to ask what it is that makes someone feel that they are the wrong gender?

[Imogencodpiece]

I have just been watching the programme Ladyboys and I am genuinely interested in how someone knows they are the wrong gender.

A lot of the girls on the programme have said that they just knew they were mentally a woman and I am curious as to what makes one mentally a woman or indeed a man, surely our thoughts are gender neutral? Unless they are being stereotypical i.e a woman likes clothes and makeup and a man likes beer and football.

Can anyone try and explain perhaps?

Also this. www.shb-info.org/reimer3.html

I'm sorry, I should have put a trigger warning on the previous post but honestly, no, I don't think this doctor did think he was doing the best he could. I think he was a child abuser who lied about his experiment. I don't think the story has anything to tell us about gender, only about abuse.

LRD Sorry should have been more clear, it didn't look like a vagina, he just had nothing there so then they did reconstructive work to make a vagina instead of the "ken doll situation".

Sorry, reading it back it sounds different to what I meant, was kind of thinking faster than I was typing and didn't get it down right.

Thanks for finding a useful link though, was just using a case study from my phycology course that sprang to mind as it illustrates my point about being in the wrong body.

Yes, I know what they did.

Point is, it may have looked vaguely like a vagina, but it wasn't. It's terrifying that anyone would have thought that creating a hole in his body was somehow like a vagina. I mean, we can so upset about FGM, but I cannot begin to imagine how that would be (and I don't want to try).

I am not at all having a go at you and I hope I didn't come across as if I were, but that child was abused and treated appallingly. His case can't possibly illustrate either what the doctor initially claimed about gender neutrality, or points about being in the wrong body - because he was a mutilated and abused child whose doctor used him as an experiment.

I didn't mean girls think about clothes and make up (do I come across as a blithering idiot) just that when i think about myself in terms if my gender it is with the contentment that my outer body reflects what i consider myself to be

I can tell this because there is no discordance

Agree with trills.

Wrote a whole load of stuff and deleted it, as I agree with trills

IME people who don't conform to stereotype are more likely to work to change stereotypes, than change their sex/gender.

I really think that what is going on with trans-gender people is something it is probably impossible to really get unless you are that way. Same as growing up gay or female or black or whatever it might be. If you aren't in the group you can try as hard as you can and empathise and so on but you can never really really "get" it.

Personally I do wonder if things would be easier for trans individuals in a society which wasn't so hell bent on enforcing gender roles. if there was genuine acceptance of difference in whatever form it takes (and genuine equality in society for all people) then I think things would be easier all round.

I hope no trans person is finding this thread difficult to read. This is a link to some information from a gender identity organisation.

Thank you for the link.

I find I don't agree with much of it.

"Masculine" and "feminine" are stereotypes defining gender roles which have been enforced in societies across the world for, well, ever. Causing great unhappiness.

Most people have a mix of traits. Most people do not lie at one end of the gender "scale" or the other. It is a reductive, narrowing and depressing view of the world.

Do you feel a genderqueer approach feels more comfortable for you Nice?

For myself I'm not sure I identify strongly with the female gender identity felt by the small number of M2F trans people I've known but no less than I feel rather separate from the female identity of many other women.

'Most people do not lie at one end of the gender "scale" or the other. It is a reductive, narrowing and depressing view of the world.'

Amen to that.

Well no I'd rather ignore gender altogether and just let people get on with being what feels right for them.

I don't think there needs to be a special name for that. It's just the way it should be.

Me too.

Plus, in my experience which I know must be pretty limited, 'genderqueer' is an excuse for some really poor attitudes and actions.

Surely it depends, at least partly, on the hormone balance?

I'm sure someone will correct me, but I don't think it does.

I would like to know, with my feminist hat on, what would happen if we could pause the patriarchy, express who we were without being forced into little boxes and cease to use gender to control and hurt people. Would people who are trans feel differently about reassignment if gender were a less intrusive and controlling force? I've never felt able to ask the and of the people who are trans that I know. I know that some feminists and some trans activists have had a tempestuous relationship but it really interests me.

As others have said it must be more than just identifying more with stereotypes of the opposite gender. I would have thought sexual orientation might have had some part in it. But both trans people I know in rl are in same sex relationships. Is this a common trait? I did wonder if maybe this was due to more open-mindedness from gay people towards trans. The f2m trans I met when female and was dating a female. Now male dating men.
Obviously it doesn't matter at all that I don't understand this but wondered if anyone else had any insight.

we are all born as we are meant to be Even babies with fatal genetic conditions? Who would 'mean' for that to happen?

And I'm obviously not equating a desire to change your sex as an illness.

I am another who struggles to see the distinction between body dysmorphia and the desire to change gender. It doesn't seem logical that invasive surgery to change gender (including amputating a penis) is accepted and even funded in our society and invasive surgery to amputate limbs, for example, isn't.

