Quote from: Tay on May 15, 2007, 06:11:29 PM
It takes forever. And people that accept a "girl" who dresses as a "boy" but doesn't want to BE a boy are few and far between.
Really? I find I have a fairly easy time finding people who recognize that I do not have the character attributes of woman-ness, but they don't see the man-ness. "You are not a woman, merely female," seems to be a statement it's not too hard to get friends to arrive at, and they'll even do it all by themselves. But the same person will also deny, almost hotly, that I am masculine. Of course, if I was physically male I would not mind at all being described as an unmasculine sort of man, as I am one. So I really ought not get wound up about that.
I'm sorry you're not recognized.
QuoteI came out to my friend recently. Two days later he told me that if I were a movie stereotype I'd be "the bitchy, stuck up girl who likes to play pretend that she has more balls than the men."
What a misogynistic statement. Do you think he meant to be nasty? Or was he just tense and thus inarticulate and coming off the rude git?
Seems to me that a lot of people respond to female-to-anything transgendered people by mistaking them for a modern but well-accepted and even admired feminine archetype. I call women who fit it 'Title Nine Tomboys.' A Title Nine Tomboy is a competitive (generally athletic but sometimes intellectual) woman who wants to win, wants to beat the boys, wants to show she's as good as any man, and wants to be 'all woman' while she does it. Your friend's 'movie-stereotype' sounds like a really resentful and negative way of describing this particular flavour of womanhood.
I find most Title Nine Tomboys (excepting MtF ones) spectacularly annoying, 'cause they tend to say things to me like, "You
are a woman, just as
you define womanhood," or, while dressed in big-hip tiny-ankle jeans and a pink t-shirt with the slogan 'A Woman's Place is on a Horse' printed on it, tell me, "I never wear women's clothes either." Besides, competitive people bore me anyway, all that ego wrapped up in being better than other people.
Anyway, I get that too, if it's any comfort. Recently somebody gave me a videotape of a new kid's cartoon called
Jane and the Dragon and told me how she thought I must have been just like Jane as a kid. With dread, I watch this thing and sure enough, Jane is a Title Nine Tomboy, every inch a girl, she's just a girl who wants to be a knight. Something I sympathize with, but don't identify myself as.
Quote from: Tay on May 16, 2007, 07:03:42 AM
Breast reduction isn't as important to me as a hysterectomy. I have a decent binder I wear at home and on some weekends. My uterus, however, cannot be stopped from bleeding (Canada doesn't allow menstrual suppression using birth control). With my uterus intact, I run the risk of one day becoming pregnant, something that I would not be able to handle.
That's kinda silly, Canada -- as I understand it, the 'period' a woman on birth-control pills gets isn't a 'real' period, it's just 'withdrawl bleeding' from taking placebo-pills instead of hormonal birth-control pills on those days. All you've got to do is get on birth-control pills, say you lost a pack of pills and merrily go along taking an active pill every day. Women do it all the time, and this being the case it would clearly be wiser to do it under medical supervision. I guess there's some hot debate about its health risks or possible benefits. And there are certainly pills (or that injectable birth-control) that supposedly stop periods entirely for most females. Are they not available in Canada?
I remain puzzled about why it should be that getting spayed is so remarkably beneficial for the long-term health of female dogs, but is 'indicated' for human females only for life-threatening conditions.
