Up till now, I've been able to function so well as female that it's mind-boggling.  It's only when I'm constantly reminding myself that I'm male that I'm not as socially fluent (I think that's the right word...) as when I go back to playing female.  It's so easy to slip back into that role, and it's so hard to make my manhood something I don't have to think about.  At this point, I'm so used to presenting as female that even me thinking of myself as male feels counter-intuitive.  I guess those who raised me (parents, teachers and other adults and role models included) succeeded at ingraining in me the idea that I am female, inside and out....   

I know a couple of FTMs here have basically said (either implicitly or explicitly) that they never fully adapted to the female role they were expected to take on.  I'm just wondering if this is the case for the majority of folks or what.  I doubt I'm alone in my ability function just fine when everyone (including myself) sees me as female.  So I'm just curious to see where everyone stands.

~Alex   

I lived a VERY long time in the closet..was married for 10 years to a man, raised two boys, even was a Tupperware and Avon lady during part of those ten years...but something was always nagging at me from the inside. Eating at me. i was depressed constantly. I didn't realize till a few years ago that it was because I was living a lie. I was very self destructive. Slept for hours longer than I should, sometimes days on end. I never left the house. I made no friends. I was just miserable. Then it hit me one day...and the day I finally said "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH" was when I finally started to feel like a person. I now have a job, beautiful girlfriend that accepts me the way I am. Have friends. Go out of the house to do things..It's like a whole different person and in a sense it is...cause that other person was me just acting like someone people expected me to act like.

Um...I tried to be a girl, I really did. Adolescence was a terrible turning point for me after a childhood spent as a tomboy. My life was so compartmentalized from the age of about fifteen to twenty-six that I wasn't fully aware that most of my extreme unhappiness was gender-related. I didn't see any way out, so assimilation seemed like the only way to go. But I was terribly self-conscious.

I didn't have a very clear idea of how to live as a female, so I often went overboard in that direction. Sometimes dressed provocatively, but didn't really know how to do it; in college, I alternated between dressing like a guy and dressing like a tramp with no fashion sense. Was something of an exhibitionist. Tried to be bisexual. Went to straight swing parties.

Then I spent another twenty years knowing what I could do about my problem and not doing anything about it. To be fair, when I started doing serious research on transition, the available literature indicated that I wasn't eligible. But the times were definitely changing--very soon, I could see that--and I didn't have the guts to investigate my options and find out if local programs were less dogmatic than the programs I had been reading about.

Before I found out about FTMs, I was uncomfortable living as a girl. After I found out, I was uncomfortable in a different way.

Arch, that sounds a lot like me. I see-sawed on either being REALLY butch in how I dressed to almost just downright trampy to even trying to be all "June Cleaver" trying to figure out what to do with myself. Nothing ever seemed right. Docs always thought I was bi-polar cause of it. I was so extreme one way or the other...

And I never thought about it before but your last statement makes so much sense to me and now that I think about it, I was the same way....

Presenting male, I'm less anxious. I behave the same way either way anyway, and my behavior doesn't conflict with my presentation. So. . . I don't know if I ever really failed at being female, but male is just somehow more natural and comfortable to me. Of course, this is probably because I'm young and haven't had as much female conditioning as you probably have.

Quote from: SilverFang on June 18, 2010, 02:30:56 AM
this is probably because I'm young and haven't had as much female conditioning as you probably have.

Really?  I'm only 22, 23 in September....   

Then again, age probably has little to do with how much conditioning I got.  There's more conditioning in a family with firmer gender-roles than a family with more variable or flexible ones, I'd think.  I got a family with firmer ideals, although I'm sure there are others where no man is allowed to do what women traditionally do, and vice versa. 

I did the same thing as Arch and bones in college, alternating between dressing like a tomboy, and dressing ultra feminine.  I had friends, parties, guys hitting on me and buying me drinks, but I was never happy.  I was a lesbian one week, and sleeping with a guy the next.   I was in therapy for depression and self harm, and was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.   I was trying so hard to be feminine, and acting how MTV told me too, and drove myself crazy in the process.

Finally over the past 3-4 years, things have gradually started to make sense.  I met a couple transmen IRL, did some research and some serious self exploration, and became a much stabler, comparatively happier person.  I gave up and just let me be me,  and it turns out im not actually the crazy slut who used to dance on platforms in fishnets and schoolgirl skirts.   

