There are a lot of people on the forum here hurting over gender dysphoria, and to some extent, I wonder, is it THEY that have the problem? or is it all the people in their life that is the problem?

Clinically speaking, I can see it now, a shrink would address my situation by trying to address MY gender dysphoria. But wait, why does it need to be me that has the problem.

What? they think I don't know who I am? Shouldn't I be precisely the one to know who I am?

People see me and they mistake me for male, I am not going to beat them up over it, sure, if I look male, it is not unreasonable to mistake me as male, and I can't really fault them for an innocent mistake.
But that doesn't hold with people that DO know me.
If I tell a person 'I am female in here, and I expect to be treated as female', then the person with the gender issues is not me, it's the person that needs to be told repeatedly to stop treating me as the wrong gender.

What do we say to them? 'hey, are you just bloody stupid? are you friggin deaf? what part of the language do you not understand?'.
'Would you like it if I smacked you in the head every time you used the wrong form of gender in speaking to me?'.

Yeah I was raised male, in a male form. I am NOT shocked I have trouble sitting like a girl.
And I have been watching very careful like recently. Cis females don't really walk differently for the most part. Sure, if you put on a confining skirt your pace alters. If you put on high heels your pace will alter. I think if I was wearing a skirt, I wouldn't need to spend energy making myself sit properly, I'm not going to sit there legs splayed exposing myself.
But I get it, I have a lot of programming that is not simple to just delete.
Ever looked at a 5 year old computer that has never been formatted and had the OS reinstalled? There's a lot of garbage going to be in there.
There's a lot of garbage in my head I wish I could delete too.
Not as much though as I think a lot of people might realize.
That's why hindsight is interesting. I can look back and a lot of my behaviour is now all the more logical.
And some of the stuff I did, was just buggy programming that never really belonged.

But society is just so ill prepared for anything that so fundamentally screws with the rigid and the old.
Heck most of society has problems dealing with boring cis people let alone the rest of the non cis portions.
The religious world is saturated in dogmatic garbage for the cis crowd, so it is no shock they can't handle me.
And then there is all the cultural idiocy that the cis crowd deals with, so I am not surprised they are not really capable of dealing with me.

There's nothing special about being cis if you ask me.
I happen to be in a male form, but I don't consider it a perk that's for sure even if society is as misogynistic as it is.
I suppose my misogynist society just can't fathom why I would ditch them.

Our species makes more of itself through the sexual interaction of a male and a female.
I wonder though, would our planet, and our world not be better off, if not all of us were so driven to the need to just make more of us, just for the sake of doing it?
We are now something like 7 billions of us, and I have seen it written that our planet is not suited to coping with more than 8 billions of us, and 8 billion is not likely to be too hard to reach if we don't do something genuinely radical. And ideally I would rather not the solution be something horrible like a violent confrontation to make the 20th century be no more than the tutorial.

But I have wandered, the point is, I think too many of us might be taking too much of our gender dysphoria as being a WE problem when it is possibly better to put it on them as a THEM problem.

It's not your fault you were born as you were born.
It's only your fault if you do nothing to make your life happier when you can.

Interesting post...I think a lot of reasons you brought up are probably the same reasons that motivated the APA to change "Gender Identity Disorder" to "Gender Dysphoria". Gender Dysphoria tends to be more about how transgender people relate in social environments, vs Gender Identity Disorder, which tends to stigmatize transgender people by saying that "You are the problem, you're abnormal".

Another similar topic to the one that you have brought up here is the difference between what I would call "Physiological Dysphoria" and "Social Dysphoria". Physiological Dysphoria is the sense that "my body is wrong, or my body shouldn't look like this", Social Dysphoria relates to how transgender people feel about their perceived gender in public settings.

I think that we tend to generalize "everything bad about our gender assigned at birth" as being under Gender Dysphoria. It's a problem of definition. A trans person can have strong social dysphoria, and little to no Physiological Dysphoria; or it can be opposite this, or anything in between.

What do you think?

I look at it this way. While your logic is good, the simple fact is we have a ton of guilt and shame compounded over a lifetime of knowing that we are faking things. We feel, or have been told "it's wrong. You are a _____". That has been our life experience. That is our reality.

Not to refute you Joanne, but remember, some of us learned near at the beginning, and some of us are so young we haven't even left the beginning, then you have people like myself, who really don't get the light going on till decades of life have already gone past.

I don't have any 'guilt' per se as there was no real awareness in my life to plague me.
I can look back and see a lot of what I was, differently now, but, back then none of it was revealed to me.

I don't have 51 years of baggage, I just have 51 years of preconditioning to paint over.

