When I first began posting here, I made myself look very indecisive about who I was or wanted to be. I said I wanted to be a woman, but now my perspective has almost shifted.

- Now that I see these stories about Trans discrimination, and how it's on the increase under our new political climate, it makes me less confident about my ability to get by. I also don't want to be the "deer caught in headlights".

- I probably have issues because of lack of confidence, boring lifestyle, etc. I probably cannot directly relate this to being Transgender. Also I don't "feel" there's an issue with my gender, except for a wish to be or look like a woman somewhere in the back of my head.

- I feel more aware that since I was born and raised in a smaller less progressive community, that I will not "make it" as a woman if I wanted to become one, whether physically transition or otherwise.

- I tend to be pretty young-ish and immature looking by physical appearance. I also seem to have a "fixed" monotone, nasal voice and lack of control. I will never be able to achieve a feminine, non-monotonous sound. No matter what voice tips I read, I can't seem to put it into practice. I am not very confident in my ability to practice and get better.

Confidence comes from within. Im not one to preach (as i too have my own confidence issues) but it is true. In short of that for some trans folk it is hard to be confiedent in who one is when their gender or expression is one of a fake. I get the not wanting bad attention (discrimination), but at some point one will have to come face to face with it. When i was full time and to a lesser degree even now when i am her/me 85% of the time i still gotta deal with that kinda crap. If you can stay your assigned gender all the power to ya! but also look at it like this, if you having been dealing with gender issues for a long time they probably wont go away (mine havent no matter how hard i try to push them). Perhaps looking at things through a binary lense may also be stunting your growth potential with your idenity. My two cents.

I too had the same concerns you have.  It was tearing me apart. So what to do...I stopped and said "I can beat this.".  Three months later I was losing my mind, both figuratively and literally.  It almost destroyed my life.

My thought for you is to watch yourself. Find a friend who will be honest with you that you trust with your life to watch for mood/attitude/temperament changes.  My wife saw almost right away but didn't understand what it meant; I was in a downward spiral.

Please be careful.

Your online friend,
Dee

Pretty much nobody who is trans wants to be.

Quote from: redhot1 on January 24, 2017, 10:09:37 PM
I don't "feel" there's an issue with my gender, except for a wish to be or look like a woman somewhere in the back of my head.

That's a pretty big "except for" dear.  Sadly just because we sometimes don't want to be transgender or even how we look or where we live or how difficult it is for our society or our friends and family to deal with has very little (pretty much nothing at all) to do with it.

Denial isn'the just a river in Egypt and we all swim regularly in it.  We live our lives trying to be what society expects us to be, knowing somewhere inside that we aren't.  We fight it because we want to be a "normal" man or woman.  We blame ourselves for everything that is wrong in our lives...failed relationships, social isolation, never being good at anything...the list goes on.  We live in this fantasy world because we are "supposed" to, not because we want to.  Self-doubt is a security blanket for us.  We live in its warm cocoon and tell ourselves that we can overcome this.  Which is insanity because we never do.  We keep doing the same things, expecting a different result.  It doesn't work.  I wasted 32 years of my life not living authentically.  I have come to the conclusion that if the word trans enters your mind, you are.  If everyone hides under a rock, the narrow-minded win.  As was previously stated, it isn't your issue, it is society's.

You have to be true to yourself...no one else will be.

Sweetie. Fear is a very powerful weapon. It is brutal to the very core of a person, robbing them of the ability to be rational, at the times when they need to be most rational.

As Jane Emily has said, the desire to look like a woman is one of the very core definitions of being trans - we may not feel it, we may feel we can get by, and a few of us do, but at the reckoning, you know that how you present, and how you are perceived is different to how you wish to be perceived.

Being youngish looking, is a good sign, that dear old T has not done much to push your body to build masculine markers.

It's all too easy to be wrapped up in the glamour of looking like the perfect woman. The only problem is that <1% of the natal population would reasonably fall into that category.

let's do the blue pill/ red pill experiment. If I told you that you could transition now, and look  feminine, and that your voice would be convincing, and that you would be accepted within your community would you do it?

Rowan

Given that trans people face hostility and discrimination from society, it's no surprise that people don't "choose" to become trans.  Generally, trans is something you ARE, not something you BECOME.  If you ARE trans, it doesn't go away just because you try to ignore it or because you make a decision to resist it.