I know its right when I get called sir and have to fight the urge to grin like an idiot, or when strangers get my attention by saying "hey, man/dude!" and I don't care that someone else wants to bum a smoke because they didnt' say miss. I'm more outgoing, and social, and (I've been told) more fun to be around when I'm not trying to be a girl.

Presenting as female however is always akward.  I get defensive when I hear the word ma'am or miss, I die a little inside when I get referred to as "one of the girls" and pull away a little.  It's like theres a constant nagging voice in my head saying "this is wrong"  "Danger! Will Robinson, Danger!".  I find myself angry a lot, and become very withdrawn when I have to present as female now.

There's this woman I work with that I always want to punch...I just want to run away whenever I see her...but she calls me 'Girly wirly' And I Just want to PUNCH her in the face...I want to let her know it bugs me but I'm waiting for the day that it doesn't piss me right the hell off before I do cause I know if I say anything when I'm mad, I will just come across badly...but I still wanna sock her in the nose!

Yes and no.  I never did feminine things, but I also thought that hating your body and wishing it was male was part of being a tomboy.  That and my parents were very good about letting us do what we liked and not forcing gender specifics on us.  So I never had any trouble 'adapting' or presenting as female, because I never thought of myself as not female.  I was never one of those who said "I'm a boy in the wrong body."  My family, peers, and anatomy all told me I was a girl, so how could I argue with that?  Instead, I said "I'm a girl who wants to be a boy." 

Quote from: Alex Rene on June 18, 2010, 01:52:24 AMIt's only when I'm constantly reminding myself that I'm male that I'm not as socially fluent (I think that's the right word...) as when I go back to playing female.  It's so easy to slip back into that role, and it's so hard to make my manhood something I don't have to think about.  At this point, I'm so used to presenting as female that even me thinking of myself as male feels counter-intuitive.  I guess those who raised me (parents, teachers and other adults and role models included) succeeded at ingraining in me the idea that I am female, inside and out....   

I don't have this problem.  I've never tried to follow the girl crowd (actually I tried to stay far away from it).  I've always just done what I liked and been me.  This is to the despair of some of my female friends, but then I've never had a problem with that...

Alex, this doesn't sound too unexpected.  As Bones says, you have years of social conditioning to undo.  Our self image is developed, in a large part, by how other people treat us and, if you have been treated as female, it will be a push to convince yourself fully that you are not.  Combine that with a female body and that is a hell of a lot to unlearn.

And the male role is another learned construct.  Biological males aren't born knowing how to be male in their culture.  They have to learn it.  And they do this from the minute they are born.  By adulthood, they have had a lot of practice.  We, however, have to run to catch up.  And we don't have the usual socialising influences of parents and peers implicitly telling us how we should behave.  We have to learn it by artificial means, by observing and copying.

I think it is easy to belittle the amount of work that has to go into resocialising from one gender to another.  Just because we feel that we are male, under it all, we tend to believe that the male social role just ought to come naturally to us.  There is no reason why that should be the case.

Quote from: Alex Rene on June 18, 2010, 02:49:52 AM
Really?  I'm only 22, 23 in September....   

Then again, age probably has little to do with how much conditioning I got.  There's more conditioning in a family with firmer gender-roles than a family with more variable or flexible ones, I'd think.  I got a family with firmer ideals, although I'm sure there are others where no man is allowed to do what women traditionally do, and vice versa.

Yeah, well I didn't really think I needed to mention it.

Quote from: Bones on June 18, 2010, 03:29:24 AM
'Girly wirly'

I feel bad for you.

Alex and Bones summed it up nicely.

I thought more about being a boy as a kid.  Puberty killed me.  I then spent the majority of my adult life trying my hardest to make the F role fit.  I was fairly feminine (long hair, touch of makeup), married, had kids, did NOT identify as a Mom though was a pretty darn good one.  Yeah.  The whole thing.  But it never fit, felt fake, and I had no real clue wtf was wrong with me.

Then after my divorce, after years of soul searching, I realized DUH.  Then discovered transition as an option.  Jumped off that cliff and haven't looked back.

Jay

Quote from: Papillon on June 18, 2010, 04:16:46 AMBy adulthood, they have had a lot of practice.  We, however, have to run to catch up.  ... We have to learn it by artificial means, by observing and copying.

