. In the gene edit scenario, the same could happen if the 'nature' argument was used to overrule consent, because a Money of the future could argue that our nature lies in our genetic code.

I used to serve on an ethics committee. We had a member who was a lawyer and I learned a lot from him about how to see the wood for the trees!

Quote from: TanyaG on April 13, 2025, 12:16:41 PMThe prime issue here is consent,

I feel as though I'm beginning to grasp your 'nurture' defense (finally, right? Sorry to put you through all of that). If I'm reading you correctly, it just doesn't matter (nurture v nature). What matters, is recognizing all of us are 'ends' in ourselves (Kant's argument poorly rephrased and more defectively remembered). I have long believed intersex children should be allowed to determine their own gender identity prior to undergoing any gender defining surgery. David was never given that choice but, assuming his penis was severely damaged, did his doctors have any other choice? (I guess I'll read the book and find out) Final asides on a tangential topic (and realizing you may not be an endocrinologist or gender affirming surgeon): would you recommend puberty blockers and HRT at the earliest appropriate ages for a trans male (thereby avoiding mastectomies and facial reconstruction surgeries)? Conversely, is it better to delay HRT for trans females to allow for adequate penile tissue maturation (I've read anecdotal reports of torn vaginal lining due to vaginoplasties using immature penises)? Or is everyone case by case? In any event, should social transitioning ever be discouraged? God, I wish Ginny had been my friend, too. In some ways, she is. And so are you.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 13, 2025, 12:16:41 PMI used to serve on an ethics committee.

Clarifications: social transitioning at home. Elsewhere depending on risk and community acceptance.
Categorical Imperative in making medical decisions for children (give them the same agency granted adults with caveats for safety and risk/benefit analysis).
Sorry, TanyaG. So much of this is driven by my curiosity and regard for you professional/personal opinion. Please don't go too far out of your way to respond. On the lighter side: you convinced me. I will not be preparing a robust rebuttal as I read Colapinto's book.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 13, 2025, 02:33:56 PMIf I'm reading you correctly, it just doesn't matter (nurture v nature). What matters, is recognizing all of us are 'ends' in ourselves

That's it, basically. There's no single cause of why we end up how we are, which explains why we're so diverse.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 13, 2025, 02:33:56 PMDavid was never given that choice but, assuming his penis was severely damaged, did his doctors have any other choice?

The way I'd look at this is, 1. David wasn't intersex, his penis had been damaged by a procedure that went wrong. 2. He was a very young child, so no decisions needed to be taken about what to do other than remediate the damage as much as possible. 3. At the stage plastic surgery was at then, it would have been possible to offer a reconstruction, so why wasn't that recommended? 4. How did they even get to the point of considering surgery to make David 'more female' and bringing him up as a girl when there was a perfectly viable alternative which would have left him with a similar level of urinary continence while bringing him up as a boy?

David's parents were offered a false choice. Even if he'd suffered total penile and scrotal loss, there was no argument for bringing him up as a girl and every argument for bringing him up as a boy. That was really bad, but when you read the book, you'll realise it got much worse after that. Poor guy.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 13, 2025, 02:33:56 PM...realizing you may not be an endocrinologist or gender affirming surgeon... would you recommend puberty blockers and HRT at the earliest appropriate ages

I'm neither and this really is case by case stuff, depending on whether someone is binary or non-binary and which way they're travelling. Right now there are arguments for delaying vaginoplasty because of immaturity and arguments against delaying because of the huge issue of development of secondary sexual characteristics and the dysphoria they bring with them.

On balance, I'd be in favour of progressing GAMC as soon as everyone had given considered, informed, assessed and stable consent on the ground that avoiding the psychological distress and further surgery associated with dealing with the development of secondary sexual characteristics more than outweighs the disadvantages of not waiting.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 13, 2025, 02:33:56 PMIn any event, should social transitioning ever be discouraged?

I don't think so, as long as everyone involved realises it isn't a walk in the park. Social transitioning is good for helping families and friends realise that this isn't just a phase and for testing trans people's ability to live in the gender of their preference. If someone feels psychologically better after a reasonably long period of social transitioning then it's a boost for them and a signpost to the future.

Lots of trans people socially transition at home and never present in the gender of their choice outside. I have no issues with it because if it works for them, then it's good for them. I'm not married to the idea that anyone has to go any further with being trans than they actually need to go, if that makes sense. It's not an all or nothing thing and the best and most comfortable solution for each of us will be different. Which is why I have this thing about describing being trans as like being on a railway network with numerous routes and many stops ;)

No problem asking as many questions as you want, I only wish someone had been there to do the same for me. Other than Ginny, bless her.

Being raised as female would have made it easier for my work in progress social interaction.
Less of a transition for sure!

Chrissy

Quote from: ChrissyRyan on April 13, 2025, 03:47:05 PMBeing raised as female would have made it easier for my work in progress social interaction.

Without any doubt. Gender is something we 'do' and we learn how to do it. Romeo and Juliet taught me that, because Ginny stopped me a few times to say, 'Juliet would do it this way,' and it was always over small things. In the last year we were together she had a motorbike and she taught me how to get on it as a woman. Which was hilarious because there was a moment when we looked at each other and laughed, because it hit us that she did it instinctively the way a girl would because that was how she'd been brought up and vice versa. Yet part of her felt more comfortable as a boy and part of me as a girl. The irony was too much.

This is what I'm getting at when I write about gender being part nurture. If we're brought up with gendered behaviour which is different to our gender identity, we have to unlearn it and relearn new behaviour, or we won't be a good fit with society's convention on that gender.

Being raised as a female beds in feminine traits and behaviours, making them so instinctive they feel natural, so it's 100% easier to be raised in the gender you identify with than the one society corresponds to your sex assigned at birth. A whole bunch of homework doesn't need to be done.

There's a game I've played with people I've worked with, which can be magical if you want to explore your own or someone else's gender identity, but only if you or they are absolutely honest when you play and don't overthink it in the first round!

Down the bottom of this post is a list of words and phrases describing gender traits separated by semi-colons. Type out these traits one below another on a sheet of paper. Put the traits in a column on the left and leave three blank columns to the right.

You'll need to print two copies.

Cut one copy up so each trait is on its own strip of paper and put three cups on the table. Shuffle up the strips.

Now drop each strip into the first cup if the word or phrase on it describes you as you are, into the second cup if it describes the opposite of who you are, and into the third if it does neither. Label the first cup 'me', the second cup 'opposite of me' and the third one 'neither'.

Don't cut up the second sheet you printed out because it's your scoresheet. When every strip of paper is in a cup, take the first cup and tick off each trait listed on a strip of paper in it using column one; do the same with the second cup but tick off the traits into column two; and finally, deal with the third cup.

