When I was around 6 years old I wanted a pen!s really bad....I would try and convince myself that I would grow one and sometimes stuffed my underwear. I one time asked my mom if God would turn me into a boy because I really wanted a pen!s....she told me God wanted me to be a girl and I got upset at her answer.
Now I hear about pen!s envy quite a bit...so I dont know if that is a sign of ->-bleeped-<- or if its just normal pen!s envy in a young girl.
What do you think?
Thanks.
Penis is an okay word on here I think man. So I don't think you have to use the exclamation point, I could be wrong. I've personally never heard of a girl having penis envy.
Sure, I've met teenage girls who wished they weren't able to get pregnant or wished to be a male for the reason of it being simpler. (I always laughed at the simple thing a little because I think in that case it's a "grass is always greener on the other side" type.) So it's not impossible. Seriously though do you have a glbt center near you? Maybe they can set you up with cheap or free counciling because a therapist would be able to better answer your question than we can.
I had penis envy sometimes too with my ex boyfriend (wow i cant believe i just used that term), but most of the time it was because i get so angry knowing that he can wave it around so confidently and positively like he OWNS it. Like hes happy with it, the fact that he has it and he is so proud of having it. Whereas, when i had mine i hated it, there were times i wanted to grab a knife and remove it myself.
Even now after my SRS i still feel a little sadness whenever he kinda rubs it in my face like....HAH!! im a man! im stronger and more masculine and i dominate over u!!!
I dont like that feeling...as i always wished in a way that i was born male...with a male brain.
I dont know if that even makes sense since i WAS BORN biologically male...but i always wanted to be a girl...but then i am a girl who wishes she was born a guy with guy thoughts and mannerisms?
OMG i am so confused.
Penis envy was a term coined by Freud. What it was referring to was the resentment that girls feel in relation to their socially and physically inferior state compared to boys.
I appreciate that many have tried to adapt Freud to the modern world. But the reality is that Freud was dealing with a client base of wealthy middle class 19th century women who were reacting to their preposterus lifestyle by becoming neurotic. He did attempt to apply his theoris to psychosis with disasterous results. It developed into behaviourism which resulted in about 50 years of psychiatric patients being teated like naughty school children, being punished with ECT, mind crippling drugs, confinement, even in small spaces. Fortunately, that phase of psychiatry seems to have passed in most of the world.
If I may suggest, try not to annalyse yourself. And try to avoid using terminologies that are more appropriate to someone's bank balance than to the realities of human experience.
QuoteI dont know if that even makes sense since i WAS BORN biologically male...but i always wanted to be a girl...but then i am a girl who wishes she was born a guy with guy thoughts and mannerisms?
OMG i am so confused.
Not so confusing. If You wanted a guy brain but stuck with a girl one, that makes sense and having a girl brain and guy body but wanting it all to fit together right, that makes sense. Add the 2 together and it still makes sense, either that or I don't.
Technically it's both. You can be envious of penis and still be TG.
Wanting a penis seems consistent with transgendered feelings. However, for any behavior in transgendered children, you'll find non-trans children that exhibited it also. I don't know how common it is for little girls to exhibit penis envy. I'm not up on Freud enough to know how many incidences he actually observed of this.
So, it could be or could not be.
Quote from: KillBelle on December 25, 2010, 06:02:01 PM
I dont like that feeling...as i always wished in a way that i was born male...with a male brain.
I dont know if that even makes sense since i WAS BORN biologically male...but i always wanted to be a girl...but then i am a girl who wishes she was born a guy with guy thoughts and mannerisms?
OMG i am so confused.
Some part of me wishes I could be happy being female, and feels sad that I never will be happy about it.
Quote from: LordKAT on December 25, 2010, 06:42:42 PM
Not so confusing. If You wanted a guy brain but stuck with a girl one, that makes sense and having a girl brain and guy body but wanting it all to fit together right, that makes sense. Add the 2 together and it still makes sense, either that or I don't.
It sounds to me more like a privilege envy situation; she likes all the male privileges that comes with being male, but is female (brained).
She'd be better off reading some feminist literature than wishing she was male brained.
Or perhaps this is just an 'I don't want to me trans' reaction to being trans.
Just pointing out that Alex prefers male pronouns from what I've read.
Quote from: Michael Alexander on December 25, 2010, 08:32:28 PM
Just pointing out that Alex prefers male pronouns from what I've read.
