Quote from: Pica Pica on November 17, 2013, 03:27:56 PM
It's a common metaphor round here that male and female are like two different cities but separating those cities is not a simple fence but a large and perplexing forest filled with magical creatures. ...
I think of male and female as more like markers, like the markers on top of a mountain (or the North or South Pole.) People say they are "at the top" or "at the Pole" if there just somewhere nearby, and they really think of themselves as being on that X-marks-the-spot, but really they are just one point of many.
To be less metaphorical: we have these categories/concepts "male" and "female," which nobody fits precisely into. If you come close enough, you twist yourself around so you can believe you fit precisely. If you fit badly, you can either do some really weird and painful twisting and still not fit very well, or you can recognize that, like everybody else, you only partly fit into one or the other (or maybe both.)
Actually, this is true for
any "identity." You see young gay men writing to help boards trying to figure out "how to be gay." Crossdressers writing to ask "how to cross-dress." And, in the USA, we see all the time people going to great lengths to be "real Americans" (and to make rules to decide who isn't a "real American.")
My general advice (which I'm not always very good at following): just try to be yourself. That's already hard enough. "Male," "female," "androgyn," "Martian" -- they're just labels of convenience, like "tall" or "short," to help people recognize you when they have to pick you up at the airport.
