What do transgender women/girls think it is to be a man?

[ValuePartnership]

I have tried and tried in every place to find out what exactly it is (specifically) that makes women, and especially girls, feel they are "really" men? Does anyone have any idea? I am a man and would love to know what, apart from some very general conviction (asserted but never made specific); wanting to wear male clothing; wanting male "body shape"; represents becoming a "man" to trans women (or girls). Such ideas are supposed to match the reality of having a male identity. I do not have any supposed cis-gender identity, but I know what things have been central to living as a boy and then a man - and it's nothing like anything I have read about trans men. I never thought being a man depended on others seeing me as man; I never thought about my body shape; most of the clothes I wear (and have always worn) are very ordinary and could just as easily have been worn by a woman. The big big deal for me all my life (I am in my 60s) has been the way I experience sexual excitement and arousal: my body will register it (and sometimes against my wishes) through penile erection; the next has been the experience of orgasm deep in my body (prostate gland); then how vulnerable to attack (friendly or violenbt) by other males, or my own clumsiness, my testicles made and make me. Only then came comparisons - I was aware of, generally to a high degree, being taller and stronger than females. Finally, I learned that I could become a father (with a growing realistion I was expected to do so); that I had a distribution of body hair (more than some other men and less than others) that affected my appearance. It seems to me that even if you think you are a man, you have no idea what being a man is like unless you are one. Hence nobody ever says. Anyone able to help with ideas?

But you presumably are a man or a woman. What makes you a man or a woman?

I think my DH must be very confused! He chops firewood, never cleans the bathroom and is obsessed with sport (watching, not playing). However, he also does all the laundry including ironing, has no idea about our finances and earns less than me.

Genderists call people who don't share their ideology 'transphobes' because then they can wallow in self pity while avoiding explaining what exactly this gender thing they care so much about is and why humanity managed just fine without it until about 20 years ago.

Anyhow, I identify as a person who'd sooner be gardening, doing wildlife /history/ archaeology stuff, cuddling the cats, solving a codeword puzzle, or even changing the bedlinen, but I have to do a supermarket shop instead.

I don't get it either. I'm a woman, been one all my life and instead to stay one. I may be a woman, but I just feel like me, a human being. I don't pin my reality on being a woman and just do t get why a man will want to be like a 'woman'. Is it an idea? An obsession with the idea of womanhood? A sexual thing? Confused.

What a bunch of sexist claptrap. I hate definitions like this because they effectively tell me I'm not a woman. Sure this may make sense for you but it's fuck all like me experience. Which takes us back to the place of having toml admit that all women have in common is women's bodies. And men can never have them. Just like mocking up something which looks a bit like a coxk and balls does not tell me what it's like to actually have proper functional ones.

I had to step up with practical tasks like putting up shelves and pictures, decorating etc.

There is absolutely no reason an average able-bodied woman cannot put up a shelf. Believing this is "man stuff" is part of gender.

Totally agree. But gender ideologies don't want fo answer questions like this. Explaining oneself seems threatening. Perhaps because itnvery quickly exposes massive flaws in a poorly thought through ideology.

It really IS a simple thing. Being a man means you are an adult human male. Being a woman means you are an adult human female.
Male / female is determined by XX or XY chromosomes. Everything else is window dressing.

I guess she means she is not helpless, “feminine”, wobbly, interested in “feminine” conversations and pursuits, sexually a focus for men, boring, a nag, unable to build a bridge or run fast or use a computer.

I hated all those views of women as a teen, both external and internalised. We used to say that there should be another word for adult females apart from “lady” (feminine and elegant and a bit helpless and silly), or “woman” (child-bearing and menstruating and frumpy and old before your time). We felt like neither of those things and didn’t want to be either. But we didn’t want to be men either. We wanted to call ourselves “zuggins” or some such. Interesting that zhe etc are being promoted as pronouns now - clearly we were ahead of our time.