I've done it with flash cards where I've shown them to someone for a second and asked for an instant yes no, dumping cards where there isn't a quick answer into the third cup. That can work really well because it leaves no time to overthink or to come up with answers superimposed by the gender you were brought up in, if you know what I mean. The faster you play the first round, the more accurate it'll be.

The first time through, play the game as described.

The second time through, take more time to consider each word or phrase and drop the words into the cups to fit the values of the gender you were brought up in.

Third time around, if you think of yourself as binary, take as much time as you did the second run through, but drop the words into the cups to match your understanding of the values of the gender you see as the opposite of the one you were brought up in. If you are non-binary, skip this round because it doesn't apply to you.

If anyone does play the game, I'll explain how you process it in a later post, but that's fun too, because anyone can do it and it can make it very easy to understand aspects of dysphoria that aren't driven by the body you were born with. Not to mention where your gender lies on the spectrum.

The trait list:

Independent; dependent; protective; vulnerable; reflective; unreflective; curious; non curious; assertive; acquiescent; docile; defiant; cooperative; uncooperative; amenable; unamenable; empathetic; aloof; soft; hard; sensitive; insensitive; impetuous; controlled; fearless; fearful; modest; humble; ambitious; unselfish; selfish; leader; follower; forward; retiring; obliging; disobliging; forgiving; unforgiving; rational; irrational; submissive; dominant; supportive; distant; yielding; unyielding; cheerful; austere; emotional; unemotional; gives love freely; love has to be earned; I should take decisions; my partner should take decisions; I should be cautious; I should be willing to take risks; sexual activity should have a physical focus; sexual activity should have an emotional focus; I should initiate sex; my partner should initiate sex; I should be the more sexually experienced; my partner should be the more sexually experienced; when I have sex I like to be in control; when I have sex I like to be controlled; I should always be ready for sex; there are times when it's okay not to be ready for sex.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 14, 2025, 06:10:56 AMIf anyone does play the game, I'll explain how you process it in a later post, but that's fun too, because anyone can do it and it can make it very easy to understand aspects of dysphoria that aren't driven by the body you were born with. Not to mention where your gender lies on the spectrum.

Tanya, this game sounds really fun, I think I'll give it a try with some friends.

Thanks for sharing!


~ Lilis 💗

Quote from: TanyaG on April 14, 2025, 06:10:56 AMIf anyone does play the game, I'll explain how you process it in a later post, but that's fun too, because anyone can do it and it can make it very easy to understand aspects of dysphoria that aren't driven by the body you were born with

I love games, TanyaG! And look forward to playing this one. It might take me a few days so, please, no spoiler alerts.

No spoilers until everyone reports back, meanwhile I'll play it again and we can compare notes!

As everyone has probably worked out, you need three copies of the score sheet if you are binary, not one for each person who plays. Even if you are non-binary, the third round can be illuminating.

I've arranged the traits into a list because it makes it easy to paste them in complete with their numbers into a word processor and I've renamed a couple to make them easier to understand, as well as adding a couple.

If you play with the list in the earlier post, it'll amount to the same thing because what we're interested in is the split, not the precise totals, since all of you will be throwing out quite a few trait pairs anyway.

1 Dependent
2 Independent
3 Vulnerable
4 Protective
5 Reflective
6 Unreflective
7 Curious
8 Non curious
9 Acquiescent
10 Assertive
11 Docile
12 Defiant
13 Cooperative
14 Uncooperative
15 Amenable
16 Unamenable
17 Empathetic
18 Aloof
19 Soft
20 Hard
21 Sensitive
22 Insensitive
23 Impetuous
24 Controlled
25 Fearful
26 Fearless
27 Modest
28 Ambitious
29 Humble
30 Proud
31 Unselfish
32 Selfish
33 Pack member
34 Pack leader
35 Reluctant to give an opinion
36 Keen to give an opinion
37 Obliging
38 Disobliging
39 Forgiving
40 Unforgiving
41 Irrational
42 Rational
43 Submissive
44 Dominant
45 Supportive
46 Distant
47 Yielding
48 Unyielding
49 Cheerful
50 Austere
51 Emotional
52 Unemotional
53 I give love freely
54 My love has to be earned
55 My partner should take decisions
56 I should take decisions
57 I should be cautious
58 I should be willing to take risks
59 Sexual activity should have an emotional focus
60 Sexual activity should have a physical focus
61 My partner should initiate sex
62 I should initiate sex
63 My partner should be the more sexually experienced
64 I should be the more sexually experienced
65 When I have sex I like to be controlled
66 When I have sex I like to be in control
67 There are times when it's okay not to be ready for sex
68 I should always be ready for sex.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 15, 2025, 03:34:56 AMI've arranged the traits into a list because it makes it easy to paste them in complete with their numbers into a word processor and I've renamed a couple to make them easier to understand, as well as adding a couple.

I completed the 'test' using the original traits. I also tested in compliance with 'non-binary' guidelines (two rounds). Guess I'll find out how queer I really am (I almost hope I fail. All in all, I would rather be a woman) Thanks, TanyaG, for taking the time and effort to help me know myself.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 15, 2025, 12:17:55 PMI completed the 'test' using the original traits. I also tested in compliance with 'non-binary' guidelines (two rounds). Guess I'll find out how queer I really am (I almost hope I fail. All in all, I would rather be a woman) Thanks, TanyaG, for taking the time and effort to help me know myself.

Okay I'll work out a sort for the traits you used and post that so you can score yourself and once Lillis is done we can discuss what they mean!

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 15, 2025, 12:17:55 PMI completed the 'test' using the original traits. I also tested in compliance with 'non-binary' guidelines (two rounds).

Quote from: TanyaG on April 15, 2025, 12:44:48 PMonce Lillis is done we can discuss what they mean!

Done! And same as Annika, original traits, non-binary, 2-rounds.

Quote from: Lilis on April 15, 2025, 05:30:43 PMnon-binary, 2-rounds.

Wow! Lilis, I've never met a woman more female than you. If you're gender confused, there's hope for me.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 15, 2025, 05:52:58 PMWow! Lilis, I've never met a woman more female than you. If you're gender confused, there's hope for me.

Internally, there are two of us, me and him. He's just as real as I am, but he never visits spaces like this.

If you're curious to learn more about us, feel free to check out my blog.

I don't want to take over Tanya's thread with my own story.

So no, not gender confused, just fully aware of who we are.


~ Lilis 🫂

Quote from: Lilis on April 15, 2025, 06:02:42 PMjust fully aware of who we are.

