Does anyone get dysphoric because their handwriting isn't male enough?
I've not really got a standard handwriting because of a pretty messed up hand, I had trigger finger in my little finger since I was about 7, then broke the fifth metacarpal four years ago which made it painful and very sore to write with. Since then I've had a steriod injection, which made it worse rather than better, and an operation about three years ago. My hand's mostly okay now but it makes it hard to stick with one style for long, it can go from being upright to sloping to the left and then to the right in one paragraph if I let it.
Any writing that I do bothers me because it's either illegible and everyone has to ask me to read it for them, or because it's really feminine. It sucks because I can write most comfortably - physically - with largish rounded letters but that really bothers me because that's how my mother writes and becomes really uncomfortable mentally.
Am I just being really weird getting dysphoric over handwriting and does anyone actually care what it looks like as long as they can get the info they need from it?
My dad has the nicest handwriting of anyone I've ever met. My grandmother has the second nicest and my grandfather had the third. Handwriting isn't gendered. Its just how you are write. It depends on a variety of things - which hand is dominate, who taught you to write, who corrected your writing when you were a kid, how your teachers wrote, and so on. I wouldn't worry about it.
Unless you dot your "i's" with little hearts over the top, I REALLY doubt anyone would think your handwriting is feminine. I know a BUNCH of guys with extremely nice penmanship. This has nothing to do with gender. You're just screwing with yourself for no reason! Don't worry so much! Besides, most professors make you type things once you're in college and so your penmanship is irrelevant.
My bestfriend is cis and we both have ugly angry handwriting.
And I can remember a lot of guys back in middle and highschool that had really pretty handwriting.
I think male handwriting has fewer loops and is a bit more angular. You could always practice that. If you google it, you can find some male looking handwriting and attempt to emulate it. I think in time you could do this.
Maybe practicing would hurt your hand.
Or you could just not worry. There's lots of variation here-- don't do hearts on your "i's". :)
--Jay Jay
Quote from: Stewie on August 16, 2012, 10:03:17 PM
Unless you dot your "i's" with little hearts over the top, I REALLY doubt anyone would think your handwriting is feminine.
This.
Besides, I've seen some men to have very nice handwriting, the first one to pop up in my mind is my old art teacher from lower secondary (then again, it could have something to do with his profession).
Overall, I think the people who do art - draw, paint, etc - tend to have "prettier" handwriting due to the hand-eye coordination.
Obviously, this doesn't seem to include me.
I must have just met very scruffy guys then, because I'm struggling to think of any guy that I know who has handwriting you could read a paragraph of without having to ask them what at least one word is. Once when I was at college for a trial day I thought that I would get outed more not by my birthname or the person who knows me there as a female but by the fact that my handwriting was too neat. It wasn't actually neat, it was just legible.
I dont notice anything like that eather. I usunally think peoples handwritting is more based on how much they care, and there background of what there use to writte. I dont get comment from having a pretty handwritting, actually I got told its very ugly and people dont belive I can be good at drawing while having such a crappy handwritting.. XD
but if theres anything close to that then I had alittle paranoia about my wrist, but I dont do that much anymore since I seen guys having wrist and hands as small as myself.
Modified for profanity
I wouldn't be concerned about it. Many of the guys I've known in the past have had some very "pretty" handwriting with big, rounded letters and the like, just as I've known plenty of girls who made sloppy, angular letters. I've yet to see anyone actually bother to question it. Especially when it's an issue of your physical comfort, it should not raise any issues--and heck, if it did and I were in your shoes I'd go off on a rant about how handwriting doesn't have a gender say I have to write in a way that's comfortable for me and that's that.
That's not to say that I haven't wondered about my own handwriting being perceived as "too feminine" from time to time in the past, but then I realized that A, nobody else was going to care and B, different people write in different ways regardless of gender. Oh, and C, I like my handwriting how it is anyway. ;B
One cis guy I knew had such amazing hand writing that it seemed like it should belong somewhere in the constitution of the U.S. I could barely read a word of it. I've also known a lot of men with very "girly" handwriting. Mine is a sloppy mix of cursive and print that is hardly legible.
I've been taking college classes for 7 years. Honestly, 2 weeks into your first semester, things will seem so much easier then what you originally thought. Most people completely ignore you (even the one's sitting at your own table, if you have tables instead of desks) unless forced to.
Just try to keep your cool through the first 2 or 3 weeks, and it will all fall into a routine that will be easy to follow.
The only reason I've really met anyone at the college is that I smoke, and when I began taking classes, smoke/ food breaks were a mandatory obligation.
Agree with the comments about dotting i's with hearts and such. My handwriting changes a good bit (I've got some joint problems) and it's never been a gender-relevant problem. I wonder if maybe you are insecure about it because you have to work at it and it isn't predictable? I know I get self-conscious sometimes about the things I work at and other people take for granted.
I don't use hearts so I think I'm okay there!
Felix I think you might be right about being bothered by it because I have to work at it because I can't just pick up a pen and write, I have to think about how I wrote the last thing for that person/what's going to be comfortable. I get paranoid that people aren't going to think that it's come from the same person because my handwriting changes so much, and it made school books look a total mess when each page was in a different handwriting.
Quote from: Alex000000 on August 18, 2012, 10:01:30 AM
I don't use hearts so I think I'm okay there!