I’m glad that the word “woman” has been reclaimed to an extent. When I hear eighteen year olds calling themselves a “woman” now I think, good for you. Previously they would have been called a “girl” for as long as possible - as if the alternative was too awful to contemplate.

Like pps have said, I think the reasons and motivations behind ftm and mtf are almost always very very different.

Indeed. I do most of that in our house as I am better at it and enjoy it.

I have a lot of sympathy for people - male or female- who find the societal expectations of the sex distressing and uncomfortable, I certainly experience some of that. Where I get confused is the conlusions they draw. Many women and men throughout the ages have chafed against societal expectations of their sex and I though we were going in the right dorection when we agreed it was society that was wrong and needed changing. How did we get to the place where the preferred conclusion is now your body is wrong and needs changing?

Internalised sexism and homophobia .

I've a trans male colleague and they don't appear to have met many gender non conforming women in their life.

My mum did a lot of the diy and I'm very capable. I tend not to now simply as Dh is incapable cba with domestic stuff and would fuck up the laundry.

I took a stand recently and insisted I did a particular job as it pisses me of when he then brags about doing some diy. As it's obviously weird to brag that I got to the bottom of the laundry basket.

I made a point of not bragging about the diy job that looked amazing. He bragged for me which was nice but still doesn't get it. 🙄

Interestingly I have always been a fan of Christine and the Queens. Chris has always been androgenous but has recently started to identify as a trans man. For me they still look and sound like they always were - a handsome, androgenous woman, so a recent radio interview referring to them as "he" sounded a bit jarring to me as the voice being interviewed was undeniably female sounding.

So sometimes I wonder if it more about trans, for.some people, being the current vocabularly for describing something that a lot of people have always felt. In the past someone lile Chris would have perhaps described themselves as a butch or a masculine woman rather than a trans man.

But you presumably are a man or a woman. What makes you a man or a woman?

Being an adult human male makes you a man. Being an adult human female makes you a woman. That’s it.

My dd is trans (yes I refuse to call her ds) and it’s a question I have asked her and a question my family would like to know the answer too, my dd just says ‘it’s a feeling’. In my eyes she isn’t what I would expect a man to be, she doesn’t really present as a male, has always in my eyes been gender neutral. Of course I love her what ever she wants to identify as and I respect her choices even though I may not agree with them.

You might just consider that perhaps there is actually no such thing as gender identity. Perhaps those who think they have a gender identity are mistaken, just as those people who think they have a guardian angel or paranormal aura are (perhaps?) mistaken.

Perhaps?

After all, to quote Alex Byrne (Professor of Philosophy, MIT), "If there is some kind of “gender identity” that is universal in humans ... it remains elusive. No one has yet found a way of detecting its presence ..."

[I don't offer Prof. Byrne as an authority here, by the way. His reasons for thinking as he does, though, bear consideration, sure as eggs. (See Byrne on gender identity) No? ]

I got so sick of waiting for my husband to do DIY stuff around the house so I'm the one to do all household fixing etc.

We have a DD who is questioning her gender at quite a young age and I'm all up for showing her I'm still a woman when I'm dressed up for a night out, or when I'm covered in paint spatters, hair a mess, drill in hard. We had rats in the drain the other week and her father was no where to be seen!

This. And want to be able to walk at night without fear of rape.

When I was a child quite a few of us wanted to be boys. Not because of any sense of identity, or gender dysphoria, but simply from our POV boys had privilege we didn’t.

we wanted to play sport, be recognised for being good at sport. We didn’t like being constrained to netball and dance, we wanted to play football, to have the immense earning potential boys and men did.

we didn’t want to be constrained by looks. Sport again- don’t get hot and sweaty, you’ll ruin your make up. I didn’t like the expectation that I’d have to spend time on make up, adhere to certain dress codes, wear certain clothes to gain society’s approval. I wanted to be able to go to the pub in jeans and a t shirt without someone saying “aren’t you going to wear something nice” , or do something with my hair, or put a bit of lipstick on.

we wanted to go to the park and climb trees or do cartwheels in the playground without being told to mind our dress or to stop or people would see our pants.

