The ramblings of a middle aged hag

My own experience has been learning to live and accept my body. I still don't always love it but I am much less critical of it than I was when younger. In my teens I self harmed in several ways and was deeply unhappy. My perception of my physical self was way off and I fixated on the problems as I saw them and that 'problem' was the reason I was unhappy.
I didn't have gender dysphoria but I didn't have an accurate or balanced view of myself. I think this experience is not uncommon.
Age, experience and hopefully a small degree of wisdom has altered this for me. I'm not unhappy any more. I can see better the reasons for my feelings and am more at home in myself. I don't think this is uncommon either!
Self knowledge is a long journey. I think the reason why so many older women in particular are resistant to the idea that you need to modify your outside to fit your inside perception of yourself, is because we have experienced how that changes over time. Previous generations have had more limited ways to express those conflicts but young men and women now have options that are life changing and not reversible. For some these changes will be right for them and not regretted. But what about the ones who do regret but can't go back? I would not want to be living now according to choices I made as a teenager.

Thanks @SeasonOeufMistes - I will try to do a bit more research when I have time and I appreciate that update.

I think my general feeling, though is still the escaping of a body that is doing its natrual cycle thing, is something worth considering. It is seen as the domain of the new agers and the vegans. But I think perhaps it is due a consideration in the main stream as part of the mix.

I am throwing in curve balls. Not deliberately. Mind just does that. So will bow out now. But still follow discussion with interest.

It's estradiol that's manufactured and precsribed these days, Joody.

I think this is a common experience for many young women.

When you add into the mix other issues such as sexuality, problems processing it, what other people might do to you because you are growing up, the availability of porn, the mass of uncorroborated (mis)information available on the internet, other people's interpretations, issues with socialising etc etc, it is tough these days.

I know I have gone off-topic here and apologise. Still I think this is relevant to the overall discussion of this topic. Taking hormones to feel at ease in one's body. I have been considering this since reading this Jeanette Winterson article from 2014. In the course of 7 years the description of how Premarin is produced has never left me.

www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/11/jeanette-winterson-can-you-stop-the-menopause

I am one of the former tomboys who is now GC, mainly because my niece - who seems a lot like me as an adolescent - is on testosterone and awaiting surgery to cut off her breasts. I find this horrifying and the opposite of progressive.

Other friends are more accepting as there are loads of teen girls who now say they are non-binary, and what’s the harm? It is like today’s version of goths and emo, except that we say they are actually vampires. This does seem superficially harmless, as long as no medication is involved.

It is easy to say ‘be kind’ but there is nothing ‘kind’ in giving masetomies to teenagers.

I’d say that I grew up like your sister. Tomboy with short hair. Did science at school and ended up in computers, so never felt like a girl. However, as I’ve grown up, I am happy to be a woman.

That experience strengthens my GC views. Probably because I have a lot of sympathy for people that don’t fit in. I just figure that I’m lucky that the message when I was growing up, 80’s/90’s, was that women can do anything they want. I would struggle more with the emphasis on image now.

Your sister probably has different views from you because of friends and media exposure, not because of how gender-conforming she is.

It's shit being a woman. There are different ways to respond to that, depending on a number of factors at play in one's social background.

Gender identity ideology offers some false hopes I suppose.

The real answers lie in stopping it being shit being a woman, because no-one can change their sex. We need to improve and change the social conditions of girls' lives, not their bodies.

Also, I think a lot of girls and young women just like feeling a bit 'edgy' and think they've invented 'gender non conforming', something that was around big style in the 1980s with a different vocabulary and doing far, far less harm. And without the young women doing so much pandering.

It's a valid theory.

One of the reasons I am GC is because I believe if I was a teen girl nowadays I would be caught up in thinking I was a trans man and it would solve all my problems. (As did JKR in her blog, I believe)

It's possible it works the other way around too?

I think the idea that a person can feel "born in the wrong body" relates to many things. It is to a particular time in one's life, when bodies are changing, such as growing, puberty, child bearing, menopause. The truth is a body isn't a static entity, but always changing, and doing so from birth to death. It is a natural life cycle (if we are lucky). There are times when I feel intensely at home in my body and times when I feel intensely out of it - carrying extra weight etc.

With regard to this question, there are many things we can do to change our bodies with attitude, diet, exercise etc. That may sound trite and dismissive. But I really don't think it is - in any case, an holistic approach should be a first resort surely. I am really saddened at the tendency of so many to look for outside aid in making changes via pharmaceuticals and medicalisation.

I think one of the costs of this attitude that is never reflected in the "be kind" mantra is the cruelty of the cost of producing the hormones that people take to change themselves. Other sentient beings suffer greatly for that to happen. It is something un-necessary, the hormonal changing of an otherwise healthy body. I have never really seen this raised among the young desperately telling everyone to be kind. They probably don't know.

To be clear, I am not making a case not to take medicine when it is necessary for quality of life to continue. I just think our attitude is to demand change on request without regard to the consequences for others (other people, but also other species). There is a relevance here to the climate change discussions. It is a wider view perhaps. But at what cost, all of this human centreing to the health of the planet?

It might be true for some, although the same experience seems to drive a rejection of gender identity ideology from others.

I'm not sure how relevant this is, but when i was a child it was always seen as a bit "cool" to be a tomboy. In my 20s, it was "cooler" to be "one of the lads at work, drink pints and smoke instead of hiding in the corner with the few women from the office crossing their legs in the high heels and short skirts sipping rose...

So although I don't buy into it the same way your sister does, I do understand the kind of dissonance between me and "girly girls". That doesn't make me any less of a woman though.

Now I'm a few years older the whole "cool" thing if you act more like a bloke rather than a woman just pisses me off. But then that's a whole other can of worms.

Sorry thats not very articulate but hopefully you know what I mean!