I can't speak for TanyaG, but I think she understands. I have read and reread every word of your blog. Like you, I am him and I am her. Unlike you, sometimes I don't which I am. The 'her' you present in this space is perfect. But, I have little doubt if you shared the 'him' with us, he, too, would be perfect. Gender and sexuality matter. They matter a lot. I mean, I've spent so much of my life looking for me. I'm getting closer to finding him and her. I can feel that in my soul. But that is the part that matters, the soul. I'm not sure gender has a darn thing to do with my soul. Or with yours. You're a mother/father. And I'm a father/mother. What could be more beautiful? What could matter more?

Quote from: Lilis on April 15, 2025, 06:02:42 PMI don't want to take over Tanya's thread with my own story.

I don't mind because all our stories are intertwined for at least some part of their way and stories from one of us illuminate them all.

This is a fun thing I remembered after getting involved in a discussion which touched on sexuality and another member's changing perception of their own. It also casts light on my scripts and how they have very likely confined my own sexuality.

To give you the full picture, I considered myself straight for years and if you'd asked, would have replied I'd only ever been romantically or sexually attracted to women. You'd have got that answer without me thinking about it.

Somewhere in my playing around with what analysis might do for me and my never ending process of trying to disentangle the gender I was brought up in from the gender identity I would naturally have without my upbringing, I had an idea. For a long time, I set the idea aside because it was a can of worms that was separate to my gender identity and one that wasn't causing me any distress, but I began to wonder exactly what was in this particular can.

The reason for the wondering was that just as I'd come to accept my gender identity wasn't aligned with my sex assigned at birth (SAB), so I began to wonder how well my sexual orientation might align to my gender identity too.

Mentally, I put my gender identity in one can, and my sexual orientation in another can. Both had labels on them, which read 'masculine' and 'heterosexual'.

Reading the label on the sexual orientation can, it was aligned to the gender I'd been brought up in, but hey, I'd spent years reading the label they'd slapped on my gender identity without asking me and having peeled it off at last, I'd found a different one underneath!

Like everyone else, or most anyway, of the people here, my first reaction was to put the label I'd been given at birth back on, but peeling if off so often eventually did something to the glue so it wouldn't stick any more.

I began wondering what I'd be like if I'd grown up alone on a desert island with the ability to make everything the way I was comfortable with in terms of my gender identity. This was so enlightening I'd recommend anyone to do it, because it's so simple.

Just imagine if you could dress how you like, live the gender traits you are most comfortable with, wear make up or not (depending on which sort of trans you are) and everyone else on the island would be completely comfortable with it. No one would ever question your clothes, look at you in a funny way, or do anything except say hello, how you doing, been a long time, etc.

Every time I tried that, I came up with the same answer and one that matched my plays through the Gender Game. On my island I was a bubbly mix of feminine and masculine, which is in character with every aspect of me which isn't gendered. It helped me accept and understand many daydreams I'd had because my island paradise fitted with them like a glove.

It took time to process all that, but once I'd accepted I was trans I quit trying to put the label that had originally been on my gender identity can and learned to be happy with the one I'd found underneath.

But what to do with the sexual orientation can? Did I dare look? Would my head explode if I found I wasn't totally straight?

People often assume that someone who hasn't had ever had a homosexual experience is straight but that's a definition of default. Besides, it depends what you think of as sex, so definitions are important. Many straight people turn out to have had occasional dreams or fantasies that aren't straight, something you learn very quickly if you do therapy. They are 'mostly straight' and might have been bisexual (better called mixed sex attracted) if they'd been brought up differently, or met different people.

So, how to find out if the label on my sexual orientation was right? I had some clues, because I have had some fantasies about having sex with men, though they have been rare and I've no experience of it in real life, nor am I likely to because I'm monogamous (this is another can?) and happily married to a wonderful woman.

I can touch type, and can type so fast that whole paragraphs come out without me thinking, and sometimes even words so completely out of context I can't work out where they came from. So as piecework, I wrote stories which explored that side of my sexuality on the desert island principle and guess what? The label on my sexuality is probably never going to go back on again, either.

The rules for Susan's are very clear, no erotica can be posted here, so I'm not going to post what I've written and on no account should anyone reading this do it either. Just an absolute niet. But once I dismantled the scripting that got in the way to begin with, I discovered I could write seriously hot stories of a sort I'd have bet money against me writing ten years previously. I wouldn't even have considered the idea back then because my sexual orientation would have reacted against it.

Did the stories change my sexual orientation? No, they just revealed an aspect of it I'd never allowed space for.

So if you are reading this and you can write stories, it's worth trying. I particularly wish I'd done it when I was conjuring up my 'gender identity desert island'; for me, I think story writing would have been incredibly helpful there. It would also have given me something else to bring to my poor analyst, but then again, maybe it was good I didn't, because the experience nearly blew their brain up :-)

Well I think its the person I would fall for not their gender but I do lean towards a female partner. Not that I am looking as happy on my own!

Quote from: davina61 on April 18, 2025, 07:50:36 AMWell I think its the person I would fall for not their gender but I do lean towards a female partner. Not that I am looking as happy on my own!

That's how most of us are I think, and it's easier to think of sexual orientation as 'toward males' or 'toward females' once we accept we're trans because on one hand it aligns with scripts we own about hetero and homsexuality and on the other is less complicated to understand, so I'm with it as an idea.

In me, disconnecting the scripts revealed I wasn't as completely attracted to females as I thought.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 18, 2025, 07:58:06 AMIn me, disconnecting the scripts revealed I wasn't as completely attracted to females as I thought.

The same for me. When it was revealed to me in therapy that I was asexual (not physically attracted to males or females), it explained why so many of my prior relationships had failed. I was attracted to the person, not their body. I learned through experience that for many people, that is not enough. I suspect my lack of attention to that aspect of the relationship may have left them feeling unattractive. They expected more, and they sought it elsewhere when they didn't receive it from me.

I have finally reached a point in my therapy that I fully understand this and can stop blaming for what has happened. No one, including me, knew back then that I was asexual or transgender, so it really was no one's fault. It just didn't work out the way we thought it would.

Quote from: Lori Dee on April 18, 2025, 09:37:59 AMI have finally reached a point in my therapy that I fully understand this and can stop blaming for what has happened.

I completely get that, Lori. All of these aspects of us are so tangled together and held up with so many buttresses and bodges that it's hard to see the person underneath. Yet once you take down one of the props holding the edifice up, the rest become more visible and you can get closer to what's really underneath. I'm really pleased it worked for you.

If you've ever owned a dog, or shared your home with cats (bearing in mind that cats, being cats, can't be owned,) especially if the animals have come from a few different breeds, you'll have noticed that how some behaviours are common to some breeds. Most dogs will fetch you things, as will cats, though they mostly fetch things you don't want fetched.

Like half a mouse.

