Hi,

I've been thinking a lot about the nature v learned gender dysphoria.
Some people like me developed GID after environmental issues.
For me, I had absolutely no male role model other than one violent boyfriend my mum had.
So did I 'learn' my wish to be a woman..and this if I'd had a more settled childhood would I now have no gender dysphoria?
It troubles me because it feels authentic.
But if it is not biology..I'd only be a male's idea of womanhood..not a woman.

Does that make sense to anyone? How do you resolve that?

Sarah,

Yes, it sounds very familiar to me.  This is the highest hurdle I had to overcome on my way to my own transition.  While the examples of males in my immediate family wasn't quite as dramatically bad as you describe, there was a sort of male stereotype as villain that had always made it difficult for me to accept my male identity.  I had to finally discover and decide if my desire for femininity was simply an escape from toxic masculinity or a true manifestation of my female identity. 

This took place over a period of years, so it's hard for me to pin down a moment when things became clear, or a specific method or exercise that facilitated that clarity.  But it's good and necessary to maintain awareness of the sources and manifestations of your desire in order to choose if, how, and when to act upon it.  Good luck in your quest, I trust the you'll find your truth. 

Erin

Quote from: Dayta on May 14, 2017, 02:54:19 AM
Sarah,

Yes, it sounds very familiar to me.  This is the highest hurdle I had to overcome on my way to my own transition.  While the examples of males in my immediate family wasn't quite as dramatically bad as you describe, there was a sort of male stereotype as villain that had always made it difficult for me to accept my male identity.  I had to finally discover and decide if my desire for femininity was simply an escape from toxic masculinity or a true manifestation of my female identity. 

This took place over a period of years, so it's hard for me to pin down a moment when things became clear, or a specific method or exercise that facilitated that clarity.  But it's good and necessary to maintain awareness of the sources and manifestations of your desire in order to choose if, how, and when to act upon it.  Good luck in your quest, I trust the you'll find your truth. 

Erin

Thank you Erin. It really does seem to be the crux of the matter for me.
I've a lot to lose so I want to make sure I would gain the real me.
Sometimes I'm convinced, other times flooded with doubt

We imprint at a very early age, but I think you imprint to the traits of your gender identity.

My earliest memories are of me sitting on my mothers lap whilst she put her makeup on to get ready for work. I loved it, but my slightly older brother rejected it entirely and would have tantrums when made to do the same thing. Of course I had little concept of makeup at that age other than it was something my mother did, and not my father. But I also felt it was something I'd be doing without question. Hard to explain really.
So I suspect its a combination of nature and nurture. Just my experience, no science to back it up.

Peace and love and all that good stuff,

Sadie

Quote from: Sarah77 on May 14, 2017, 02:39:04 AM
Hi,

I've been thinking a lot about the nature v learned gender dysphoria.
Some people like me developed GID after environmental issues.
For me, I had absolutely no male role model other than one violent boyfriend my mum had.
So did I 'learn' my wish to be a woman..and this if I'd had a more settled childhood would I now have no gender dysphoria?
It troubles me because it feels authentic.
But if it is not biology..I'd only be a male's idea of womanhood..not a woman.

Does that make sense to anyone? How do you resolve that?

Gender dysphoria caused by environmental issues? Unless it was DES or similar, that's a non-starter of an idea - and you are not old enough for DES. The science suggests that GD is the result of a hormonal imbalance in utero, it's not something that can be "learned". Your gender identity is innate, it just takes some of us a while to acknowledge it. I realised I was female when I was 12 - and then spent the next 23 years in denial.

Trans people come from all kinds of backgrounds, it's not limited to those with trauma in their past - I knew I was trans both before I knew what it was and before I experienced any kind of serious trauma. Reading your other posts, it seems that you don't want to be trans, that's fairly normal for trans people.. No one wants to be "different". But this is not something where you can chug down psychoactive drugs and stick your head in the sand..

A word of caution here.

There are other reasons for identity issues and that is one reason that a comprehensive psychiatric/psychological assessment is taken under WPATH SOC.

Please do not be flippant about this aspect of health.

In my situation, I had transgender feelings from a very early age. I am now 67 years old. In the 1960's and 70's, medical text books stated that transsexualism was cause by cruel or absent fathers. When I read this in 1972 and felt that since this was learned behavior, I can unlearn it. I tried doing many masculine things, military service during Viet Nam War, motorcycles, guns and other adventure sports. Got married, had kids and went to work. Still had those feelings that I should be female, not male. By this time too many people were dependent on me and I had to deny myself, so I immersed myself in work.

But the feelings never went away.

Today, we have better explanations for transgender feelings. I am not saying that nature or nurture caused my transgender feelings. I just know that I feel this way and it never went away.  For me I do not think that psychiatric counselling would have changed anything, since 45 years ago the causes of gender dysphoria were  not well understood.

Having said that, today psychiatric counselling has a much better idea of all the variations of gender dysphoria and how to treat each type. The treatment for one type may not be the correct treatment for someone who is more fluid in their gender issues. For this reason, proper psychiatric counselling is the most important thing to do for everyone who is considering gender transition.

I think each person's identity, like their history, is unique and "over-determined."  Trying to tease out what part is innate and what comes from experience for any particular person is likely to be impossible.