Yes ...I very much prefer male pronouns. Female pronouns disgust me.
Quote from: Vexing on December 25, 2010, 08:24:58 PM
It sounds to me more like a privilege envy situation; she likes all the male privileges that comes with being male, but is female (brained).
She'd be better off reading some feminist literature than wishing she was male brained.
Or perhaps this is just an 'I don't want to me trans' reaction to being trans.
It has nothing to do with male privledge. I could care less about that. I just want a male body.
Quote from: KillBelle on December 25, 2010, 06:02:01 PM
I dont like that feeling...as i always wished in a way that i was born male...with a male brain.
I dont know if that even makes sense since i WAS BORN biologically male...but i always wanted to be a girl...but then i am a girl who wishes she was born a guy with guy thoughts and mannerisms?
OMG i am so confused.
I understand what you mean exactly. Some days it would be easier if I actually wanted to have the damn thing.
Quote from: Alex201 on December 25, 2010, 08:34:38 PMQuote from: Michael Alexander on December 25, 2010, 08:32:28 PM
Just pointing out that Alex prefers male pronouns from what I've read.
Yes ...I very much prefer male pronouns. Female pronouns disgust me.
I think Vexing was referring to KillBelle's post.
Quote from: Forum Admin on December 25, 2010, 09:00:18 PM
I think Vexing was referring to KillBelle's post.
Oh, sorry Vexing, my bad. I blame it on my tiredness. Sorry!
Seems to me that the only people who take "penis envy" seriously have a combination of "brain envy" and "life envy." It's an outdated idea that was never anything more than an insulting charicature of a theory. I feel morally obligated to make fun of anyone who brings it up as something to be regarded with anything other than scorn.
Quote from: glendagladwitch on December 25, 2010, 09:32:46 PM
Seems to me that the only people who take "penis envy" seriously have a combination of "brain envy" and "life envy." It's an outdated idea that was never anything more than an insulting charicature of a theory. I feel morally obligated to make fun of anyone who brings it up as something to be regarded with anything other than scorn.
is my post offensive? I'm sorry if it is I do not know much about the subject itself I have just heard the term thrown around.
Quote from: Alex201 on December 25, 2010, 09:43:53 PM
is my post offensive? I'm sorry if it is I do not know much about the subject itself I have just heard the term thrown around.
No, you were asking a legitimate question. It's just that it's a mostly discounted theory as far as I know, and it's based off of the inequal treatment received by men and women. As Spacial said:
Quote from: spacial on December 25, 2010, 06:39:41 PM
Penis envy was a term coined by Freud. What it was referring to was the resentment that girls feel in relation to their socially and physically inferior state compared to boys.
Since your posts are about feeling uncomfortable in your body and with female pronouns, and not about wanting to be male to gain social priviledge, I'd say that this term doesn't apply to you.
wanting to be male to gain social priviledge
lot's of guys have like less than zero social privilege
just sayin'
Quote from: tekla on December 25, 2010, 10:56:13 PM
wanting to be male to gain social priviledge
lot's of guys have like less than zero social privilege
just sayin'
All males have male privilege. (http://www.amptoons.com/blog/the-male-privilege-checklist/)
Hell, even though I haven't lived or been perceived as male for over 3 years, I still have residual benefits from being male, like my education level and my job experience.
So, according to your (and it's not your's its classic, i.e. retro, feminist theory) Hillary Clinton has less social privilege than the black guy who's sweeping the floor in the terminal where she parks the luxury state-owned jet she gets to use to travel the world. That's so cute.
I'm dying to hear you convince that guy of that. Hell, I'd pay money to watch that.
But hey, I'll not only take race out of the equation, hell I'll reverse it, so that the white guy who is sweeping the terminal where Condi Rice walks out of her first-class cabin seat has a lot more social privilege than a Regent at Stanford University who once had an oil tanker named after her before she was Secretary of State? Damn girl, they ain't even going to name the broom after him.
But wait, that's not even it. Because even more than being the youngest Regent in the history of Stanford, besides being the highest ranking African-American (at that point in time) ever to hold office in the US (male or female), besides being Secretary of State for the US, what Condi really has always wanted (and like everything else she's ever wanted, I'm sure she'll get, and the sooner the better) is to be the Commissioner for the National Football League. And, at the point where she is pretty much in charge of the NFL, I want to see you tell the guy with the broom, who can't even afford a ticket to a crappy NFL game, that he has some form of 'privilege.'