Labradors eat so fast their food is gone before they know what it was, terriers are grazers, many breeds of spaniel naturally quest, Siamese cats tend to be noisy and destructive, Burmese are affectionate, Persians are plain hard to please and so on.

Dogs are much more trainable than cats, but some breeds are more trainable than others and within breeds some dogs learn faster. I've lost count of the times I've accidentally trained a dog something, but I've also marvelled at how much some dogs value routine to the point of being OCD, while others are laid back to the point of horizontal.

One time we owned two sisters, one of whom knew the time her walks should happen to the minute, the other of whom hated walks with a passion, because she took an instant dislike to all other dogs but her sib. The second was easily trainable, but a complete non-conformist, while the first was harder to train but vastly more confident than her sis. They both ate food like a speed run through a platform game and none of our friends could tell them apart when they sat together, yet the moment either dog moved, they could name her.

We had those two from six weeks old and we treated them just the same.

So it is with us. Some of how we are seems to be inherited, other elements of our personalities seem innate (as in we're born that way,) and yet another tranche are learned. It can be very hard to tell which element is nature and which is nurture.

The elements we learn are taught first by our parents, secondly by our wider families, then by people outside our family, like teachers and people we're at school with and finally by a third set of friends, partners and fellow workers in adult life.

We can't choose the first group, but we have to live by their rules, so their values take root in us the deepest, many of them before we're old enough to realise what's going on. Though we get to choose some of the second group, we still have to conform under the pressure of school rules and peer pressure, and because our brains are still maturing, this group's values remain influential throughout our lives too, though less so than the first.

Mixing with the third group can be revelatory, but when we first meet them, we still carry with us everything we've absorbed from the first two groups. If you can remember the first time you sat down with someone who challenged a firm assumption you held about some core value, what happened?

Your first reaction was probably it was bull, followed by a wave of 'hey, I'd never thought about it like that!' only for a few minutes, hours, or days later when you maybe began to realise something you intrinsically believed either wasn't right, or wasn't right for everybody.

The most powerful experience of this type I had was during my teens, with a 'second group' contact, my friend Ginny. My parents were conservative, as was my school, the men in the family highly masculine and everyone religious. On the one hand I was subjected to a drip feed of norms telling me not only that their way was normative, but also that any deviation from the path would lead to a sorry end, while on the other I lived a relationship which trampled on their rules and made me so happy I still warm at the memory all these decades later.

Yet, as I've written before, I'm a good act as a man. So how does this even compute?

I'm the human equivalent of a labrador. I'm confident, outgoing, enjoy fetching things, love being patted and an incurable optimist. Yet, just as dogs and cats are born with some characteristics true to their breed and others at variance, and just as two labs from the same litter and brought up together will share some traits and differ in others, so do I both share and differ from my family. That's what nature and nurture do to you in the complex process of growing up.

Because I'm fundamentally curious and like finding out how things work, I spent a lifetime acquiring the skills to take my mind apart, understand why I'm trans and deal with the bits of me that don't like it. I didn't want to change my trans-ness, because it brings me all kinds of good things. One thing that really surprised me during my unofficial, intermittent and often hilarious analysis was one of my motivations for going to medical school may have been it was the only place I could at that time find the tools I needed to begin digging. Which seems crazy, but in the context of me, not so crazy.

Where did this get me and what's it to do with cats and dogs?

In a society with different norms, my trans-ness would challenge no-one because it wouldn't trigger the zero-sum assumptions some groups are trying to bake in around gender identity. Just as we accept not all labradors fetch things, so we would accept not all men need to be masculine. For those people my comfort with feminine traits and gender expression is their discomfort, leading them to portray me as a threat when I'm not. As I watch their anxiety boiling over and the increasingly polarised positions activists on both sides are taking, I think of the reaction by men to women who aren't feminine, which is mostly one of acceptance.

If we could open up a dialogue between moderates on both sides in a situation where fear did not overwhelm the exchange, we could find a way out of this stand off and work toward a solution where both parties could have most of what they want. A political dogfight is not going to resolve this and given the lawyers haven't managed to adequately define biological sex yet (which we desperately need if we're to help people born intersex) or begin to consider non-binary people, then a dialogue between ordinary folk might not only be the best solution, but allow us to understand each other.

Who knows, we might even get to like each other?

I'll begin with a trigger warning, because this includes some details of the story of someone who was brought up in a gender identity they did not wish to be brought up in and ended their life because of it.

Some members of Susan's will be aware of the sad case of David Reimer, who was brought up as a girl after a botched circumcision damaged his penis beyond repair seven months after his birth in 1965. Like almost all circumcisions, the operation was clinically unnecessary, but unlike almost all boys who have undergone it, David paid a high price.

It's a long and harrowing story, but on the advice of an American psychologist called John Money, at 22 months old David had an orchiectomy and surgical creation of something approaching a vagina. Money's theory was that gender identity was nothing more than a learned behaviour and, according to a book Frank Colapinto wrote, went to extreme lengths to enforce his view on David.

This included what Money called 'childhood sexual rehearsal play' involving his twin as a male partner. If Colapinto's account of it is correct, it was abuse, although for reasons I cannot begin to understand no-one seemed to call it that at the time. Nor, bizarrely, does virtually anyone who brings up David's case even here seem to regard this dimension of his treatment as anything other than a distraction, when it must have been intensely traumatic.

Money saw David as the perfect opportunity to prove his theory, because David had a twin brother who was brought up as a boy. Unfortunately for David and his brother, he reached fourteen before he could convince his parents that he didn't want to be a girl, by which time he already had breast development and needed a string of further operations. His twin committed suicide in 2002 and David followed suit in 2004.

Reporting of Colapinto's book leaves the impression David's case was unique, but it is not, and there are records of countless people with 46,XY chromosomes (i.e. male genetically) who have been brought up as girls, 388 of them collected together in one paper alone. The decisions about them were justified on a wide variety of grounds, all of which can be summarised as a failure of their genitalia to develop 'adequately', or in some cases, at all.

The authors of the 2005 paper, which collected together the 388, searched the literature to find cases retrospectively and went to great lengths to follow up and establish what gender they were living in, making it an intimidatingly thorough piece of work. I'd stress that the authors did no more than chronicle cases that others had managed and weren't involved in any of them.

As far as can be told, none of the 388 were subjected to the coercion Colapinto's book suggests David Reimer underwent and all were free to take on whichever gender identity felt right to them once they were old enough to express an opinion.

One finding was that the majority of the 46,XY patients who had been brought up with a female gender identity had not changed their gender identity to male. Amongst those who continued to live as women, dysphoria was rare, which seems to have been because all of the cases who had experienced it had been allowed to change their gender identity.