The problem, for me, isn't really going out on the street and other people seeing me as male. The problem is that when I look at myself, I see myself as male, and it's so wrong to me on so many instinctual levels that it brings me feelings of anxiety, depression and physical discomfort. It's not an issue on how other people see me. I'm actually kind of looking forward to challenging people's perceptions. No, the problem is how I see myself. Granted, there's a lot of other emotional baggage that's mixed into that, but basically when you boil it down, yes, the problem isn't them. It really is me.

If you know who you are, good for you. A lot of us are still struggling to find our own identities. If you're comfortable with you you are, good for you. A lot  of us aren't. To offhandedly dismiss our own personal struggles of self worth as almost irrelevant I find to be almost insulting. You can blame society all you want, but at the end of the day we're the ones who have to make our lives better, and if we can't stand with confidence and say, "This is who I am, and if you don't like it, bite me," then we can't help change the society we live in.

'All you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be..'
Pink Floyd 'Breathe/Speak to me'

Agreed.. Perspective is everything.

Two questions which keep going through my mind is 'Is it me or is it them?' or 'Am I experiencing this because I'm trans?'

It's taken me a few good years to work out my issues and how they are related to each other - gender dysphoria, social anxiety and depression. I've kind of slowed my transition down because not just of my weight but also because I want to get a better grip on my depression.

In fact I'm probably going to discuss my depression more with my specialist when I next see him. I haven't before because I'm at Charing Cross and wasn't sure how they would see it fitting in with their 'regime'. My depression is separate from my gender issues, it's more connected with my creativity. The social anxiety is a response to my transitioning.

My GP explained the social anxiety by saying it's almost impossible to get through a transition without suffering some degree of psychological and emotional trauma.

I guess my experience is different to most people as at the time when I did come out I was a well known and popular public figure in Polish society and I took a calculated risk by coming out publicly. I was living a double life, had many trans friends in Poland living perfectly oppressed lives and felt that it was worth the risk of coming out because being from the UK I could always leave and it wouldn't completely destroy my life.

But things were getting too close for comfort especially with the media and the rise of the Polish right wing was making it a particularly uncomfortable and stifling zeitgeist.

Two things ultimately forced me to come out. Firstly I was struggling to function as a male in any capacity and my artistic work and health was suffering. Secondly I came to the conclusion that I was living a lie and I really didn't deserve any of the privileges in life that people in Poland had bestowed on me.

I bit the bullet and momentary misgivings were dispelled completely when i attended the Warsaw Equality Parade in 2005. I was shunned by every journalist, and I looked into the faces of the attending public figures and politicians and saw the hypocrisy for what it really was.

Sod that for a game of soldiers.

Looking back over my transition I have to say that most of my problems have come from people in positions of power and authority and that most of my support has come from the ordinary man in the street.

I remember the local Catholic priest in Poland describing me as the 'personification of evil'. It took them about two weeks to remove all traces of my work and my achievements from public view.

I thought it would be so much easier in the UK but what I didn't realize is that 13 years is quite a period and things changed in the UK. Not quite as open and tolerant as it was back in the 1980's. I was moved into a hostel for the homeless near the East End. I was back in male gender having spent two weeks in a night shelter where it wasn't safe or wise to present as female.

I wasn't expecting any problems with the hostel staff when I came out to the hostel manageress the day after I moved in and announced that I would be continuing my transition, before going back to my room and emerging some time later as myself in female gender.

This freaked everybody out especially the staff. I was in the male part, it was a segregated hostel and the manageress fought me tooth and nail to prevent me being moved to the female wing or a gender neutral space. I complained to the head office threatening legal action, won the complaint hands down, and the battle continued until I was moved out.

It had a good effect with all the residents who saw how I was being picked on by staff and almost all of them were supportive. add to that harrassment from the Job Centre when job hunting, being stripped of my benefits for most of 2008 and forced to live without income.

I'm also listed as an undesirable to the United States. I got myself into an online relationship with a woman in the States, in Mississippi and flew out to visit her for a few weeks entering the US in Atlanta. i flew in on a brand new passport with an 'F' obtained under our gender recognition laws. Had everything bar insurance. Long story short the official got it into his head that I was trying to enter the States illegally disguised as a woman on a fake passport.

Same experience in the States. I was kept overnight in the downtown city jail on the male wing. By then after a 13 hour flight and some hours held at the airport I didn't look too convincing. Initial laughs and s->-bleeped-<-s in the waiting area which changed abruptly when people discovered that I was from England. I asked to me referred to as 'ma'am' and they complied.

Flown back the next day. I appealed to the Department of Homeland Security who in 2009 affirmed the decision in Atlanta citing INLA 204(a). So yeah, I admit it, it's out here in the open, I'm officially a threat to US society.

*cynical laugh*

I suppose I could have battled further, but decided not to seeing as my lady friend went off with someone else a year later. I settled for the moral victory. Sometimes that's enough, and sometimes you can win a battle by simply refusing to fight.

It's not just trans people who have gender issues, I think most people have some degree of an issue with gender and gender identity.

