Does anyone else struggle with feelings of having been handed this challenge of living as a woman and failing at it? Like 3.5 billion women on this planet managed to work this and you couldn't?
I guess I have to mourn and grieve and let go of the person I was before. But I can't escape a feeling I didn't try hard enough. And maybe it's just shame over my mood disorder which is pretty much what took me to this point of having to transition. Idk. I just wonder ... what is so wrong with being a woman that I am so miserable over it?
No, I don't. I really do not equate any of myself with having been female or a failed female. Not even in my lowest moments.
I do understand what you mean though. This idea that it is wrong and needs to be got rid of does present a problem of sorts. There's nothing wrong with being a woman. But would we expect a bio male to live happily in the body of a woman if he is simply not made for it? Would we blame him for being miserable because of it and tell him to just get on with it? That would be cruel, in my opinion, and even cis people would see the cruelty of such an expectation. Same as forcing a cis woman to look and act like a man if she is just not inclined that way and doesn't want to and would feel assailed by it. I expect many people would feel that would be a cruel thing to force on a person and that is pretty much what is forced on us by misfortune. Men and women have their urges and propensities that are common to them that are very hard to suppress, and when they are suppressed or a person is forced to act in a way that doesn't sit right with them they can do harm to the individual. We are what we are and there's no-one to blame.
No, not really.
I did, but now I've concluded that i wasn't a woman to start with, and so could hardly be expected to have been successful at it.
Yeah I can relate. Sometimes I feel like maybe I should just stop this and just "be a girl". It's just not that easy.
I felt really guilty about abandoning my womanhood. I was a huge les/bi women's activist and it felt like I was losing a part of my identity. It's hard to accept that's not my community anymore.
I used too. Even though I spent 21 or so years living as my assigned gender and feeling awful I still thought I hadn't 'tried hard enough'. It wasn't until I started to accept myself; realised trans was normal and started T that I stopped thinking that way. If I was a 'failed' woman why would I feel right on T and not on estrogen? Or feel a lot more comfortable not being referred too as female? I'm not a failed woman bcos I never was one to begin with.
I decided as a teen that I should just pretend to (pass as) a straight woman because I didn't think there was any way I could live as the gay man I knew I was (no idea that transition was possible). I decided to live to break stereotypes and to be a staunch feminist. If anything, I feel like I failed that objective, like my performance was subpar. Sometimes I also feel like I'm betraying my own desire to bread stereotypes though.
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Quote from: T.K.G.W. on August 28, 2016, 04:39:11 PM
But would we expect a bio male to live happily in the body of a woman if he is simply not made for it? Would we blame him for being miserable because of it and tell him to just get on with it? That would be cruel, in my opinion, and even cis people would see the cruelty of such an expectation.
It burns me that forced feminization is considered torture when done to a cis male but just fine to enact on people like us. And that is what I went through. Forced feminization.
Quote from: AnxietyDisord3r on August 28, 2016, 08:52:34 PM
It burns me that forced feminization is considered torture when done to a cis male but just fine to enact on people like us. And that is what I went through. Forced feminization.
Woah that thought had never occured to me :( That's really dark and sad.
I don't know that I feel like I failed at all. I think I was operating under the wrong expectations and now that those have changed I'm quite happy and see myself as successful. I never felt like I needed to mourn myself either. Why would I? I'm still here and kicking and doing awesome. Transition didn't mean I had to give up anything except my apathy and self-hatred.
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I think I just have a tendency to think about myself and the world in a negative way.
It has been tough for me to give up a female identity in some ways. I've always (well, at least since puberty) chafed at being "she" but I was proud to be in girls' sports and I liked being the girl who was competitive in math and science and stuff like that. I even told my therapist that as a woman (ugh) I was pretty unique but as a man I am just ordinary. And I don't know how I feel about that! :laugh:
Oh frick can I relate...
I feel like Im expected to and SHOULD BE a woman. But I cant wrap my head around that...
Its not necessarily that I like "guy" things and am all tomboyish, I know I dont have to be a guy to like guy things.
So somewhere along the line I mustve decided to myself that somehow being a tomboy wasnt enough for some reason, that I had this needed urge to be the man I am.