Another finding was that the proportion of patients who had changed their gender identity to male was considerably higher than the (then) estimates of how many transgender people there were in the community as a whole. The authors' conclusion was that at some level both nature and nurture had a part to play in gender identity, but there's a potential question mark over this because few of the 388 had been given an independent psychological evaluation.

Anyone who makes life decisions based on a single paper should think twice, because gender identity and sexual development are so complex we've only scraped the surface, but for me, the 2005 paper highlights something much more chilling.

Until comparatively recently, it was technically easier to do a vaginoplasty than it was to create a penis. Back to the 'if you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail.' Surgical techniques have since advanced to the point where either operation has much the same chance of success and so today, the parents of those 388 would likely be recommended a phalloplasty for their child without a vaginoplasty being considered.

There are other papers which deal with similar cases, making it clear this has been a worldwide issue, but one which particularly caught my eye was published in 2007. Up until that time, in India, it was traditional to assign children with a penile length of less than 20mm at birth as 'unsuitable to be raised as males'. After vaginoplasty was developed as a technique, it became the solution for these 'problematic' babies.

The incidence of 'congenital inadequacy of the penis' in India is 1:15000 male children. The population of India when the paper was published was 1.1 billion, so even my most wildly optimistic estimate says there are 10,000 46,XY people alive in India who fall into this category and very likely twice that number. That's a problem, because Indian culture simultaneously celebrates and discriminates against transgender people, many of whom have little choice but to live within Hijra communities (which are more diverse than many people think but where they needn't have ended up at all.)

That is just India. Other countries are known to have pursued similar policies and have shared similar cultural attitudes to gender identity over a lengthy period.

Far from poor David Reimer being an isolated case, he is one of many. Societies which discriminate against those who are uncomfortable with the gender they were brought up in, including the US, India and the UK, have seen no problem assigning a gender identity to babies when it suited them. In this case, the excuse was one of pure convenience: the surgical construction of a penis was technically more difficult than constructing a vagina.

Why isn't this more widely known? I think it's a scandal of epic proportions.

My exploration of the question 'Why are we trans?' has mostly looked at the 'nurture' side of the equation, but I'm going to double back now and look at the 'nature' side, because in human beings, hardly anything has a single cause.

Before DNA sequencing became possible, the most practical way to work out if something had a genetic basis or not was to do twin studies. The TL;DR is you look at a bunch of twins and work out in how many pairs both have what you're interested in compared to how many where only one twin has it.

Sounds simple? First find enough twins, second it matters whether they are identical (monozygotic) or non-identical (dizygotic) and finally, if the condition you're looking for is rare, you'll need to sort through an awful lot of twins before you can find enough cases to make the stats work.

Amazingly there are several studies where this has been done and they mostly point the same way. Which is unheard of in science because there's always one paper that spoils the party. For some reason, in this case that hasn't happened.

So what do the results show?

In adolescents the heritability of gender dysphoria lies somewhere between 38-47% in people assigned female at birth and 25-43% in people assigned male at birth. In adults the numbers for the two groups are 11-44% or 28-47% respectively.

For non-identical twins the numbers aren't so clear cut, with one paper finding a similar levels to the figures above, while another found no evidence of heritability. With different sex twins, the figures are plain hard to interpret, with one study finding a much higher chance of both presenting with dysphoria than same sex twins.

The reason for the spread of percentages is they come from six different studies, but if you take the averages it's impossible to walk away from those numbers without seeing them as the strongest possible hint that genetics plays a part in why at least some of us are trans.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 24, 2025, 11:22:10 AMThe reason for the spread of percentages is they come from six different studies, but if you take the averages it's impossible to walk away from those numbers without seeing them as the strongest possible hint that genetics plays a part in why at least some of us are trans.

Thanks for recommending As Nature Made Him (John Colapinto). I could not put it down and read it in one sitting. Mr. Reimer's story was a tragic reminder of the frailty of being human and a celebration of the resilience of the human spirit. In my particular instance, I don't believe genetics were a significant factor. I think my gender variance was due to in utero hormonal exposure. But I don't remember that far back with any degree of clarity. Either way, it's still 'Nature.' I believe that, for the most part, 'Nurture' either affirms our sense of self, or, is the primary causal factor of gender dysphoria. I do vividly remember the moment I decided I would no longer affect 'girlishness'. I was four years old. I relapsed a few times into 'girlishness' but the consequences were so severe such 'relapses' were few and far between. I have met so many people inside Susan's home with stories so similar to mine, we could merely have a space labeled: insert name here. 

In the process of answering the 'Why am I trans?' question, one of the theories that's around is hormone transfer in the womb.

The background to this hypothesis is that numerous studies have shown a complex interplay of hormonal,
neuroanatomic, neurofunctional and genetic factors in the development of core gender
identity in utero.

As this process is currently understood, it works like this.

1. Depending on the presence or absence of a Y chromosome, a foetus will develop testes or ovaries (from cells which could become either,) but this also depends on the presence of the SRY gene on the Y chromosome.
2. Between six and twelve weeks in utero, testosterone begins to be converted to dihydrotestosterone, (which can only happen if the foetus has functional 5alpha reductase type 2 enzyme.) Dihydrotestosterone is essential for further development of testes or ovaries and, crucially, for external genitalia.
3. In the second half of pregnancy, enough genital steroids (aka oestrogen and testosterone, but especially the latter) build up to cause permanent structural changes in the brain and in behaviour.

If a foetus isn't sensitive to genital steroids, it will be essentially female, even if it has testes.

The prenatal hormone transfer (PHT) hypothesis rests on the concept that that gender identity is primarily determined by prenatal genital steroid exposure.  If this is true, the PHT theory is tempting, because the reasoning is that if a female twin sharing a womb with a male twin is exposed to higher levels of testosterone than a female twin sharing a womb with another female twin. Conversely, a male twin sharing a womb with a female twin is exposed to higher levels of oestrogen than a male twin sharing a womb with another male twin.

To say that studies on prenatal hormone transfer conflict is an understatement and if there is any consistency to be found it's that prenatal hormone transfer hasn't been proven to have any correlation with indicators like gendered play, cross gendered behaviour or dysphoria. Prenatal hormone transfer might have an effect on emotional, cognitive and biophysical gender markers but none of the studies have been powerful enough to confirm it.

So prenatal hormone transfer remains an unproven hypothesis and further work is needed either to prove or disprove it.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 24, 2025, 01:09:21 PMdo vividly remember the moment I decided I would no longer affect 'girlishness'. I was four years old. I relapsed a few times into 'girlishness' but the consequences were so severe such 'relapses' were few and far between.