I've worked hard to internally transition and work out my issues and baggage. I spent some years with an anger issue, had seething caustic resentment deep inside me (which can be detected in some of my plays to those sharp enough to notice) and it took me a while to learn how to internalize my experiences and process negative emotions into some form of positive energy.

I think there's a lot of people who just can't get their heads round some of our issues because they have no way of relating to it. What is it like to grow up knowing who you are all along? What's it like to have that definite sense of identity?

When I look back on my life especially towards the end of my man thing period in Poland I have wonderful memories. I remember meeting and knowing some of the former members of Polish Solidarity, of peering out from backstage seeing a packed theatre who had come to see my play.

But then what with my lack of a sense of identity and the removal of references to me and my work I have some doubts. Was it all just some illusion? Sometimes it seems that ten, even fifteen, twenty years has gone by, nothing much to show for it, and none of these years are ever going to come back. It's over.

However today I have no doubts as to who I am, and what I'm about. It's taken me years of exploration, experimentation, discovery, trial and error, searching and trying to find answers to difficult questions. I'm here working to rebuild my life and my artistic career and I feel so much better. Even though things have changed. I settle for less. Success is an audience of fifty people in a pub and I don't really care what happens later. When I die I die, I won't be around to share it.

One thing I'm clear about now is where the boundary lies between my issues and the issues of other people. I embrace and accept myself totally, I'm a work in progress even though it's been a struggle to accept myself as female.

I'm openly trans and also quite open about my issues. I will openly admit that I have trust issues, that I can make mistakes and misunderstand because I'm looking through my own transgendered prism, and that I can become insecure quite easily and anxious. I ask people to bear this in mind when dealing with me.

However being trans isn't a major thing in my life. I see myself pretty much as a disabled female who isn't physically or mentally incapacitated in myself. But through being born with the wrong genitalia I'm primarily disabled by certain other people and their assumptions about me. 

This is where I've drawn a line in the sand. It's a very clear line and it's now usually never crossed. All my baggage has handles, and labels, I fully embrace and own my issues and I accept responsibility for them.

I have my years and history as an activist and a human rights campaigner particularly within the LGBT community. It changed a few years ago when I ran into problems with an LGBT focus group I was running.

The way I see it you have a choice, you can either be part of the struggle or you can be part of the solution. I'm of the opinion that many of those who identify as LGBT have the support and friendship of someone who is cisgendered and heterosexual. My question has always been that if they can learn to accept someone different as a fellow human being, then why can't you?

I ran into problems with a few of the gay men. They didn't want anyone heterosexual having anything to do with the group and I saw this as the only way forward. Nobody gets to change the world or society, nobody learns anything from a position of conflict or from being right. We can only learn something when we resolve the conflict and find some common ground and it's that change which changes culture and ultimately changes society.

I quit and gave my reasons in that as someone trans I am also marginalized and persecuted by some but refuse to choose this experience.

I refuse to accept responsibility for other people's issues. Very few people I have found have an issue with people who are trans and if you are trans you can stop feeling responsible for the way other people feel and think.

Most people who have an issue with those who are trans have a much bigger issue with gender. I call it the Peter and Jane syndrome. Some of you who grew up in the UK in the 1960's might remember the Ladybird books we were all taught to read with the middle-class nuclear family somewhere in the South where Daddy worked and Mother stayed at home. I guess Americans could call it the June Ward Syndrome.

It's this assumption in a binary sex and gender system which is exact and immaculate and doesn't take into account basic biological imperfections or indeed Darwinism. It's why many people refuse to accept that gender dysphoria is a legitimate medical condition or state of being.

Am I saying that people who refuse to accept trans as fellow human beings have basic underlying deep seated issues with gender? Yes I am. 100%. What's more when they start to argue with me over my gender identity (which is a non-topic and beyond all discussion) I will not hesitate to inform them that they have this issue.

They can argue all they like and try to hold me responsible for their issues but I'm not buying it. You can observe that usually these are people who also place a greater emphasis on being right than on resolving conflicts and actually learning something from the difference.

Usually also they're pretty stereotypical and 'normal' and have given over control of their mind to attempts of social programming by those who hold the power and positions of authority.

They're usually also people who are part of the bigger issue of gender warfare and the struggle for power employing the main weapons of money and sex.

Gender and sex are not immutable and male and female are loose distinctions of polarity across an entire spectrum of gender and sex variations. This is a scientific fact. Some species of fish mutate between genders, sheep can be transgendered, and many animals are as imprecise as to gender and sex as we are.

I don't just accept that I'm trans. I appreciate being trans, and to be honest if I had the chance to live my life again I wouldn't change a thing. Transitioning hasn't just taught me about myself, it's also taught me a lot about life and people and what people really mean to me. Some of the people who have accepted me without question have convinced me that the problem isn't really with me, and I have been humbled quite a few times by the kindness and compassion that people have shown me.   