In short...I feel like upholding the standards those around me expect...that I "fail as a woman", and now with transition Ive felt very good and things have felt smooth and I feel I easily "succeed as a man"
Yeah, I relate to this. Being a woman is a lot of work, as any of them can tell you. For a long time I thought maybe I was just too damn lazy to be a proper woman. Plenty of women complain about makeup and bras and heels and all the time and money and effort they put into being femme...
But then... a series of conversations I had convinced me that, no matter how much they complain about the work, or how society treats them, and no matter how much they ignore or subvert or rebel... they fundamentally want to be women in a way that I never have!
The Staff of Tiresias came up in one of these conversations and I was the only person there who said, basically, hell yeah I'd take a magical transformation into a man, wouldn't anyone? And the women who were there -- they said no, they wouldn't. Given the choice, they would stay as women.
I don't know if that helps. It's something I thought about for a long time.
Is it though? If I decided not to transition and just keep on living with everyone thinking I'm female, I'd just keep on the way I was going being myself and not wearing make up or caring about clothes and presentation especially, not caring about all the various things my female acquaintances seem to care about a lot. I'd done it thus far and it wasn't difficult "being" one of them. What's difficult is the internal turmoil that was produced by and of myself and this condition. Cis women don't experience trans turmoil, so what is truly difficult about 'being' a woman when people say this? Peer pressure, societal pressure? I never felt that, tbh. It went completely over my head and I did as I pleased. Giving birth? Well you have a choice about that and you don't have to be pregnant if you don't want to be. Periods and emotional ups and downs - yeah that's unpleasant but it's apparently not this awful terrible thing to cis women like it is to us. Being generally smaller and weaker than men? Yes, that really sucks but it's made up for by the fact people step in to help women, and to protect them, as an unspoken rule.
If a woman wants to, she can go through life without bending to social pressure. She might be considered unusual, quirky, tomboyish, that's not exactly a hard thing to live with. Not being an integral member of a social group might be hard if you really want to be one, but there's plenty of people who aren't and don't care.
I never thought being a woman was particularly hard or a lot of work from any of my experience. I never took any notice of expectations and nothing came to bite me in the ass for it. Sure, if I'd wanted to look like a model or something that would be a lot of work and consideration, but I don't see the point of even bothering to try to do that. Women are valued as women, even if they don't look like models. I was never short of people interested in having a serious relationships with me for example, and I didn't even bother trying to look feminine.
I guess the hard work I heard about regards it is trying to live up to some unrealistic standard of beauty. But that's what a lot of people choose to do and you totally don't have to do it. You can still have a normal life as a woman without doing it, I had one and it was fine, all apart from the trans nightmare I lived every day.
I take it you're talking about the average woman and not say, a woman who really wants a career in the armed forces on the front lines or something. Now that would be difficult because she'd be up against the male physical standard and people's ideas about whether women are fit for combat. It would make her life harder. But in most situations I don't think it's fundamentally difficult to 'be' a woman. You're right though, almost every woman I've ever met might complain about this or that aspect of femininity sometimes but she still goes ahead and puts on the make-up, or she decides to have kids, etc. I knew I was different because I literally could not go ahead and do any of those things, even if I agreed sexism sucks, periods suck, childbirth sucks, and so on. All non-trans biological females I knew from school or college or work or family in the end embraced these things and I was simply not mentally or physically able/inclined to.
And I didn't feel bad for that fact. I guess I just never was convinced, either by the shape of my body or the stuff people around me were saying, that I was a woman. It was some time before I accepted that I might be a man, but from the first, there was no self-identification with women. Which is pretty strange, almost like part-failing the mirror self-identification test for self-awareness in animals, but I was always very self-aware outside and beyond the concept of gender. (Then again we all know and understand there is a distinct separation between our internal self and the self that "appears" to everyone else, trans or not. The physical manifestation is but a very small part of what we know about ourselves inside, and that's pretty much exactly how I treated it, as a small and insignificant part. Probably why it took so long for me to become concerned enough about it to transition. I guess I mostly live "in my head".)