In my case, I don't recall having "transgender" feelings as such as a child.  I do remember that I was unable to act the way a boy was supposed to, and I was already getting harrassed for it by the time I was 8 (I don't remember much before age 10.)  And I remember that the idea of a boy getting turned into a girl was terrifying when I first heard of it (Tip -> Ozma in The Marvelous Land of Oz)  I've also been aware of gender expectations as far back as I can remember, and I can remember finding them just plain stupid and weird.  I do remember as a teenager finding a dress of my mother's which she no longer wore and wearing it while hiding in the cupboards under the eaves in my bedroom.  Wearing "women's" clothes was both scary and attractive.

So maybe I can say I had "crypto-transgender" feelings.

On top of that I have C-PTSD, probably due to feeling emotionally abandoned at a very early age (possibly as early as 18 months.)  I do remember that I had all kinds of trouble dealing with school, with other children, with adults, with expectations, and my parents were not only no help, but frequently did the sorts of things that got the message across that asking for help would only ever make things worse for me.  To the end of their lives, they kept doing things to give the impression that they'd rather not be reminded that I existed.  And no one else showed any willingness to understand or support me.  To this day I struggle with feelings of worthlessness and wishing I were dead.  On good days I don't notice those feelings, but on bad ones, all I can do is hold myself and bite my fingers and try in vain to cry.  I have no idea how much this affected my gender identity (or non-identity.)

I often wonder whether, if I'd grown up in a different world and a different family, I would have been okay with being male.  If being gentle and affectionate, not being competitive or domineering, hating fighting of any kind, being not especially coordinated (though I've read that trauma can cause lack of coordination), and kind of nerdy had been accepted as a perfectly normal and appropriate way for a boy to be, maybe I would have been happy with my body and my assigned gender.

But I didn't grow up in that family or that world.  I am what my history has made me, and even if by some miracle the world would change and what's left of my family would change, I don't think I would be able to feel comfortable as a man, any more than someone whose leg has been blown off in a war will suddenly find it growing back once the war is over.

I remember dressing up around 4 or 5, being caught and then encouraged by my brothers.  Wore panties & stuff in high school, always hung out with the girls, etc.  So PRETTY sure I knew I was a girl since I remembered anything.  Its just I had this annoying birth defect.  I did try purging, and praying... didn't work. Finally when I got in college around 21 I knew these feelings would never EVER go away.. plus having been misgendered off & on my whole life encouraged a bit too. 

Got screwed over by a therapist who when it was time for the letter for surgery told me I hadn't seen him enough times.. I TRIED going with the harry benjamin crap, but in the end found a surgeon in Thailand willing to do it with a docs recommendation letter when I told him my situation.

Gate keepers are a good idea.. unless they are greedy bastards, with bad morals.  Then they just harm you.  IN the end I got the surgery, have lived as the girl I am now for over 25 years.. couldn't be happier because of that decision.  Recently had ffs in my 40's, and now I look like I am 20 again which is wonderful time reset (If only the bones would agree). 

If you remember having these feelings since the dawn of time.. I highly doubt abuse or such has anything to do with it.

Hmm, for most of my life I had no discernable male role model, but my earliest memories were from before my parents got divorced, and in them I'm acting more like a little girl all on my own. May or may not help you to know that as that only really proves that it's nature, not nurture for me, but at the very least it's also evidence that it isn't ALWAYS nurture.

On the other hand, it doesn't really make a difference for either of us, we are who we are no matter how we got that way. I can just barely draw a link to worrying about your sexual orientation changing during "the process". It doesn't matter, you'll like it either way...

To come at this from another angle, if nurture played any role that would mean someone could be "turned trans", and that just kind of sounds ridiculous, if you tried really hard you could probably give a cis guy a cross-dressing fetish, but I can't ever see that extending further than a bedroom thing unless he was already trans/in denial... It would also imply that there are some trans people who could be "cured" instead of transitioning by just giving them a proper male mentor, and that sounds equally outlandish.

In the end it's a question to explore with your therapist, but I think you're in the clear here, whatever that means in this context.

Quote from: Sarah77 on May 14, 2017, 02:39:04 AMit feels authentic.

This is something to go with!  This is your truth.

The biology of being trans is that it is innate.  We are born this way.  When you see a gender therapist, one of the things they do is make sure there is no underlying delusion that is fooling you into thinking you are trans.  But that kind of delusion is rare.

Ultimately, what matters is your authenticity.  If you truly feel that you are trans, then you are.  For real.

Many years ago, there was a lot of discussion about "nature vs nurture", that is are male & female behaviours learned or innate.  However, it has been shown since then, that it's predominantly innate, with external factors generally a modifier, rather than a determinant.  This has been shown in experience with infants who were given gender changes due to medical issues, who still identified with what they were born as.  There have also been experiments with other primates that demonstrate this.  This was shown not to long ago, on a PBS show about gender differences.  In one experiment, young primates (I've forgotten which type) were given human children's toys.  The females generally went with dolls, but the males preferred cars & trucks, just as humans do.  One could point out that the females were just imitating older females in their group, but the males had no possibility of that, as they'd not been exposed to other males playing with the same toys.  So, at least with the males, their preference was innate, rather than learned.

I expect the same applies to the vast majority of transgender people.  It's just the way we feel, not what we learn.  I know in my own life, I was raised as boys generally are, to be strong, etc., but regardless I still wanted to wear some of the things my sisters did.  I was also terrified someone would find out about it.