Well, yes and no. It's not artificial to observe and copy; that's an important element in the way we all pick up gendered behavior. But, as you point out in the same post, cis boys also have the advantage of society's assumption that they are in fact boys, so they get all of that conditioning from family, friends, and society at large. Some conditioning comes in all-male groups.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, many (perhaps most?) trans guys pick up at least some male conditioned behavior in one way or another. Some of us do intentionally, it in spite of society's opposing cues. Some of us are brought up in families that are less dogmatic about gendered behavior, and that tends to make it easier for us to not behave in a stereotypically girly fashion. Unless we transition very early, many of us are tomboys well into adulthood and we hang onto some boy patterns. Some of us "run with the boys" and don't really play with girls. Doubtless there are other arcs that I haven't even thought of.

I know that I started picking up some male conditioning at a very early age because I was confused about whom to emulate. So I patterned myself mostly after my father and brother. When I started "playing female" as a teenager, I started to repress much of my boyish behavior, maybe because I was caught between the Scylla and Charybdis: I couldn't bring myself to completely alter myself for the sake of assimilation, but it wasn't safe to just be myself anymore. So I pulled into my body. This, in and of itself, is characteristically read as female behavior because women tend to take up less space and keep their arms closer to their bodies and all of that. It may have helped me to be more convincingly female. But I don't think the comfortable patterns completely went away. Some I kept. Some remained dormant and waited for me to call them back up when I needed them.

Years later, I recognized what I was and no longer consciously played female. Many of my comfortable mannerisms and behavior returned, but they didn't fit my obviously female body. So I was still stiff and hesitant in the way I carried myself. But what I did display was often at odds with my body and social role. Fortunately, I had some switches in my head. Compartments. Those didn't completely break down till I came all the way out of the closet and accepted that I had no choice but to transition. And then...well, that period was excruciating for various reasons. I was opening up my behavior and body language more and more, but I was usually still read as a girl on account of my chest and, when I spoke, my voice. I started binding; it helped a lot, but there was still the voice. And then my voice was low enough--and I started "passing"--but as a straight man.

There's a lot I don't know about the insider's view of male conditioning, but nearly all of my adult socializing has been with men. In some circles, I was just one of the guys in a lot of ways. And my fantasy socializing has been surprisingly similar to my real-life experiences in gay circles. I feel much more comfortable in male circles and always have. Maybe that's why I don't feel that I've had to "run to catch up."

I would love to be able to "camp it up" and take on some stereotypically feminine mannerisms so that I'm read as gay, but that isn't really in my repertoire and never has been. Because, sometimes consciously and sometimes not, I have been assimilating male conditioned patterns and suppressing female ones since early childhood. That doesn't mean I feel confident about my new male role, though. That will take time. I'm sure other trans guys don't have that problem.

Anyway, that's my own experience with gendered social conditioning. Sorry it went on so long, but I'm in an analytical frame of mind today.

Quote from: Alex Rene on June 18, 2010, 01:52:24 AM
Up till now, I've been able to function so well as female that it's mind-boggling.  It's only when I'm constantly reminding myself that I'm male that I'm not as socially fluent (I think that's the right word...) as when I go back to playing female.  It's so easy to slip back into that role, and it's so hard to make my manhood something I don't have to think about.  At this point, I'm so used to presenting as female that even me thinking of myself as male feels counter-intuitive.  I guess those who raised me (parents, teachers and other adults and role models included) succeeded at ingraining in me the idea that I am female, inside and out....   

I know a couple of FTMs here have basically said (either implicitly or explicitly) that they never fully adapted to the female role they were expected to take on.  I'm just wondering if this is the case for the majority of folks or what.  I doubt I'm alone in my ability function just fine when everyone (including myself) sees me as female.  So I'm just curious to see where everyone stands.

~Alex   

I function just fine as female, I even enjoy going shopping for "female" clothing and wearing clothes that show off my body.  However, my parents never really raised me as "male" or "female" and I just slipped into the role of being female easily though it got easier as I got older (when I was in middle-school, it was pretty hard because that's when my body began to change). 

I'd love to transition, but I can't because of school and job-related issues so I'm content right now to go about playing female.

I was a midwife for six years.  I practiced traditionally, helping women give birth at home.  That's why it pisses me off so much when people tell me I have just never embraced my femininity. I wish I didn't have to give up my passion in life (catching babies) to live as a man full time, but I had to. I couldn't get work if I presented as male.  Man.. what a crazy trip that was.

That is really cool that you're a midwife Damien, I wonder if there's some way you could keep it up.  There are not enough midwives as it is and they're very very important imo. I've been tempted to go into that in the past, I'm quite passionate about the problems with the medicalisation of childbirth and I don't even want to give birth.