And, while I'm sure they ain't going to name the broom after him, I'm also pretty sure that you'll get to have it surgically removed after you try to make that argument to him.
Quote from: Alex201 on December 25, 2010, 09:43:53 PM
is my post offensive? I'm sorry if it is I do not know much about the subject itself I have just heard the term thrown around.
Hardly. You just fail to appreciate just how insulting and ridiculous these other people are being that offer "penis envy" as some kind of legitimate alternative to FTM identification.
We need a rope to pull, you and I, that dumps a ton of slimy poop on these people whenever they talk.
On the original point, penis envy as a theory is pretty much in the bull->-bleeped-<- bin at this stage, and never meant what you seem to think it means, Alex. If you actually want a penis then it never applied.
On to the subplot:
In reality, social priviliges exist and it's not just feminist theory. Of course there are exceptions, but thats the essential point of a generalised social theory - it applies explicitly to groups and not individuals or even large populations within said groups. Teklas' pedantic commentary notwithstanding.
Quote from: tekla on December 25, 2010, 11:35:46 PM
So, according to your (and it's not your's its classic, i.e. retro, feminist theory) Hillary Clinton has less social privilege than the black guy who's sweeping the floor in the terminal where she parks the luxury state-owned jet she gets to use to travel the world. That's so cute.
I'm dying to hear you convince that guy of that. Hell, I'd pay money to watch that.
I've heard this argument before, from a white, (self proclaimed) hillbilly, no less.
There is no such thing as 'social privilege'. There are various privileges which intersect. This is known as 'intersectionality'. Such privileges can be divided into groups, like race, class, gender, being able bodied, being cis, socioeconomic status and a host of other privileges.
So you example is flawed. We are only examining male vs female privilege here.
You're trying to inject race, class and socioeconomic status into the mix to make an illogical comparison. The logical comparison is comparing (for example purposes only) a white middle-class cis male who works in management and a white middle-class cis female who works in management. We then draw comparisons of the differences in status and privilege based on gender.
Male privilege still exists, no matter what other privileges you are lacking, if you are male and presenting as male, you have male privilege.
Reality check.
When I revived my PhD more than half of the Doctoral Degrees handed out that year were given to women. In my department there were 4 of us, I was the only male. My two US Senators are both women. Was was up for re-election and had she lost she would have been replaced by a Republican woman, a multi-millionaire ex-Fortune 500 CEO. No matter which place I'm in, SR or SF, my congresscritter is a woman, one of whom is Speaker of the House at least for a few more days. Of the two nightclubs/theaters I work at one is run by a woman the other by a gay male. The president of my union is black, as is the president of the country. See, that's the problem with theory, it rarely works in practice, which is why people would rather hire people with practice as opposed to theory.
What matter much, much, much more than gender is social class, but no-one in America will talk about that. Least of all Feminist Theorists, who mostly are middle and upper middle class, and hence, the oppressors, not the oppressed.
Have a read through again:
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/the-male-privilege-checklist/ (http://www.amptoons.com/blog/the-male-privilege-checklist/)
You'll note that only a handful of the points relate directly to employment.
3rd wave feminist theory is VERY involved with talking about class and socioeconomic status.
Also of interest:
http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm (http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm)
...wow, 16.9%. The USA is worse that Kazakhstan.
Quote from: glendagladwitch on December 26, 2010, 12:18:43 AM
Hardly. You just fail to appreciate just how insulting and ridiculous these other people are being that offer "penis envy" as some kind of legitimate alternative to FTM identification.
I don't think anyone here is suggesting that. The question seemed to be whether expressing a desire for a penis at one point was ->-bleeped-<- or something else. The speculation was to how common it may or may not be for a girl to express the desire for a certain body part at a young age.
Quote from: Vexing on December 25, 2010, 08:24:58 PM
It sounds to me more like a privilege envy situation; she likes all the male privileges that comes with being male, but is female (brained).
You are correct.
Quote from: Alex201 on December 25, 2010, 08:37:17 PM
It has nothing to do with male privledge. I could care less about that. I just want a male body.
Dear Alex.
You're annalysing things. It's good that we think, rethink and rethink, about all aspects of our lives. We have brains. It's about all we do have. We should use them.