You're a young person, and it may be that you have paid attention here at Susan's mostly to others who face similar problems related to struggling to find your own way in the face of resistance from parents, family, school, etc.  That's certainly logical.  But I would invite you to spend some time reading posts from folks who transitioned much later in life.  Many of them recount a long history of pain and struggle to fit in with their assigned gender identity and to ignore or repress an alternate gender identity coming up from inside.  Many of them regret having "wasted" many years of their lives in futilely denying who they really were.

I feel for you.  You are stuck in a conservative family and community.  Probably there are no other people openly gay or trans in your immediate world.  You feel what you feel, but probably there's nobody in your life you can open up to.  The life you live now seems like being suffocated in a closet.

Maybe the issue of "trans or not trans?" is not what you should focus on now.  Maybe the right thing to focus on is building your personal independence.  Succeed in school.  Make some friends.  Get a job.  Make the jump when you are able to a bigger and more progressive place to live.  You'll find a lot of options will open up that you can't even imagine now.

You think your personality is flat and boring.  I think that's because you keep trying to fit into a flat and boring environment, so you're suppressing how complex you really are.  (You sound pretty thoughtful and emotional in here!)  Get into a more open space, and you'll be surprised how your personality opens up.

Being monotone takes some work. Find someone you admire. Me, I chose Meryl Streep. Watch interviews and look for clues in mannerisms. Meryl tends to touch her face a lot. She emphasizes point by moving her hand. Notice that she maintains eye contact, she smiles and laughs a lot. You can see her confidence. The three things to work on are pitch, my goal is F3 or 175 Htz. 80 % of the time. Resonance This requires retraining to creating the voice up in your head instead of your chest. When you speak letters like m there should be a little tingle in your lips. This is evidence you are doing it right. Lastly breath, Practice breathing from your diaphragm rather than the chest will help the resonance. To start using a guitar tuner app like Da Tuner to monitor your pitch.  Once this is set up on your cell phone you can use it anywhere. Again you want to keep in the F3 area. My speech therapist says that F3 is an androgynous pitch but many women's voices operate in this range. Do pitch glides. Sort of Do ra mi fa so la te do raising your pitch incrementally. Practice by holding your pitch. Use the sound ME, ME, ME to find it. Da Tuner will tell you if you are within range. After a few weeks of practice and you can find your pitch fairly easily, start expanding out from words to phrases to whole paragraphs. I'm one of those monotone people also, but I can now do fairly well holding a conversation. The irony being that when I identified as the other person sharing my body. My being an introvert prevented me from holding conversations. Don't be so hard on yourself. Anything can be learned if you do the prep.
Dawn

Quote from: redhot1 on January 24, 2017, 10:09:37 PM
- I probably have issues because of lack of confidence, boring lifestyle, etc. I probably cannot directly relate this to being Transgender. Also I don't "feel" there's an issue with my gender, except for a wish to be or look like a woman somewhere in the back of my head.

- I feel more aware that since I was born and raised in a smaller less progressive community, that I will not "make it" as a woman if I wanted to become one, whether physically transition or otherwise.

Until 3 years ago (when I was 60), I couldn't relate to being transgender, either.  And I had no "wish to be or look like a woman."  I had never felt like "a woman trapped in a man's body," which is all I knew about being (MtF) trans.  And I still don't.

But I now realize it isn't really about being or looking like a woman.  It's about being and looking like yourself.  In my case, it was about allowing myself to be the self that I'd suppressed for almost all my life.  It just happens that the self I let out fits far better into the gender "woman" (and sometimes "little girl") than the gender "man."

I hope I will be accepted as a woman (or some version thereof), because it would be nice to no longer feel like a member of some almost extinct grotesque extraterrestrial alien species.  But just getting to be me, in all my silliness and weirdness, is like getting out of prison.  Like I was imprisoned as a very small child out of bigotry for a crime I didn't commit, and my conviction has finally been overturned.

Quote from: redhot1 on January 24, 2017, 10:09:37 PM
- I tend to be pretty young-ish and immature looking by physical appearance. I also seem to have a "fixed" monotone, nasal voice and lack of control. I will never be able to achieve a feminine, non-monotonous sound. No matter what voice tips I read, I can't seem to put it into practice. I am not very confident in my ability to practice and get better.