There go you and many of us. Most of us first suspect somethings not quite right at about that age and it comes up in too many introductions to dismiss, besides it's been noted many times in the research. It happens then because that age is when all children wake up to the idea that everyone isn't the same and begin to wonder why.

What's amazing, to me, anyway, is that there's a tendency to excuse parents for doing what yours did and mine did, but objectively, there's no clear water between them and what happened to David in that book, minus the operation. Parents who suppress a child's natural gender identity are doing what Money did.

I think that a century from now, maybe less, society may not look so kindly on gender identity suppression?

Quote from: TanyaG on April 25, 2025, 09:35:57 AMI think that a century from now, maybe less, society may not look so kindly on gender identity suppression?

I pray you're right, TanyaG. And greatly appreciated your discussion of in utero hormonal effects. I have a brother and sister who are fraternal twins and neither experienced (as far as I know) any significant degree of gender variance (my sister was more of a tomboy than any of my other four sisters but otherwise seemed to experience a 'normal' female trajectory after pubescence). I really didn't understand much of what you said, but it all made sense. The only counter argument I can formulate is my mother may have sustained a different hormonal mix during her pregnancy with them than with me. However, I will gladly accept a genetic explanation in lieu of a developmental or congenital one. Or, a spiritual explanation. Perhaps my soul has always been female regardless of the shape of the body in which it abides. 

I came across a paper recently which did a good job of summarising the psychological issues trans people struggle with, so I've translated it from psychosocial speak into English!

I'm posting it because if you're in the early stages of suspecting you are trans, or dealing with having accepted you are trans, it provides a checklist which may help you make sense of some of the thoughts and emotions messing up your mind. It may also help when you first engage with a therapist, because you'll be able to pick up on important themes straight away and make faster progress.

The authors picked up on four main branches, which I've reduced to three along with adding some background and explanations to help get you going. It's as brief as I can make it and isn't exhaustive, but picks up on the major things that bug us.

1. Distress caused by between the clash between your preferred gender identity and the one you were brought up in

This is called dysphoria and describes a tumult of negative emotions ranging from constant edginess to full blown distress. it can be overwhelming and extraordinarily hard to manage, particularly early on, when you have little or no idea what's driving it and simply want rid of it.

a. body dysphoria

Dysphoria can be caused by beard and breast growth, voice changes and erections can be extremely hard to deal with. Many of us experience dysphoria over the genitalia we are born with, but 'secondary sexual characteristics' including the ones mentioned in the previous sentence are often triggering when they develop.

b. gender expression dysphoria

Having to live on a daily basis wearing clothes and having to behave like someone belonging to the wrong gender is a challenge all of its own. It is particularly hard when we're at school. It's common for people only to begin dealing with their dysphoria properly after they leave home because unsympathetic families leave them no choice and that can make it a lot worse.

c. confusion

People who suffer from a and b above and who don't yet understand why (and even if they do) usually have trouble processing their feelings because they don't know where they come from. The confusion can reduce your self confidence and leave you feeling out of control.

d. denial and suppression

We commonly go through this when we begin to suspect we are trans. The easiest way out (or so it can appear) is to block out the growing awareness of our trans-ness, which can lead to periods of hyper-gendering (over emphasising we belong to the gender we've been raised in), purges of clothes, and even outbursts of transphobia. It can happen in repeating cycles.

e. fear of what's next

It's common to worry about the implications life changing decisions, like coming out, starting hormones or having surgery will have for us. If you're at this stage, even if you have supportive friends and family, therapy is the way.

2. Distress about how others will react to us

a. fear of being unable to pass as a member of another sex.

This is common, if not universal, despite there being no shortage of cis people who don't look cis. 'Gender policing' is so common it's almost impossible to grow up without experiencing it at first hand, even if you're cis. We learn to fear it.

b. conflict between how we've been taught our gendered behaviour and appearance should be and how we would naturally express them

This can catch you out, because it takes a long time to match our subconscious learning about how we should behave with our natural preference for behaving as a member of another sex. That learning's in us so deep it's hard to get out. What this feels like is discomfort at finding yourself behaving or reacting a particular way when you didn't intend to; it's as if you're not in charge of yourself.


3. Internal processing of rejection by others and of transphobia

a. feelings of sadness and loss when others aren't supportive

The majority of us experience this, most powerfully with family members and close friends, which is where therapy and places like Susan's can prove so helpful, because others can offer the support we're missing.

b. hypervigilance for transphobia

An expectation of rejection can put us on edge when we meet new people after social or medical transition. Hypervigilance can backfire if the people we meet pick up on it and wonder why it's there. If that happens, they too will become vigilant.

c. internalised transphobia

This is more common than you'd think. Just as some gay people struggle to eliminate negative concepts of gayness they've been brought up with, so some trans people struggle with negative perceptions of being trans. It's likely a problem if you've been brought up in a conservative household where transphobic views are common.

d. fear of loneliness

This is common, what will happen if nobody accepts us? But now you're here, you know that isn't true :-)

Quote from: TanyaG on April 27, 2025, 09:19:52 AMI came across a paper recently which did a good job of summarising the psychological issues trans people struggle with, so I've translated it from psychosocial speak into English!

I'm posting it because if you're in the early stages of suspecting you are trans, or dealing with having accepted you are trans, it provides a checklist which may help you make sense of some of the thoughts and emotions messing up your mind. It may also help when you first engage with a therapist, because you'll be able to pick up on important themes straight away and make faster progress.

The authors picked up on four main branches, which I've reduced to three along with adding some background and explanations to help get you going. It's as brief as I can make it and isn't exhaustive, but picks up on the major things that bug us.

Wow, this is a great article.  Thank you for putting it in terms that make it easier to grasp. This is right to the point. I have not been to individual therapy as of yet. I am trying to find my way by resources available to me. I have found this place very helpful. I have my first support group on 1 May. I do plan on seeking therapy in the future. I can definitely say by being here has helped tremendously. This article hits home and I can relate to so much. Thank you. 🤗

Quote from: Annaliese on April 27, 2025, 09:40:05 AMWow, this is a great article.  Thank you for putting it in terms that make it easier to grasp. This is right to the point.

Thank you, Annaliese! It took a slice of time to write and I was worried I'd condensed it down too much!

Quote from: TanyaG on April 27, 2025, 09:42:00 AMThank you, Annaliese! It took a slice of time to write and I was worried I'd condensed it down too much!

You're welcome,  not at all. It was something I think was on point.

The position of trans people in the UK has been in the news a lot recently, but because news and social media are fighting for readership, both have amplified the loudest voices on either side of the debate. With due respect to everyone involved, they've handed a megaphone to the last people who are going to help navigate us to a compassionate solution, because neither group is interested in anything but a crushing victory over the other side.