It doesn't 'bother' me - I wouldn't want anyone to be unhappy and have no problem on an individual level relating with someone as the gender they identify with.

A transsexual women has recently joined my wider circle and I have no problem with her identifying as a woman etc. But I know that philosophically I don't really buy it. I don't really think she is the gender she has adopted, I am just going along with it to be polite. Which makes me feel a bit shit.

I've always been pretty firmly of the belief that gender identity - like sexual identity - is pretty much a social construct. I was born female, and still am, but have been told that I have a lot of "male" character traits. I don't agree - I have my own character traits, and they're neither male nor female, they're just me. Similarly, I've always been in relationships with men, but I think that it's just been that - so far - the people who I've been attracted to have been male. So I do agree with MrsTerryPratchett that if gender identity wasn't an issue for society, it would become less of an issue for the individual.

However, DC2 identifies as a gender other than his birth gender (I apologise for any offence I cause here by using male pronouns to discuss him - we've discussed this and he is completely happy at the moment with me using these, rather than gender-neutral pronouns, but I know that many trans people do prefer the use of gender-neutral words). He says that he originally identified as a gay man (he came out to me when he was 13 or 14) but more recently thinks that he'd be more comfortable in his own skin living as a woman (and decided this at the age of around 15). He says that it wouldn't make much of a difference to him whether or not society sees him as male or female, or if society didn't give a stuff either way, because what matters is how he views himself.

He doesn't have particularly "feminine" personality traits - I've asked if he'd like to have more typically female clothes to wear about the house, for example (to which he responded by looking at what I was wearing and said "so that'd be jeans and a t-shirt, then"). He says that he doesn't particularly want genital surgery, but wants hormone treatment so that he doesn't grow a beard, and so that his body (other than his genitals) becomes more "female" - in terms of fat distribution, skin texture, growing breasts. So even within trans people, there seems to be a continuum of identity, rather than a definite "I'm this gender, and I want to be that gender, with all it entails".

Sorry for the rambling, it's a bit early in the morning for me, but I think that it's worth saying that the differences between two trans people can be as marked as the differences between a trans and non-trans. Everyone is an individual.

There's a horrendously twee and irritating poem-type-thing going around Facebook - I saw it first a couple of years ago but it seems to be having a resurgence.

It goes something like...

"A real woman
always blah blah blah (looks)
always blah blah blah (housework)
always blah blah blah (putting others first)
always blah blah blah (something else stereotypical and twee)
Share this if, like me, you just realised you might be a man."

No. I don't think I'm a man. I just disagree with your description of a "real woman". Obviously. It's written as a joke, but it's not funny. I really hate the use of the phrases "real woman" or "real man".

I really don't think that any trans people identify as such because they think "I don't behave like how a stereotypical man/woman behaves therefore I should go and be a woman/man" (or if they do it's a tiny minority so small that it's not worth discussing).

Living as an effeminate man or a butch women is still a lot easier than living as a trans woman/man.

This is a brilliant way of thinking about things:
itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Genderbread-2.1.jpg

I think that current research into people who think they are the wrong sex suggests that both hormonal and genetic factors do not predispose everyone clearly for one sex or the other, nor do they always correspond with extrenal sexual characteristics. So someone with male external characteristics may be female hormonally and genetically which may make them feel trapped in the wrong body if they are brought up as a boy. These insights are fairly recent and the result of a better understanding of people whose external sexual characteristics are ambiguous. Previously babies with ambiguous genitalia were ascribed a sex based on the length of their penis (there was an actual length below which it was called a clitoris and the child a girl, above which it was called a penis and the child a boy - turned out to be a catastrophic way of assigning sex for the children who were often misidentified).

Gender is a concept which has more to do with self-ascription so it is an expression of one's character which needn't have much to do with one's sexual characteristics. So a person with female sexual characteristics may have character traits that are either socially and/or personally perceived as more typically male.

but being female doesn't always mean you like pink pretty things same with a man who doesn't want to be out tinkering with cars, I feel like a woman but dont go in for make up etc, I would imagine transgendered people just do not feel comfortable in their own skin it is obviously much more than , they just know they are not who they are ,

I remember covering this issue on the Access course as part of Sociology and looking at gender roles. One of the quotes amongst the material we looked at was 'it's easier to dig a hole than build a pole' which accounted for the majority of such infants being 'made' into girls.

Data gathered from adult individuals who were born with what's known as ambiguous genitalia suggests it's best to leave the child 'as is' and to let them decide for themselves what sex they are later on, but as a society we find the whole idea of that hands off approach uncomfortable although I think we are slowly becoming less confined by labels.

I think I've remembered the nuts and bolts of it well enough but it's been some time so apologies if I've got some of its wrong.

Yes, I've not heard that quotation (yuck), but I know that used to be the practice. It is awful. And I do think it perpetuates the idea that that is all a vagina is, a hole, whereas a penis has to be something that functions sexually.