I have name changed for this.
I'm not sure whether this is the best board (or place on the internet) to post this but I gather it's watched by many people so I'm hoping to get an answer from people with first-hand experience one way or another. This is not intended to be in any way goady, there just seem to be so many different understandings of what makes someone 'trans' and I think it's important to know what we're talking about.
I'm generally and genuinely curious about how transmen and women view their own desire to present or be viewed as the opposite sex to which they were born.
Leaving aside anyone for whom presenting as the opposite sex is a sexual thing (I gather there are complicated rules on speaking about this on this board and don't wish to be offensive), my current (no doubt very basic) understanding is that it must fall into one or both of two categories:
- Dysmorphia in the sense of being uncomfortable or horrified by your physical body, or parts of it, as are people who feel a deep revulsion towards a healthy limb.
- A feeling that you are a man or a woman, regardless of your body, and wish to be treated as such.
The first category I can get my head around to an extent. I don't pretend to know the reasons or best response but I can understand what is being said.
The second causes me more problems and I am curious to know how transmen and transwomen think of it to themselves. What, to you, counts as 'living as' a woman or man? What, in your view, is the difference between being treated as a man and treated as a woman? If you lived in a society where the expectations ascribed to each sex we're different, or you'd received different messages about that growing up do you think you'd feel differently?
Particularly:
A) Do you believe that there are in fact (perhaps even in science) internal feelings/traits etc. common to all women or all men regardless of the society they live in that you, as someone biologically of the opposite sex unusually share, making you therefore really a man/woman on the inside? Or perhaps
B) Do you feel that 'feeling like' a man or woman is indeed based on sexist stereotyping of the society in which you live but, while that stereotyping is alive and well, it's more comfortable for you to describe yourself as being the opposite sex than to try to present as the biological sex you are but live outside of the stereotypes?
Doubtless I'm stepping on landmines left and right, here, but I truly can't find my own way through the difference between "living as a woman" and sexist stereotypes, and rather than immediately conclude that there isn't one, I'd be very interested to hear others' thoughts.
Thank you in advance.