we wanted to follow our interest in science, maths and practical subjects like woodwork without being seen as weird, nerdy, being the only girl in the class and seen as less capable than boys.

we didn’t like being seen as lesser. Being told we couldn’t do things because we were girls. The expectation that all girls loved babies and that the main goal for girls was marriage and babies while the boys planned exciting lives.

we didn’t like having to modify our behaviour constantly as what mattered most is people/boys like liked us, saw us as pretty.

personal examples- I was a competitive swimmer. I lost count of the number of times I was told I’d be giving up soon (I was 11!) because boys wouldn’t be interested in girls who smelled of chlorine, or that if I kept going I’d get “big shoulders” and wouldn’t be attractive. I was also told it wasn’t good for me to be spending so much time training, I needed to do brownies or other social pastimes seen as more suitable for girls.

so not about the physical at all. Had I been offered the trans route I probably would have grabbed it as I’d have loved to be seen as a boy and got rid of all the judgement and restrictions on my life.

As a Mum of girls, I have only seen this in the context of girls choosing trans identities at my DC's all girls school, who - without exception - have autism to varying degrees, and their trans experience appears to be entirely about rejecting an unwanted, unwelcome transition from being a perfectly happy non-binary child (which in many ways all pre-pubescent children are) to "woman" (breasts, periods, body hair, unwanted attention from men, expectations to conform as "feminine"), rather than any specific desire to be male.

These teens also have almost no contact with male teens at all (apart from brothers, which off the top of my head, I don't think any of them have?), because it's an all girls school, so they're not faced with having to fit in with males. They're just "boys" at an all girls school, and it's fine.

It would be mean to question the cis-gendered girls too much about this, but I absolutely guarantee that they all know perfectly well that the "boys" in their class are not the same as the boys in the nearby all boys school.

@Nightmare2022 has it exactly right above.

The best part of being a woman is leaving computer problems and house problems to men. I'm absolutely relieved I don't have to design bridges, fix cars, fight fires, fight wars, fight crime, deal with scary animals or lift heavy things.
If there's a mousetrap to be set, I ask a man to do it. For me, being a woman is about avoiding responsibility whenever possible, though I do still have many responsibilities

this is a piss take, yes? That’s not being a woman, that’s just you.

I love doing all that. The first computer scientists were women, as it was seen as a womens job. Ada Lovelace, Heda Garbler. Women did the computing that put man in space.

for me that is the whole aspect of “woman” we should be fighting against.

Chris now claims trans status and has changed their name again but I can't remember what to.

However has been clear they do not want to medically transition, interestingly. Probably voice related. Not sure if that includes mastectomy, but the reasoning seemed to be have a healthy body but not a woman.

Becoming a trans man, for Redcar, was a liberation, though not an easy one. He finds himself in conflict with what is expected of him. “I am in resistance to the approach of trans identity that there has to be hormones and operations,” he says. “It’s abiding by a binary system that I don’t believe in. Binarism has been made to control. The system itself imposes a lot of performance on everybody from birth and I want to free myself and everybody else in the conversation. I am sick of having to define myself with their grotesque tools of oppression. And I don’t think I owe anyone scars, to be precise.”

He takes a breath, continues. “It took time for me to say, because I was terrified of having to act on it… and I think since I’ve been talking about it, and understanding from inside who I was, I’ve been fighting sometimes trans people, who want me to formulate myself to be a ‘proper’ trans man. Who are we doing this for? Everyone’s different. I know people who have been blossoming and thriving on hormones, reaching their proper incarnation, and I respect that, but my approach is I want to thrive in that contradiction. I want to make it a poem, to help deconstruct the violence of a system. But personally, I don’t feel I need to change anything about me. I think what needed to be changed was self-hate, dysphoria and self-harm.”

www.theguardian.com/music/2022/nov/06/christine-and-the-queens-redcar-interview-adorables-etoiles

It's almost radical feminism but with pronouns. So obviously not.

Not sure why one can't be all that and be a woman.