Despite all the heat and light, we've had a parade recently which was attended by a lot of people who aren't normally associated with the trans movement, one of a number of hints there's a pool of moderate people who'd be happy with a compromise.

Which is what we had before the Scottish Parliament made what the Supreme Court defined as an act of overreach.

Briefly, the situation now is that the law in England and Wales about trans people remains unchanged, but in Scotland, it has. In respect of England and Wales the Supreme Court has clarified how the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the Equality Act 2010 apply to both cis and trans people.

The emphasis throughout the debate has been on trans people who were assigned male at birth (AMAB) with scant attention paid to trans people assigned female at birth (AFAB), who gender activists on both sides would prefer not to exist. Non-binary trans people have been left out more or less completely, which I find astonishing given they form one third of all new referrals these days.

Why have AFAB trans people and non-binary folk been sidelined? They don't fit the narrative, which was successfully leveraged into a debate about women's toilets with the implication that all trans people in the UK were male sex offenders disguised as women. Nowhere in the media was there any mention that the majority of newly diagnosed trans people are AFAB, because it would have shot the campaigners' fox and killed the story.

The dust will not settle for a long time to come, but I'll get on to that. In the short term, the Equality Commission (EQ) has sprung into action and made numerous announcements about how it's going to get tough on hospitals which have allowed AMAB trans people access to women's wards. This is Britain, so it's natural for toilets to dominate the debate and another EQ pronouncement has focussed on women's toilets throughout the land. Changing rooms have been introduced as a kind of side salad.

The ultimate irony is the EQ is what's called a Quasi Autonomous Non Government Organisation, which should put it in the line for the axe, because the narrative about QANGOs is they are an undemocratic gravy train for political appointees whose chief executive's mouths are stuffed with gold. Right now our government is giving QANGOs the hard bear stare, so it's tempting to see the EQ's new found activism as an attempt to save itself from what was otherwise looking like a nasty encounter with the sharp side of the treasury's chopper.

What are we left with? The government must be wishing it never got involved in this one, but it's on them because a dimly sighted person could have seen what's coming. The Gender Recognition Act still applies and still gives trans people a 'protected characteristic' as does gender affirming surgery.

The EQ is making so much noise about cis women's rights they've accidentally flagged up an awareness that trans women also have rights under UK law which, yes, include access to toilets. No-one has any good ideas about how to solve this which don't involve substantial investment.

We still don't have a watertight legal definition of what a 'biological woman' is in the UK, despite everyone from the Supreme Court judges downward behaving as if one exists. It is still the case that anyone with a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) is legally entitled to change their sex on legal documents including their birth certificate. The Supreme Court stated in its recent judgment that that includes the right for AMAB people to call themselves women and for AFAB people to call themselves men.

Since natural variability and the rarity of trans people ensures there are many times more cis women who look like men that there are trans women who look like men some innocent bystanders are going to find themselves in the firing line. A holder of a GRC has the legal right not to disclose they have one, so short of giving out 'biological women' certificates to be displayed on demand at every public toilet there's no clear way out of this one. Nobody seems to have thought about this.

In short, what was a mess we muddled through thanks to compassion and tolerance (ugly words in the like wars) has been turned into a political hot potato, which statements by the Equality Commission has hurled so high into the air it's impossible to ignore. Yet it will have to be fixed, somehow.

That will be interesting enough to watch on its own, but what everyone in the media, government and legislature is forgetting is soon we will have as many trans men and we have trans women, nor will it be long before the number of non-binary people equals either group. This will triple the number of trans voices and my advice for politicians and judges alike is we need to stop pretending this begins and ends with where people pee.

This weekend, the British Medical Association Residents' Committee voted to condemn the Supreme Court ruling on biological sex as scientifically illiterate. While in fairness, the Supreme Court's brief was to clarify what UK law means in the narrow terms of the Equality Act 2010 and the Gender Recognition Act 2004, the vote is significant. Why? Residents are doctors in training, about two thirds of whom are members of the BMA and who in total comprise just under 30% of the total BMA membership.

This means we're looking at the opinion of a substantial slice of medics in Britain. Although it is mentioned only in passing in most news stories, a key line of the Residents' statement is that they believe the Supreme Court decision will cause real-world hard to the trans, non-binary and intersex communities in the UK. Given that anti trans activists have left no stone unturned in their attempt to gaslight others into seeing all trans people as male abusers in disguise, this was a brave and much needed declaration.

The Residents Committee press release drew immediate and predictable responses from the usual suspects, which make entertaining reading, because taken at face value, the organisations concerned don't consider the majority of doctors in the UK aged under about 32 know enough about medicine to be able to treat them.

Which should prove interesting, because in a few years, the Residents will be senior doctors and what are the objectors going to do then?

The Residents are the people who will be staffing gender affirming services in the future and their views deserve respect because few understand the complex relationship between sex and gender identity better than doctors fresh out of medical school. It would be tough to find another group of similar size whose faces don't go blank at the mention of such apparent minutiae as 5 alpha-reductase type 2 deficiency but instead think 'intersex,' nor one whose knowledge of embryology is so great as to understand just how complicated human development is.

Part of the Residents' statement makes it clear that they, as most doctors do, understand sex and gender as complex aspects of humanity, which are independent of each other, even if gender usually aligns with sex. It has scarcely been possible to leave medical school since the 1980s without being aware of this, yet the Residents' critics are making desperate efforts to portray this teaching as indoctrination by trans activists. No evidence has been put forward to support the activists' accusation, nor can there be, because it is a flat out lie.

Is the Residents' Committee announcement pleasing? Yes. Is it unexpected? No, and I'll get onto that, but it's another sign that Gen X and Millennials are taking a much more compassionate view of trans issues than Boomers. There are plenty of Boomers who are good with trans, just as there are Gen X who feel the opposite way, but within the UK the overall trend has been toward an age-based split in attitude between older antis and younger pros.

What do older groups fear? Don't forget many of them were born long before the Equality Act, against which members of parliament fought a rearguard action until 2010, when the last pockets of resistance were overwhelmed by the obsolesce of their views. A lot of Boomers had to work through that era, the consequences of which are still being unpicked (women's pensions remain a live issue) and memories of how hard they had to fight for justice remain strong.

You would think any group which has had to fight for its cause would be sympathetic to the next group to find itself in a similar situation, but human nature doesn't work like that. Instead, having won its own battle, each group disarms and joins the establishment in the fight to ensure its successors' claim to compassion is denied, in a kind of weird Stockholm syndrome merry go round. So while it's possible to understand Boomer women's attitudes to the rights they won, as a member of their generation who supported them to the hilt, I'm not impressed with the vitriol they've focused on a group they are not only statistically unlikely to meet, but who have every reason not to draw attention to themselves.