Quote from: Lesley_Roberta on April 04, 2013, 05:17:06 PM
It's not your fault you were born as you were born.
It's only your fault if you do nothing to make your life happier when you can.

^ This, in a nutshell, is the reason why I'm transitioning now. I'm running out of time - we all are - and I need to do something about my dysphoria before it's too late.

I posted this on the ' Letting my Dad know I'm transgender thread.

I post without cross posting.

The document is simple, the reason people cannot accept?  I don't care, the fact is that I am a woman and I'm happy. If anyone disagrees it is their problem. I'm protected by the law and it is up to others to obey it I have need, wish, reason or need to argue or explain.

I don't tell people not to rob banks, I do not tell people not to kill.

I have no reason to explain that I'm a human being and I am to be treated as one.

I do not need to justify myself.

I am.

That is all there needs to be said.

As others have said transgender is not a choice it is part of you, like your skin colour your ethnicity your eye colour. It isn't something you can switch on or off. Though many of us try.

I thought I'd copy this from the Australian sex discrimination laws, some of the best in the world, but it states what Australian law considers a legal transgender person, they are copied from www.gendercentre.org.au and excellent resource for transgender people.


Who is counted as transgender under anti-discrimination law?

If you live, have lived, or want to live as a member of the opposite gender (sex) to your birth gender, the  anti-discrimination law counts you as transgender. This means you are legally counted as transgender if:

·   you want to live as a member of your preferred gender (the opposite gender to your birth gender);

·   you are in the process of changing over to your preferred gender;

·   you live as a member of your preferred gender;

·   you have lived as a member of your preferred gender in the past; or

·   you are intersexual (born with indeterminate sex, for example, with sexual parts of both sexes) and you live as a member of your preferred gender.

You do not have to have had any sex-change or other surgery. You do not have to have taken any hormones in the past or be taking them now. It does not matter what your gender was at birth.

It does not matter which gender is your preferred gender. It does not matter why you are transgender. It does not matter how you describe or label yourself (for example, as transgender, ->-bleeped-<-, transsexual or something else).

What matters is how you live and behave, or how you want to live and behave. If you fit any one of the "rules" listed above, then the anti-discrimination law counts you as transgender.

Quote from: Cindy James on April 05, 2013, 04:27:53 AM
I thought I'd copy this from the Australian sex discrimination laws, some of the best in the world, but it states what Australian law considers a legal transgender person, they are copied from www.gendercentre.org.au and excellent resource for transgender people.

Sounds like the Aussies are doing some things right, and that link seems to have a wealth of helpful information so thank you for posting it. But am I the only one who had a sudden fit of gallows humour when I clicked on the link and saw the name of the street they're on?

Quote from: FTMDiaries on April 05, 2013, 05:29:54 AM
Sounds like the Aussies are doing some things right, and that link seems to have a wealth of helpful information so thank you for posting it. But am I the only one who had a sudden fit of gallows humour when I clicked on the link and saw the name of the street they're on?

Not the first by any means

Read the parts about Stella trying to enter the USA

I want to make it clear, I have no Americans I know of when I refer to 'America' in mind, it's your government I refer to.

But that country can drop dead inasmuch as travel is concerned. If you handed me a ticket to any nice place in the US all expenses paid, I'd likely give it away.

Sorry I like myself too much to suffer that country's moronic post 9/11 behaviour. Besides, I have Canada to travel, why settle for the USA I'll pick anywhere in Canada long before Florida, Hawaii or any other so called must see place. I don't need them, I have the Pacific Northwest in BC, I have Atlantic Canada I have the Laurentians where I was born.

I've seen too many perfectly ordinary people tell me incredible stories of hassle and outright crap they suffered from. People any country would consider great deals not people to deter from entering. My close friends have either had, or have had family treated worse than criminals, told not to come back too.

US laws are I think written by mentally challenged chimps. You should never tell a border guard you wish to move there. You see, it is illegal to say that phrase at the border. Amazing eh, just admitting you would like to move to the US is a crime. I'm not making this up either, you are getting this first hand, this isn't from a news article. I know the persons in question personally.

I've been to the US in my life. The people are ordinary. Their government though, one of the dumbest on the planet.
I wish joe nobody in the US would hurry up and get fed up eh, the rest of the planet is getting tired of waiting.

I am sure there are problems here in Canada, but to tell ya, all I ever hear, is the issues besetting persons in the US.
I am sooooo glad I am not in the US and dealing with being transgender.

"June Ward Syndrome"

Had to point that comment out specifically

Showing my age I guess making it clear I know what you mean.

Oh that was so my home life as a kid.

It is basically why I am the way I am in a lot of cases. My home could have been the set for the show.

If I have any issues at all, it is mostly for having lived under that umbrella.