I swung between tomboy and girly girl as well.  I had a lot of expensive designer clothes and stuff, but it was a lot of work.  Although I still like a lot of those clothes objectively, but it is just because I have a very masculine interest in fashion and think I would make a good stylist.

Quote from: Alex Rene on June 18, 2010, 01:52:24 AM
At this point, I'm so used to presenting as female that even me thinking of myself as male feels counter-intuitive.  I guess those who raised me (parents, teachers and other adults and role models included) succeeded at ingraining in me the idea that I am female, inside and out....   

I know the feeling. I think it really does depend on how you were raised and how strictly gender and gender expectations were forced upon you. And what role models you had.

(Warning, I'm not good at really... explaining myself so take the following paragraphs with a grain of salt.)
Personally, I was raised by a single mother who never dated when I was growing up. She went on about how 'men are dogs', 'men are pigs', and 'men are only out to use you'. Her views were nothing short of gynocentric and misandric. And seeming like you wanted to fit a male stereotype was bad and 'only fitting into the sexist mold'. ...I don't think she realized that what she said was just as sexist...

Growing up, most of my friends were guys and I didn't get what she meant. She assured me that they were exceptions or that it was a matter of time. I was allowed to be a tomboy if I wanted to be, but my hair had to stay long and I had to reinforce my femaleness (I got a rant if I responded to 'hey, dude').

Over time the 'female superiority' thing was ground into my head whether I believed it or not. I was still a tomboy and I had more guy friends than girl friends, but sometimes I didn't mind dressing up or doing some sort of weird makeup. Now I realize it's just because I'm rather flamboyant, but before I was out to myself my brain loved using that to reinforce my femininity.

Anyway, because of all this, it took a long time from when I realized I was FtM to when I was able to think of myself as male at least 99% of the time. Because my brain kept yelling at me 'Men are pigs! You're turning into a pig!' and various other things along those lines. But once you have at least one person willing to reinforce your maleness to you, it gets a lot easier. It's the psychological 'Hey, they see me as this! I can be this!' effect, the same thing that socialized you into being female, only in the opposite direction.

Now I'm happy in my (sometimes flamboyant) maleness 99% of the time and happy with being a male feminist who pushes for equality as opposed to either gender superiority. It's all a matter of trusting yourself and being happy being who you are, not who people expect you to be.

Trust yourself, dude. Only you know what you really are inside.

Quote from: DamienR on June 20, 2010, 10:36:00 PM
I was a midwife for six years.  I practiced traditionally, helping women give birth at home.  That's why it pisses me off so much when people tell me I have just never embraced my femininity. I wish I didn't have to give up my passion in life (catching babies) to live as a man full time, but I had to. I couldn't get work if I presented as male.  Man.. what a crazy trip that was.

Sorry Guys for posting in a male thread. There are lots of male 'midwives' in Australia, by no means uncommon in all major hospitals. If you think about it many Obstetricians and Gynecologists are male, and of course many are female. I really don't see why gender should affect your job. I'm sorry Damien that you cannot follow an important career that you enjoyed.

Cindy

Quote from: CindyJames on June 21, 2010, 04:39:30 AM
Sorry Guys for posting in a male thread. There are lots of male 'midwives' in Australia, by no means uncommon in all major hospitals. If you think about it many Obstetricians and Gynecologists are male, and of course many are female. I really don't see why gender should affect your job. I'm sorry Damien that you cannot follow an important career that you enjoyed.

Cindy

Where I live there are no male midwives, not one. To be an OB or a gynie is different. I was super-immersed in a feminist trust your body sort of thing, a lot of it based on the fact that I myself have given birth naturally, etc, etc.  It's the social aspect more than anything I guess.  Here the natural, hippy kind of childbirth community is VERY heterocentric.  I just didn't fit in anymore but then sometimes I have fantasies about being Canada's first transman midwife.

Quote from: DamienR on June 21, 2010, 09:58:49 AM
Where I live there are no male midwives, not one. To be an OB or a gynie is different. I was super-immersed in a feminist trust your body sort of thing, a lot of it based on the fact that I myself have given birth naturally, etc, etc.  It's the social aspect more than anything I guess.  Here the natural, hippy kind of childbirth community is VERY heterocentric.  I just didn't fit in anymore but then sometimes I have fantasies about being Canada's first transman midwife.

Do it man! I know where I am at least, it is really hard to find a good midwife.  I'm sure you'd be able to find work. And plenty of queers give birth, you could midwife for them.