Quote from: T.K.G.W. on August 30, 2016, 09:05:41 AM
Is it though? If I decided not to transition and just keep on living with everyone thinking I'm female, I'd just keep on the way I was going being myself and not wearing make up or caring about clothes and presentation especially, not caring about all the various things my female acquaintances seem to care about a lot. I'd done it thus far and it wasn't difficult "being" one of them. What's difficult is the internal turmoil that was produced by and of myself and this condition. Cis women don't experience trans turmoil, so what is truly difficult about 'being' a woman when people say this? Peer pressure, societal pressure? I never felt that, tbh. It went completely over my head and I did as I pleased. Giving birth? Well you have a choice about that and you don't have to be pregnant if you don't want to be. Periods and emotional ups and downs - yeah that's unpleasant but it's apparently not this awful terrible thing to cis women like it is to us. Being generally smaller and weaker than men? Yes, that really sucks but it's made up for by the fact people step in to help women, and to protect them, as an unspoken rule.
If a woman wants to, she can go through life without bending to social pressure. She might be considered unusual, quirky, tomboyish, that's not exactly a hard thing to live with. Not being an integral member of a social group might be hard if you really want to be one, but there's plenty of people who aren't and don't care.
I never thought being a woman was particularly hard or a lot of work from any of my experience. I never took any notice of expectations and nothing came to bite me in the ass for it. Sure, if I'd wanted to look like a model or something that would be a lot of work and consideration, but I don't see the point of even bothering to try to do that. Women are valued as women, even if they don't look like models. I was never short of people interested in having a serious relationships with me for example, and I didn't even bother trying to look feminine.
I guess the hard work I heard about regards it is trying to live up to some unrealistic standard of beauty. But that's what a lot of people choose to do and you totally don't have to do it. You can still have a normal life as a woman without doing it, I had one and it was fine, all apart from the trans nightmare I lived every day.
I take it you're talking about the average woman and not say, a woman who really wants a career in the armed forces on the front lines or something. Now that would be difficult because she'd be up against the male physical standard and people's ideas about whether women are fit for combat. It would make her life harder. But in most situations I don't think it's fundamentally difficult to 'be' a woman. You're right though, almost every woman I've ever met might complain about this or that aspect of femininity sometimes but she still goes ahead and puts on the make-up, or she decides to have kids, etc. I knew I was different because I literally could not go ahead and do any of those things, even if I agreed sexism sucks, periods suck, childbirth sucks, and so on. All non-trans biological females I knew from school or college or work or family in the end embraced these things and I was simply not mentally or physically able/inclined to.
And I didn't feel bad for that fact. I guess I just never was convinced, either by the shape of my body or the stuff people around me were saying, that I was a woman. It was some time before I accepted that I might be a man, but from the first, there was no self-identification with women. Which is pretty strange, almost like part-failing the mirror self-identification test for self-awareness in animals, but I was always very self-aware outside and beyond the concept of gender. (Then again we all know and understand there is a distinct separation between our internal self and the self that "appears" to everyone else, trans or not. The physical manifestation is but a very small part of what we know about ourselves inside, and that's pretty much exactly how I treated it, as a small and insignificant part. Probably why it took so long for me to become concerned enough about it to transition. I guess I mostly live "in my head".)
This was exactly my experience and thought process. I was actually pretty successful prior to transitioning by social standards, and I was very much anti-societal beauty expectations, anti-familial expectations. But I still hated myself, and I think I would've hated myself even more had I tried to embrace society's expectations of femininity.
Now? I might be an ordinary dude, but at least I don't want to kill myself anymore. There's nothing about my old self or life worth mourning IMO - everything good is still here, I've carried it over. To mourn the remnants that didn't, for me, would be to second guess everything that's given me this renewed sense of life.
Quote from: AnxietyDisord3r on August 28, 2016, 04:20:46 PM
Does anyone else struggle with feelings of having been handed this challenge of living as a woman and failing at it? Like 3.5 billion women on this planet managed to work this and you couldn't?
I guess I have to mourn and grieve and let go of the person I was before. But I can't escape a feeling I didn't try hard enough. And maybe it's just shame over my mood disorder which is pretty much what took me to this point of having to transition. Idk. I just wonder ... what is so wrong with being a woman that I am so miserable over it?