Unfortunately, in the (MtF) trans community, there's this image of what a "real woman" looks and acts and sounds like, and not being like that is seen as "failing."  But to measure yourself by an unreal standard and judge yourself is exactly what we all were doing before we accepted that we were trans.  IMHO, it's trying to be something that is contrary to our essential nature and does violence to it that really kills us.

It doesn't just happen around gender.  There are people working at jobs that eat away at their souls, but they stay because it's what their parents wanted from them, or because they are well paying enough to support a lifestyle they are supposed to want.  And eventually they find that, having denied themselves that which would give their life meaning, death is the only thing they have left to look forward to.  (That was me, 15 years ago.)

Quote from: Kylo on January 25, 2017, 11:16:03 AM
Pretty much nobody who is trans wants to be.

But if that's who you are (that is, someone with a nature that this meshuggene society labels "trans"), then to not want to be trans is to not want to be yourself.


(Of course our whole society and economy are based around convincing people to not want to be themselves, but someone else, preferrably someone who it's impossible to be.)

Quote from: Kylo on January 25, 2017, 11:16:03 AM
Pretty much nobody who is trans wants to be.

i want this more than anything.  i think it's awesome.  yeah, im pretty new to accepting myself as trans, but really this is the first time in my life that i've felt like a human being.  we are so very lucky to be alive at this time, to have options like HRT and surgery, to have decades of feminism.  and the internet allows us to connect globally, to share our experiences and learn from each other.  everyday doesn't have to be wonderful, and many of them can feel terrible.  but i don't just want to be trans, i need to be.

Quote from: redhot1 on January 24, 2017, 10:09:37 PM
- Now that I see these stories about Trans discrimination, and how it's on the increase under our new political climate, it makes me less confident about my ability to get by. I also don't want to be the "deer caught in headlights".

- I probably have issues because of lack of confidence, boring lifestyle, etc. I probably cannot directly relate this to being Transgender. Also I don't "feel" there's an issue with my gender, except for a wish to be or look like a woman somewhere in the back of my head.

- I feel more aware that since I was born and raised in a smaller less progressive community, that I will not "make it" as a woman if I wanted to become one, whether physically transition or otherwise.

- I tend to be pretty young-ish and immature looking by physical appearance. I also seem to have a "fixed" monotone, nasal voice and lack of control. I will never be able to achieve a feminine, non-monotonous sound. No matter what voice tips I read, I can't seem to put it into practice. I am not very confident in my ability to practice and get better.

The reasons you have listed are not reasons why a person is not transgender.  They are the reasons why a person who is transgender decides not to transition.

I don't want to be transgender, either. I want to be MYSELF, and society happens to draw a box around that and labels the box "transgender".

So be it.  I can't change society all by myself, but I can be the best version of MYSELF possible, and try to erase that box for myself and others.

My goal isn't some set of arbitrary social criteria, or to follow some program laid out by others. I want to be MYSELF, and damn the box and those who want me hidden inside it. I'm following MY transition path, for ME.

Selfish, huh?  It's about damn time I thought to put myself above the transitory discomfort of others.

Isn't about time you did the same?



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Alot of the vocal training jargon is based in training for singing, which may as well be Greek to the musically illiterate! 

Quote from: JMJW on January 25, 2017, 07:22:21 PM
Alot of the vocal training jargon is based in training for singing, which may as well be Greek to the musically illiterate! 

We have a voice section on the site and members are more than willing to help you develop a feminine voice. Much of the discussion is about surgery but we tend to start with therapy before considering surgery as the recovery is long and surgery has risks associated with it. After all, if you don't need surgery, why pay all the money for it.

Transsexual is something you are, not something you either wish or wish not to be. If you consider this a choice, I would urge you to get into therapy before you make rash decisions that can't be undone. If you don't feel your self to be innately female, then you most likely aren't.  Nothing wrong with that at all. Actually, consider your self blessed.
      Wanting to be pretty or feeling feminine or liking girly things or liking hanging out with girls seem to be recurring things I hear that lead people to believe the are TS. Nothing could be further from the truth. Again, if you can make the choice, you're probably not Transsexual. At the very least, you need to think about it a lot harder and speak to a professional trained in Trans issues. Good luck.

