Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 17, 2025, 01:47:14 PMThe verdict is in! I completed a rather complex 'test' under TanyaG's guidance and it came back 'strongly feminine' (which in itself is a bit oxymoronic). I think that means I'm not a queer anymore
I'd clarify the situation this way. You consistently picked feminine traits in your first pass through the
Gender Game, Annika, which can be a good pointer, but it is in no way a validated tool, hence the word, 'game'.
Just as emotions aren't a problem per se, it's what you do with them that creates goodness or badness, so it goes with
gender traits. It's what you
do with them which defines you.
So, it's up to each person to decide what they do with the gender traits they are sympathetic to, which may or may not include a decision about transition, and a decision about their sex. Only the person concerned is in a place to take those decisions, depending on the balance. I for example am almost fifty:fifty masculine traits versus feminine ones.
It's a complex process, because when people who are in between the moment they
suspect they are trans and
accepting they are trans (and before even working out what sort of trans they are) they tend to rationalise when they should be reflecting.
In other words, they work on
answers instead of asking
questions and exploring more. Decisions are comforting because they bring a veneer of certainty, but that certainty can be off or wrong.
To give a for instance, AMAB people who have feminine gender expression are often seen by others as being gay men. That's because strongly binary people high in masculine gender traits equate AMAB with masculinity and masculinity with sexual attraction to women. Vice versa, those people equate femininity with attraction to men, hence
to them someone who appears male but has feminine gender expression
must be gay. That's pure scripting.
I've worked with people who've rationalised this way about
themselves. If they do, it becomes a two pronged psychological fork they end up using to prod themselves, because the odds are that, like the majority of people, they are straight; and second, they very often hold learned gendered scripts which are in no way sympathetic to same sex attracted people.
If someone makes this sort of wrong connection, they can end up delaying the discovery they are trans by years, if not decades, because of all the time they waste trying to persuade themselves they're not gay, up to and including episodes of
hyper masculinity or hyper femininity.
It's like building a house, get the foundations aligned and the frame will be aligned. Get the frame aligned and the walls will be square. Get the walls square and everything from units going in easily and pictures hanging right follows.
It sounds simple put like that but get the foundations out by an amount the eye cannot detect and it can pile up issues later on :-) Measure twice, cut once, isn't that what they say?