In passing its clarification of the law regarding the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the Equality Act 2010, the UK's Supreme Court has unwittingly pulled the cork from the bottle. What the Residents' Committee has helped to do is underline the law is a mess and that we've been limping along for far too long by pretending it isn't.

Trans people remain rare, but the Residents have been kind enough to point out that makes us too vulnerable to be forgotten or left to the vengeance of groups who've won their own fights against discrimination and are actively conspiring to stop others following in their footsteps.

Now the genie is out the bottle, it isn't going to go back in. Compassion is needed in this debate and it's fantastic to get some from the Residents Committee. Hey, I used to be a junior doctor, it was long ago, but I cared then and I still care now.

But then Labour have said birth sex for single sex wards.

Quote from: davina61 on Yesterday at 03:53:00 AMBut then Labour have said birth sex for single sex wards.

This is the genie out the bottle and starting to play, so it depends on whether you're a half full or half empty person! The Equality Commission is bearing down on the NHS Executive, which is going to be interesting in itself, because both are Quangos and the NHSE is due for the chop. Starmer and Streeting appear to have got an inkling that the genie isn't going to be an easy one to handle, but they're stuck with the Supreme Court interpretation of the Equality Act 2010, which says 'biological sex' is the basic building block of the Act.

Not only that, they've got to deal with issues like trans men who haven't had bottom surgery and who become pregnant. Not to mention say, people with congenital androgen insensivity who are to all intents and purposes female outwardly, but are 46,XY and need gynae procedures. Or anyone non-binary, a group who are as forgotten on Susan's as they are everywhere else, but who are increasingly common. The genie says this isn't about single sex anything, it's about what do we do with the entire scope of trans?

One of the few groups who have grasped the implications of this are the Residents. They've stepped forward when they need not have done and they've addressed all of these points in a way no-one else has done. Because they will become the consultant physicians and surgeons of the future, they will lead GAC and if there's a key group to have on their side, they're it.

So while this isn't going to sort out straight away, it isn't like everyone's hand is against us. We have more support than we think.

Quote from: TanyaG on Yesterday at 04:33:11 AMThey've stepped forward when they need not have done and they've addressed all of these points in a way no-one else has done.

A most enlightening discussion, TanyaG! Probably a similar scenario is playing out in the US. But we will need to abide until the Orange-haired boy finally fades away before any substantial progress can be made overcoming all the hate and disinformation. Please continue to provide such thoughtful analyses of the contours of the battlefield. They give me hope.

We have a new development, hot on the heels of the BMA Resident Doctors Committee declaring trans people need support on compassionate grounds at the weekend. The dust is still settling on that, but yesterday Britain's only publicly 'out' transgender judge declared she has backing to challenge the Supreme Court ruling in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

To recap, the situation in the UK is the Supreme Court ruled on 16th of this month that in respect of the Equality Act 2010 (EA2010) the word 'woman' means 'someone whose biological sex is female'.

Less in the headlines is they have also confirmed that the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA2004) still applies and that someone who has either a Gender Recognition Certificate or has undergone Gender Reassignment Surgery remains a woman in the eyes of that Act.

Notice there is no mention here about transmen or non-binary people (despite the EA2010 protecting some transmen) because neither the EA2010 nor the GRA2004 mention non-binary folk. The Supreme Court ruling on 'what is a woman', is purely in within the scope of the EA and the fallout has been that no-one but people whose 'biological sex' is female can use female facilities.

Background: In the UK the number of trans people of all descriptions is thought to be about 0.5% right now. Non-binary people are becoming more frequent, although they probably represent a small fraction of that percentage right now, but if we assume half of that 0.5% were assigned male at birth (AMAB) and all of them have either started treatment with hormones and surgery, and have been out of their homes in the gender of their choice, that means we're talking one in four hundred of the population who might have accessed female facilities and who are trans.

This is in line with astronomer Piero Sicoli's calculation of the odds that asteroid 2023 DW would hit the earth. Could you name this asteroid? Did it fil your nights with fear in case it landed on a public toilet?

Whatever, keep this figure in mind, because there are pressure groups who are acting as if this tiny number of individuals (virtually all of whom desire more than anything else not to get noticed) are the thin end of a fifth column whose evil mission is to roll back women's rights in their entirety.

Being fair, there have been errors in force and direction on both sides (I'm particularly looking at you, Stonewall), which haven't done anything to lower the temperature, but we got to where we are now because the law relating to gender has been an accident waiting to happen for 21 years. That's on our government and its predecessors.

The judge who plans to bring the case to the ECHR had applied to be make a submission to the Supreme Court, only to be declined along with at least one other trans person. Yet the Supreme Court did hear the views of cis people, despite the case involving the protected rights of trans people.

Until a short time ago, the judge concerned was held up by the judiciary and the government as an example of how inclusive the legal system in the UK has become.

However, she resigned last year when became increasingly obvious her transness was being (this is not her word) exploited by a system which, as the Supreme Court judgment has demonstrated, did little more than tolerate trans rights under the GRA2004. She didn't mince her words in her conclusion that, 'the national situation is no longer such that it is possible in a dignified way to be both 'trans' and a salaried, fairly prominent judge in the UK.'

The legal system isn't exactly hot on women's rights, either, just count the number of female supreme court judges. Pale, male and stale doesn't begin to describe it.

So, our new heroine, and that's what she is because the path she's chosen will be a hard one, has made it clear the issues she's taking to the ECHR are relevant not only to transwomen, but to all women and especially women who are perceived as unfeminine.

The latter group are in the firing line now the genie is out the bottle, because unfeminine looking women are an order of magnitude more frequent than transwomen (remember, transwomen are at most 1:400 of the population) and it seems only a matter of time before women who don't match the stereotype of femininity are facing questions in toilets. God forbid we should come to this.

Our judge has also made the case she has female genitalia and that it's not safe for her and other transwomen who have had bottom surgery, to use men's toilets. Since a major plank of the anti trans movements campaign has been about making  women (who have female genitalia) safe from men (don't make me write it) this is slap your forehead stuff. But despite coming from the Journal of the Bleeding Obvious, it has taken all this time for someone to say it.

How will this appeal do? I have no idea, but I can't believe we'll ever find a better advocate, nor one as well resourced. One weakness of the Supreme Court decision is that while they glibly talk of 'biological sex' the attempts to define such a thing under UK law have failed to provide something which stands up to scientific scrutiny.

Intersex hasn't been mentioned, but the Supreme Court judgement leaves the majority of such people, who even anti trans campaigners would think of as being women, defined as men. So there's that, but there's also the issues the Residents Committee and our new judicial champion have raised, which are about compassion, dignity and respect, not one of which our opponents are willing to concede us right now.