I think my experience was much more different. I don't really have the sense I ever failed as a woman, mostly because even though as a kid, as a teen even, I never had the remotest idea that trans guys existed. So me being a guy and having this "secret" and never referring to myself as a woman (female was one thing, woman something entirely different to me) I think contributed to having a pretty consistent sense of self despite not even knowing what a trans guy was previously. I have lived fairly openly as a guy for over five years now and I can't say that as a person I've changed much at all, so a sense of failure in at least that aspect of myself is not something I feel. If anything I probably have become more aware of my experiences as someone assigned female at birth and processing them more than I did before coming out. I've always been a pretty masculine person though, so very little has changed in the way I dress, behave, or what I'm interested in.
I also think that to recognise being a woman as a "challenge" must be followed by recognising that the only way being a woman could be a "challenge" for cis women who identify that way is because of misogyny. And I think we can all agree that the reason the vast majority of us came out as trans guys probably had little to do with "escaping misogyny" and more to do with just being who we felt we were inside and as people.
They've done studies and found that trans men's brains are wired just like a cis-male's in some parts, rather than a woman's. It's just harder for us to accept that when we're born with female bodies, and society tells us we need to be women.
I've always felt I struggled more with my gender because, despite having a female body, I've always had masculine traits, that caused people to make fun of me. People made me feel ashamed for having these traits, and convinced me that I'm just a gross female. I began to loathe my male traits, despite feeling pride over them deep down inside. Every time I would try to begin transition, people would make me feel like I needed to try harder at being a woman.
And then, one day, I did try. I took natural feminizing hormones (which I guess worked so well because I wasn't producing them in high qualities naturally). I tried to figure out how to use makeup (didn't work), I tried to corset train to get a more curvy figure (worked to some degree), and I tried to wear more feminine clothes (also not good at that). In the end, it drove me closer and closer to suicide. Eventually, I realized, I was being what everyone wanted me to be, but I wasn't being myself. I spent a lot of money, time, and effort, and all I got out of it was a few suicide attempts. I had been successful at becoming a woman, given where I started from, but it only made me feel horrible about myself. My appearance may have been more feminine, but my soul didn't change.
I guess the point here is, don't feel like you have to ever "try" to be a woman, just because of the body you were dealt. I know it's a lot easier to see what's outside, rather than what your brain looks like, but if we all lived by that logic, we would be an incredibly stupid, albeit beautiful, race, with a lot of mental problems. You need to be true to yourself, not to society. Don't ever "try" to become something you're not, just because you feel like it's somehow required by nature. If you're miserable being a woman, it's because you aren't, not where it counts. If you try and fail like I did, you'll realize you've lost a lot of years where you could have been living as your true self. You'll miss out on a lot of happiness and freedom.
Besides, as has been said, it really is a lot of work being female, although women who enjoy femininity do actually enjoy the act of taking care of themselves. Doing their makeup, hair, dressing up and going shopping...But that's all a personal preference, nothing more. Even if you weren't trans, if you were simply a female who doesn't like feminine things, there's no need to try harder, to do things you don't like naturally. There's no need to try to do what everyone else is doing. We all have the potential to be beautiful in our own way, and you will lose that if you lie to yourself about who you are.
You're always going to put more pressure on yourself than other people will. And sometimes that causes us to create barriers within ourselves. We just need to learn to find ways to cross those barriers, break them down, so that we can reach our own goals, not our preconceived notions on other people's goals for ourselves.
I used to try to be a girl like all the others I knew. Constantly poured money into clothes (wore my BF's Tshirts and jeans), shoes (wore one pair of trainers to death at a time), bags (backpack) and makeup that I'd never use in the hopes I'd somehow absorb 'girlyness' from them. Once I finally realised that I wasn't a girl at all it all seemed like a huge pile of overcompensation in the middle of the room. TBH I don't really miss being female at all. Just like a weight had been lifted from my back (and front?)
When I first came out to my boyfriend, his first reaction was that it was due to me feeling like I could never be a 'proper' woman, and so was 'just giving up and trying to be a man instead'. Heh. Little did he know... ::)
I agree with the other replies though, that if you felt you needed to try then it wasn't the real you i.e. you haven't failed.