How common is it to have the idea of wishing you could change sex cross your mind at some stage

[opalsandcoffee]

I just wonder how many of us female adults, particularly oldies, have had a stage in our lives when we wished we were physically male. (or the other way around)

I can remember distinctly have a stage when I desperately wished for a penis instead of a vagina - I don't know how long it lasted, maybe a few months? I think I was about 12 or 13.

The reasons were firstly, I didn't want periods, and secondly, I was afraid, from what I knew about sex. I understood it that women had to have the passive role and accept what was done to them by men, and I very much wanted to be the person who was going to be in control when I started having relationships. I also wanted to be the stronger sex in general

I just think this may actually be quite a common phase, and not really mean young people are trans.

So from single skim of this thread

44 people never wished for being male - although for many that despite the advantages men have

23 wanted at some stage to be male

6 felt they were

A further 10 less clear - sort of never but "boy brain in girl body" , lots of physical self loathing which would today mean "probably get sucked in"

I think that when a girl is friends with boys or other way round, the sex difference creates a barrier which leads to "easier" dynamic. Less intense, less commitment, and more space perhaps physical as well as mental/emotional.
These friendships might seem less complicated and so preferable to same sex friendship within which there are expectations of being "best friends" and having to support or share private experiences.

When I was just a teenager I read a great many adventure stories. They all had heroes, not heroines, and any girls had a fairly passive role (not always, but often). One day I found myself wishing I was a boy so that I could have all these adventures. I did discover Violet Needham who has female protagonists and also Geoffrey Trease who often had strong girls as characters (The Hills of Varna is an example, as to an extent Thunder of Valmy). They helped a bit to resolve my unhappiness. I am so happy that it is now possible to read adventurous stories with girls having actual adventures and driving the plot.

I didn't want periods or breasts and I had a go at reducing my calories for a time in the hope I could prevent my period from starting.

I didn't feel I was very good at being a girl but was just a bit young to have all the female beauty standards of the time pushed at me, rather than being a tomboy.

So, I don't know. I may have considered opting out of puberty as a viable option if it has been an option. Instead my discomfort quietly and fairly uneventfully passed.

I've never, that I can remember wished to be a male or have a penis.
I have wished I didn't have to have periods though and that giving birth was much easier or men could do it instead.

Yes. I worked over a decade in an industry entirely dominated by men. I was always an anomaly and my competence always being questioned by my peers and the general public. Men would frequently forget my existence or not hire me because of sex bias.

Often thought it would be so much easier if I was male.

Left the industry, it hurt being on the outside but life is less exhausting now. Hopefully in a few decades things will change up.

Just to add, I also felt dysphoric very often, that I was 'part bloke', because of being involved in my industry and spending all my time with men and not feeling I had a lot in common with women.

Those feelings only resolved in my first pregnancy.

Difficult to assess the strength or longevity of the feelings expressed on this thread without serious qualitative interviews. 23 wanting at some stage to be male seems to vary from a short but not serious incidence arising from noticing the advantages of being male to a few with persistent and troubling feelings. And of course you'd also need to know what else was going on in the family and wider circles to be sure that sexual abuse or inappropriate sexualisation wasn't a reason — or ASD or MH issues (cutting, anorexia) and all the other things that account for feeling one doesn't fit in in one's sex.

I talked only the other day to the most stunning 6'1" woman with broad shoulders and an athletic physique. She said it took her until she was in her 30s when she had her children to celebrate her body because she'd been so teased and bullied for being taller than her male peers. This despite the fact that she looks like a supermodel.

Never have I ever wanted to be a man. Ever.

I've never felt like that.

Never! I’ve sometimes/often wished that male norms applied to women eg. Wearing same suit, no make up, no hair removal, flat shoes etc. but as I’ve got older I’ve just done what I like in terms of these.
I have quite an androgynous body type anyway and have always been relieved to have small boobs so they don’t interfere with sports etc. so maybe I’m just lucky I have a body that suits me. I think I’d struggle with big boobs and curves but I still wouldn’t want to be a man.

I went through a phase of really wanting a penis when I was 8-10ish. No idea why I wanted one but I really did. If someone had introduced me to the idea of packers at the time perhaps I’d have wanted one. I don’t think I was dysphoric about my actual body, it was probably just curiosity about penises.

When I went through pregnancy and childbirth I felt really lucky to be able to have that experience. I know many women don’t enjoy pregnancy and birth, and not all women are able to (or want to) do those things, but it honestly felt like a privilege to me that I got to experience it. I felt sad for my husband that he didn’t get to grow our baby 😂

I wanted to be a boy when I was a child, because I wanted to play football at school rather than crappy netball, and continue to run around shirtless without adults telling me to put a top on. I didn’t want to have the hassle of periods, and I preferred the company of boys - less bitchy. But I never felt in the wrong body. I just wanted the same freedoms that boys seemed to have.