But sometimes, we need to direct our thoughts to make them productive.
I suggest, your thoughts should be directed toward how you will deal with life in transision and as a man. You do have some problems. In anothr thread, you talk about your parents, blocking your net access. You are going to have problems with society, with jobs. Many others.
These are problems concerned with transision, not the gender you seek or that sex society precieves.
Everyone has problems in society, because society likes to put everyone into little boxes. That person is negro, so that means...., that person is Muslims so that means....., that person likes sport, that person looks like..... and so on.
Now, you can spend your life moaning about how hard done to you are, or you can just get on with things. Trying to find solutions to your problems rather than trying to find others to blame.
Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not trying to be unsympathetic, getting to know you here, you are clearly a really nice and interesting young man. But one of the lessons I've learnt in this life is, we create our own realities.
Take care lovely Alex.
Quote from: Forum Admin on December 26, 2010, 01:35:49 AM
I don't think anyone here is suggesting that. The question seemed to be whether expressing a desire for a penis at one point was ->-bleeped-<- or something else. The speculation was to how common it may or may not be for a girl to express the desire for a certain body part at a young age.
Certainly no one HERE is suggesting that. But the original post conjured up images of others telling him that he or other FTM transitioners just have "penis envy."
I apologize for coming off as antogonistic towards anyone here. I was commenting on how I would respond to such people.
Regarding the privilege debate, I found this Time Magazine article to be fairly informative. The raw data on the wage gap always shows a big discrepancy between men's and women's salaries. But the article says that if you control for education, experience, occupation, industry, and union membership, the discrepancy shrinks to 91%.
And here's my favorite part.
Quote
Perhaps the most compelling — and potentially damning — data of all to suggest that gender has an influence comes from a 2008 study in which University of Chicago sociologist Kristen Schilt and NYU economist Matthew Wiswall examined the wage trajectories of people who underwent a sex change. Their results: even when controlling for factors like education, men who transitioned to women earned, on average, 32% less after the surgery. Women who became men, on the other hand, earned 1.5% more.
I wonder if there is any way to control for how much better FTMs tend to pass than MTFs after transition, especially due to the voice issue.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1983185,00.html (http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1983185,00.html)
To jump in on the privilege discussion (which is a tangent/off-shoot of the original question):
The problem with this debate is that there is no such thing as a "male identity" that is independent of other identity aspects.
I was discussing this with a friend of mine who is also FTM when he was thinking about how he is not a man the same way someone who is cis-male is a man. I pointed out that he is comparing himself to a white, upper-middle class, educated version of what it is to be a man. Except someone who is not white or not educated or poor will experience what it means to be a man *differently* than what his idea of what it means to be a man is, and that in many ways, an FTM with the same privileged background will experience manhood in a far more similar way to a cis-male guy than EITHER of them would experience the same idea of what it means to be a man without certain kinds of privilege.
In other words, your gendered identity is not independent of every other identity aspect of you. So when people speak about gender as a form of privilege, they are exploring how things differ based on gender - if you hold all other variables constant! We are not comparing Hillary Clinton to a janitor. We are comparing Hillary Clinton to her brothers and other men who attended Yale law school when she did.
There is such a thing as male privilege. However, it's pretty clear that in the year 2010, gender is far from the most limiting identity aspect. It also seems to be the case that gender combines with other socio-economic, cultural, racial, age-related or ethnic identities in ways that can amplify or diminish the effects of male privilege.
Alex:
As Spacial mentioned, the term "Penis Envy" is an outdated term used to describe conditions that 19th century females often found themselves in. There was much societal repression regarding women and women themselves often contributed to their own repression, while males had all the power. It described a sociological condition, not a physical need.
Your wish to have a penis is not penis envy in that classic respect. You think of yourself as a male, you are male where it counts (between your ears, not your legs) and having a penis is appropriate for males. I think you are responding to the birth defect many of us are born with. We have the wrong body for the brain we have.
And no, your post and your question was not offensive in the least. That is a completely appropriate question. Do not ever worry about asking any question here. As you have seen, there is always plenty of discussion to be had. Though we are such an introspective lot! ;D ;D
Everyone else:
I think we are drifting off topic here. Alex has asked a question regarding his feelings and we are drifting into a discussion about society. I'm sure we can start a thread regarding feminism in the modern world. But I think that he would appreciate topical responses.
Thanks!
-Sandy