Quote from: rmaddy on January 25, 2018, 12:02:42 PM
Sophia,
If I read you correctly, you transitioned to put an to end external misgendering, to which I can only say, "I'm sorry." I hope that worked out for you, and even more so that this helped you align with inner truth.
Renae
I suffered from gender dysphoria. I was getting misgendered by myself and others. Misgendering happened because of my embodiment, and to a lesser extent because of my socialization. So I changed my body, got my voice down, and immersed myself in women's culture. I maintain a closed narrative. Now I'm gendered correctly by myself and others, full stop.
My truth is that I'm
female. A gendering I elicit without qualification today. So there's nothing to be sorry about!
Quote from: rmaddy on January 25, 2018, 03:29:52 PMUnjust and unwarranted requirements on a segment of the population are never semantic. Dress how you want, because you want to. Plot whatever course you want in life. Just don't think that if you don't meet the expectations of someone else that you have somehow screwed up.
For someone suffering gender dsyphoria, this mindset you lay out may or may not work. Because that's not how
gendering works.
This is how gendering works: People see your body, and they subconscious and automatically assign it as "male" or "female," based on fairly sophisticated "models" or "schematics" or "prototypes" that a lifetime of experience has taught us. It's the same neural mechanism for distinguishing cats from dogs, or any other kind of basic level category. That initial assignment may be changed given new information -- like the wrong voice, or a terrible faux pas, or a story of transition. And again, that re-assignment process doesn't happen consciously.
People can't help but assign gender, based on the "prototypes" they've learned over years and years of subconscious information gathering from on all the people they've ever met.
If we want to be
automatically gendered correctly, we have to resemble one prototype much more than the other.
And stick to it. That's how gender assignment actually works, whether we like it or not. Now, most everyone here can agree that gender is declarative, rather than performative, but this understanding comes from our own experiences of dysphoria or cross-gender identification. Out in the big bad world, the declarative mode is becoming more and more tolerated, even indulged, but I would argue that the gendering one receives from such a situation, where we are asking other people to
consciously work against their own subconscious understanding, is not the same as the gendering that comes automatically.
This process, by the way, also happens when we look in the mirror. Which is why so many people in this community either detest mirrors or love them, depending on where they are in their process.
Quote from: rmaddy on January 25, 2018, 03:47:33 PMIt's not just the word that is problematic. If you don't see that our community is populated by aa lot of people who are terrified to be recognized as transgender, you aren't paying attention. We need to expose and actively resist ways of thinking that cast transgender people as less than. People are choosing to live in the closet because they don't think transgender people have value. This may be their choice, but it doesn't make it any less tragic.
Have you noticed the age demographic in this discussion? Younger people are more willing to trade dignity and openness for acceptance. I predict that many of them will recognize, far too late, that this was a rotten deal.
Our community is populated by a lot of people who are terrified to be
misgendered, because that is what's at the source of so many suffering from dysphoria. Misgendering happens much more frequently when your embodiment doesn't match the phenotype of one's true gender. It also happens more frequently when one doesn't maintain narrative privacy. It doesn't happen at all, in my experience, when body and and narrative are aligned with the binary.
If there's a correlation between youth and transitioning to one's target gender (as opposed to transitioning into a "trans" social identity) it's likely to be that the young aren't as deeply enmeshed in the wrong life. They haven't married, had children, had decades of the wrong hormones altering their bodies. The young move on to live the lives of men and women, because they
can.
Of course, whether this is acceptable or "a rotten deal" depends on your personal truth. If your personal truth is on the binary, then "trans" isn't an essence or identity, it's transitional, just like transition. If your personal truth is aligned with the feelings of dysphoria and the process of transition itself, then it's likely better to be out, just like people who are gay or bi and can only make this socially known by being out about it (whether through words, or actions, or both).
What you and I don't get to do is to select what someone else's personal truth is
or should be, especially in a place where gender is determined declaratively. For someone who identifies on the binary, to live with the correct embodiment and a closed narrative isn't living in a closet... it's being completely free, finally, to live one's personal truth. For many of us, the social identity of "trans"
is a closet.