As a teenager, I started to better understand sexism, patriarchy etc, but it set me on the journey to fighting for women’s rights rather than wanting to be a man.

I wanted to be a boy from about the age of 12. I knew I couldn’t BE one.

But I was sad, frustrated as fuck and raging that I had been born a girl. I too had visions of excising at least one breast (Amazonian-style) so it didn’t get in the way of my playing the guitar. I hated that everyone saw me as a girl first before seeing me. I hated my breasts and wore sports tops and minimising bras in my teens. I wrote shit poetry about the injustices of being born a girl and how I wish I’d been born a boy. I knew I was viewed as a second-class citizen, I know no one believed me when I spoke about being into the music and not into the male band-members. I thought girls who screamed and swooned over boys were stupid and pathetic.

But I accepted that I WAS a girl and aligned myself with feminism and realised I had some internalised misogyny.

I do wonder how I would have got through my teens unscathed in this era. I could easily have bought/brought into the belief that I was actually a boy mistakenly decanted into the body of a girl.

Im actually surprised I’m in the minority thinking this (on this MN thread).

Im actually surprised I’m in the minority thinking this (on this MN thread).

I think the difference is that some of us (in a childish unthought out way ie me having trantrums) recognised we weren't allowed to do the same sort of things that boys were encouraged to do, and it was JUST NOT FAIR!!

But this didn't translate into thinking being a boy was the answer.

I just wanted it to be fair. And couldn't understand.

And I know many girls I was at school thought like me that our brothers were favourites because they got to do what they wanted. But in reality it was parental favouratism, but parents who had grown up and still believed in gender stereotypes.

Never wanted a penis. It was so easy though until the age of about 10 to just be a tomboy and do everything the boys did and not to need a crop top to cover the start of breasts, or to deal with periods a few years later. I wouldn't have wanted to be stuck in childhood but I didn't want a woman's body. I now present as a (mostly) masculine woman and I've come to accept my body but puberty was very difficult.

I was looking up how to buy testosterone over the Internet at the start of adulthood, a few years later I was a mother. If I had been born 20 years later I'd likely have transitioned and it would have been a mistake.

I remember wanting to be a boy around the same age as you OP

Like @IwantToRetire my guess is that many of us who said we had briefly wished we were male-bodied were thinking of the day we were out with the school on a nature trail and the boys could go and have a wee up against a tree while the girls had to find somewhere 'safe' to whip off their underwear and crouch and hope the boys didn't creep up and trying seeing up their skirts. The unfairness of it all was a huge issue that led me to feminism.

@RepresentMe I'm sorry and horrified to think that anyone would think that it's natural and normal to hate your body to the extent of wanting to mutilate it. A few years ago that would have been considered a really serious MH issue. But this is where Gender Ideology has got us — the idea that it's perfectly normal to feel that way. It's like encouraging young women to absorb the patriarchy and unfairness and sexual predation and manifest in their scarred bodies.

Never. I love being a woman and have never had any issues with my sexuality.

I've often thought what it would be like to be a man. Funnily enough the things I would do first are all penis related, have a wee standing up on a beach and try to write my name in the sand, have a wank and have sex with a (real)woman. Oh and lift heavy things.

I guess it was the perceived unpleasantness of realising that WHAT I was, meant something beyond WHO I was.

I just thought being a male would have been so much easier and have given me more anonymity. I was never into particularly ‘girly’ things but not particularly ‘tomboyish’ either - childhood to me was a neutrality. To me being a girl now required effort and constant thinking and negotiation. I didn’t think I was a boy. But I did think I possibly would have been better as a boy.

Interestingly, I’ve come to realise that I’m neurodiverse in some way (won’t bore you with the details) My sense of difference - from ‘all the other girls’ - could possibly be down to this - a slight dissociation. Currently under investigation - jury is still out. But the number of ‘trans’ children who have a diagnosis of autism, BPD etc makes sense to me.

So if I had been a teenager now I might have embraced the ‘non-binary’ label. I don’t think I’d have had the audacity to try and make others feel the same and insist I be perceived by them as this ‘other’ status. I think thats the crucial difference. But now it’s all part of ‘celebrating’ who you are isn’t it. And that must be quite something to resist when everyone is cheerleading you and wanting to be part of a gang. I was totally aware that this fleeting desire to remove my breast(s) was a complete and utter unrealisable - and brutal - fantasy - it would have been a crazy and wrong thing to do. But hey look at us now - a whole generation of young females seeing this as a totally acceptable thing - an actual ‘solution’ FGS. Because they are being told and shown this as a solution. I might have found that totally intoxicating.

As I said, I’m glad I’m not a teenager now. And I’m glad my DD is proud of who she is and recognises that it’s the world that needs to change, not her.

The ironic thing today though is that girls CAN play football, play with cars, are encouraged to do engineering degrees etc!

If a mum says her daughter refuses to wear a dress everyone will reassure her that it’s fine to let her wear joggers - which is good!

Never thought about it.