Felix I think you might be right about being bothered by it because I have to work at it because I can't just pick up a pen and write, I have to think about how I wrote the last thing for that person/what's going to be comfortable. I get paranoid that people aren't going to think that it's come from the same person because my handwriting changes so much, and it made school books look a total mess when each page was in a different handwriting.
I worry sometimes too that people will think I'm faking something because my work or signature doesn't look like prior submissions but so far it's been okay. Sometimes I am accused of not being the original writer, but my legal name change is less than a year old and it's usually that causing as much trouble as anything. I hope you feel at ease about your handwriting now.
Quote from: Felix on September 15, 2012, 08:19:12 PM
I worry sometimes too that people will think I'm faking something because my work or signature doesn't look like prior submissions but so far it's been okay. Sometimes I am accused of not being the original writer, but my legal name change is less than a year old and it's usually that causing as much trouble as anything. I hope you feel at ease about your handwriting now.
Yeah I get that too, especially with my signature, which ends up looking nothing like my writing a lot of the time (it didn't help that I had to renew my passport at 12/13 so my signature is supposed to match up with how I signed it as a kid). I think it would still stick out like a sore thumb if it was compared to a the rest of my class's but I think more for being neat rather than feminine, so I'm okay about that now.
my handwriting is very male but this guy in my english class has handwriting that looks very girly so not all men have 'manly' hand writing.
Quote from: Natkat on August 17, 2012, 09:29:38 AM
people dont belive I can be good at drawing while having such a crappy handwritting.
this. omfg everyone i know who is good at art has horrible handwriting.
I took calligraphy in 6th grade as an extracurricular. My handwriting is now a modified form of calligraphy to make it faster to use for writing, but it's still pretty.
In case anyone is curious to what calligraphy looks like.
(https://www.susans.org/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bladerubberstamps.co.uk%2Fmedia%2FSSC015_Alphabet-stamps_11.gif&hash=5674bcac06d2dc1a34690f234fb470c2027a23b2)
(https://www.susans.org/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fcalligraphyalphabet.muxgo.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2Fccdd4aa94f19cf4.jpg&hash=230c2a88eccc5c9839aa67b6f2e5ed38f042d846)
I don't think you can really have "feminine" handwriting. Personally, I have a kinda sloppy, illegible version of my dad's handwriting. I also love and practice calligraphy, which is an art form that is appreciated by both men and women equally. I've never seen anything that would indicate a feminine or masculine type of handwriting in anything, except when I've seen girls dot their I's with hearts, like Stewie mentioned. I've seen all kinds of people with all kinds of handwriting, and I've never noticed a pattern between them. I wouldn't worry about it.
It's not a big problem, don't worry about the small stuff.
Nobody cares about your writing as much as yourself.
My undergrad days made my handwriting worse - even now, years later, if I write quickly, no one else can read my handwriting. I often have to read other peoples handwriting, and to be honest, if the name isn't on the material I'm reading, I can't really gender someone off it that often.
From what I have seen, no one's handwriting looks very girly unless they draw huge rounded parts of the letters and make the straight parts as tiny as possible, and then round the sides on letters like "L" and "T". If a letter is in correct proportion and doesn't have little loops coming off the bottom of it, then it really doesn't look girly at all to me. For example have you seen people who will write a lower case "d" and they make the bottom circle take up almost the whole letter, and just a teeny line comes over top? That's kind of girly, but draw the straight part longer and it stops looking girly. If it would be at all possible, just try not to draw tiny little tops on your "b, d, h" and not to make the bottom too small on letter "p".
As for my own handwriting, yes I used to draw pretty big and round because it took up more room on a paper and I used to have teachers who would say "Write ten pages and don't double space" so I made my letters wider to compensate. Now I have gone to making them skinny so they look normal.
I'm feeling a lot better about my handwriting at the minute, but I've just realised how vaguely ridiculous it is to have a thread about it without actually showing any of you it. This is it currently - as I said before it does change a lot - although probably slightly messier than usual seeing as my hands feeling a but fussy because I just electrocuted myself with mains through it a little while ago (long story, basically I wasn't thinking when I decided to plug the motor of a food mixer in without the plastic casing).
(https://www.susans.org/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi46.tinypic.com%2F2aewe1y.jpg&hash=2558ad9f9fc3ff7c8cd548623a417a581a841028)
(https://www.susans.org/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi45.tinypic.com%2F2likd9x.jpg&hash=6b55497e566c7695989ddd0493c3d8f40bf2ad37)
Just a random passage from the book I'm reading at the moment.
That really doesnt look girly to me. In fact it is similar to mine when I do the proper skinny letters
Some individual letters look girly when you isolate them, but I don't think people are that analytical of your writing. Overall - if you just look at entire page - it doesn't seem girly. You have to look closer to see that, and be actively looking for femininity otherwise you wouldn't notice it.
That's my perspective at least. And I'm not trying to give false positivity to make you feel better, I actually mean it.
Mine's messy and ugly, with uneven letter sizes and general awfulness. Some "girly" touches show here and there, such as loops on letters due to the cursive lettering training I recieved in school having wormed its way into muscle memory. Teachers have on several occasions asked me what I've written, and I've recieved bad marks on tests due to poor writing looking like misspelt words (an a, a c, and an e can look quite similar when I write them). It took some time for me to learn how to write in lowercase letters when I was little, so maybe that's why I have such awful penmanship. In my previous school, they used to tell me I wrote like a boy.