Quote from: jentay1367 on January 25, 2017, 09:56:49 PM
Transsexual is something you are, not something you either wish or wish not to be. If you consider this a choice, I would urge you to get into therapy before you make rash decisions that can't be undone. If you don't feel your self to be innately female, then you most likely aren't.  Nothing wrong with that at all. Actually, consider your self blessed.
      Wanting to be pretty or feeling feminine or liking girly things or liking hanging out with girls seem to be recurring things I hear that lead people to believe the are TS. Nothing could be further from the truth. Again, if you can make the choice, you're probably not Transsexual. At the very least, you need to think about it a lot harder and speak to a professional trained in Trans issues. Good luck.

Please please PLEASE only take that advice with a grain of salt. The truth is if you are uncomfortable with you birth gender and have been for quite sometime you are trans. 99% of the time. The question that is to be properly asked however is were on the spectrum do you lie. Therapy will be your best bet to uncover all sorts of feelings you may have regarding transition. You may discover you are non binary or even perhaps a full out transsexual. But please, go get help to find out. You may discover that you are indeed a full blown female buried under lots of doubt and societys conditioning! It will take a lot of work and hard thinking to know for sure though but you can do it <3

Quote from: jentay1367 on January 25, 2017, 09:56:49 PM
Transsexual is something you are, not something you either wish or wish not to be. If you consider this a choice, I would urge you to get into therapy before you make rash decisions that can't be undone. If you don't feel your self to be innately female, then you most likely aren't.

I beg to differ.

I have never felt myself to be "innately female" and still don't, and I know other transsexuals who don't either.  Yet the experience of transition has made clear to us that transition was the right choice.  The idea that you have to feel yourself to be "innately female" (or "innately male") in order to be trans was the biggest barrier I had to recognizing that I was.

I in fact came to the realization that I was trans because I noticed that, once I let myself do what felt right to me, I was doing more and more "girly" things, mainly adding "women's" clothes to my wardrobe, even as I was insisting that I was not transgender -- because I didn't have this "I am really a woman" feeling.

I don't know what "rash" decisions there are that "can't be undone."  HRT takes a long time to take effect.  Social transition takes a long time -- just changing your name takes months.  And most providers won't do surgery if you haven't been full-time for a year, and they want psychologists' letters, some even require you see a psychiatrist of their choice.  There's plenty of time to find out from experience whether the choice is right for you.

I just know that each step I've taken on the road to living as a woman (and making my body a closer approximation to female) has made me happier and better able to function.  I've thrown away the horribly-fitting shoes I wore for 60 years and I'm slowly discovering what it's like to have feet that don't ache all the time.

P.S.: that last sentence was a metaphor, in case anyone didn't get it.

Quote from: Asche on January 26, 2017, 03:03:09 PM
I beg to differ.

I have never felt myself to be "innately female" and still don't, and I know other transsexuals who don't either.  Yet the experience of transition has made clear to us that transition was the right choice. 

Actually, as your argument is specious... I beg to differ,
Why on earth someone would transition to the female gender when they don't feel themselves female is beyond me. I know of no women that transitioned that didn't feel they were women in an untenable situation. Transgendered is not transsexual...they are not interchangeable terms. One is not better than the other, only different. Transgender is an umbrella....transsexuals are women in mind who desire to live their life as a woman, you yourself have pointed out you don't identify this way. In fact, your signature states you are a non binary m2f, this is not a Transsexual Woman.
     Why was it the right choice for you, can you please expound? What is your experience of transition? i.e., how far have you taken this journey? Hormones, Surgery, RLE? Life as a transsexual woman is life as a woman or moving in that direction with that goal in mind.
As to your other query.....I would consider vaginoplasty having gone entirely too far if you find yourself unhappy in the female role after the fact. maybe that's just me?
      If you have taken steps to feminize yourself without the feeling you are a woman, you are transgendered...not transsexual, period. Not a judgement.


For your elucidation..interpret it as you please:

"Transgender/Trans: An umbrella term for people whose gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth. The term transgender is not indicative of gender expression, sexual orientation, hormonal makeup, physical anatomy, or how one is perceived in daily life. Note that transgender does not have an "ed" at the end. "

"Transsexual: A depreciated term (often considered pejorative) similar to transgender in that it indicates a difference between one's gender identity and sex assigned at birth, with implications of hormonal/surgical transition from one binary gender (male or female) to the other. Unlike transgender/trans, transsexual is not an umbrella term, as many transgender people do not identify as transsexual. When speaking/writing about trans people, please avoid the word transsexual unless asked to use it by a transsexual person."