1. It has always seemed to me that most female bodies have far more potential for being decorated, shaped, etc. so as to appear male-at-first-glance than most male bodies, including mine. Hence I am automatically jealous whenever I read about this sort of activity.
2. On "boy/girl" vs. "man/woman": I think, in my head, "man" and "woman" are roles (how people see you from the outside and how you act) while "boy" and "girl" are something more innate (how you actually are, physically and/or psychologically).
That's just my immediate take, however, and it may sound more useful than it eventually turns out to be. Maybe this is why I've never been comfortable thinking of myself as "a woman trapped in a man's body" -- because I have no interest in taking on the woman-role, at least not wholesale. [further caveats, qualifications, and speculation deleted for the sake of clarity]
3. One of my big frustrations, before Figuring Things Out, was that I always wanted female-bodied people to act out my gender-expression for me, since I couldn't do it. (The closer they got to what I wanted to be like, the stronger the wish was; if someone was just too femmy, or too masculine in the wrong ways, it wasn't worth worrying about, and I could just deal with them as who they were instead of as almost-proxies for myself. This was, I think, the main source of my bad behavior regarding Jenny (http://wiki.hypertwins.org/File:CFS_1982_Mar_029.jpg), who was about 9944/100% my inner gender and body-type.)
The reason I mention this is that I often wonder how much of this sort of "frustrated self-expression" is behind people telling other people how they should and shouldn't dress, act, etc. Person A whose hard-wired self-image is nothing like the way s/he looks but is very similar to how Person B looks might feel a very strong urge to modify Person B's behavior, clothing, or whatever so as to look more like Person A's hard-wired self-image -- and this might hold just as true for two people who appear the same gender as for people who appear to be opposite genders. If it happens at all (and isn't just some weird side-effect of my particular cross-wiring), I suspect it's quite common.
4. Having learned to... control? divert? suppress?... that frustrated self-expression, I have no real problem with any female acting however feminine or masculine (or any combination thereof) they want to, nor with varying such behavior according to mood or circumstance.
4a. That said... when you say "But it comes at the cost of my voice, as I become no longer myself.", I have to wonder: what is the gain? If you're not being yourself, what are you being, and why can't you be only the parts of it that you like? I'm guessing that this is a question not easily answered, and I'm not demanding an answer. It's just a question that you don't seem to address, so I don't know if you've thought it or not.
4b. That question is important for me, at least, because it took another length of time (after discovering my dysphoria) to sort out that I didn't need to be the whole package -- for some threshold minimum percentage of my mentality to be in accordance with conventional feminine mentality -- in order to be "really" dysphoric (and therefore genuinely in need of real-world external changes of some sort, as opposed to being able to solve the problem internally e.g. "get over it" or "cure myself" or whatever).
Even knowing this, however, I still find myself thinking that I don't "deserve" femininity -- so it may be that this is a difficult idea to escape from -- the idea that you have to take on the whole package at once, or else the individual parts are invalidated.
For what it's worth, there are many masculine traits in my ideal version of what I think of as "femininity"... and of course "femininity" is just an arbitrary label to refer to some volume in multidimensional gender-space (http://wiki.hypertwins.org/Gender_identity), for which there is a sort of culture group-consensus but considerable variation between individuals.
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ninetydegrees
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on 2011-02-26 03:09 am (UTC)2. On "boy/girl" vs. "man/woman": I think, in my head, "man" and "woman" are roles (how people see you from the outside and how you act) while "boy" and "girl" are something more innate (how you actually are, physically and/or psychologically).
That's just my immediate take, however, and it may sound more useful than it eventually turns out to be. Maybe this is why I've never been comfortable thinking of myself as "a woman trapped in a man's body" -- because I have no interest in taking on the woman-role, at least not wholesale. [further caveats, qualifications, and speculation deleted for the sake of clarity]
3. One of my big frustrations, before Figuring Things Out, was that I always wanted female-bodied people to act out my gender-expression for me, since I couldn't do it. (The closer they got to what I wanted to be like, the stronger the wish was; if someone was just too femmy, or too masculine in the wrong ways, it wasn't worth worrying about, and I could just deal with them as who they were instead of as almost-proxies for myself. This was, I think, the main source of my bad behavior regarding Jenny (http://wiki.hypertwins.org/File:CFS_1982_Mar_029.jpg), who was about 9944/100% my inner gender and body-type.)
The reason I mention this is that I often wonder how much of this sort of "frustrated self-expression" is behind people telling other people how they should and shouldn't dress, act, etc. Person A whose hard-wired self-image is nothing like the way s/he looks but is very similar to how Person B looks might feel a very strong urge to modify Person B's behavior, clothing, or whatever so as to look more like Person A's hard-wired self-image -- and this might hold just as true for two people who appear the same gender as for people who appear to be opposite genders. If it happens at all (and isn't just some weird side-effect of my particular cross-wiring), I suspect it's quite common.
4. Having learned to... control? divert? suppress?... that frustrated self-expression, I have no real problem with any female acting however feminine or masculine (or any combination thereof) they want to, nor with varying such behavior according to mood or circumstance.
4a. That said... when you say "But it comes at the cost of my voice, as I become no longer myself.", I have to wonder: what is the gain? If you're not being yourself, what are you being, and why can't you be only the parts of it that you like? I'm guessing that this is a question not easily answered, and I'm not demanding an answer. It's just a question that you don't seem to address, so I don't know if you've thought it or not.
4b. That question is important for me, at least, because it took another length of time (after discovering my dysphoria) to sort out that I didn't need to be the whole package -- for some threshold minimum percentage of my mentality to be in accordance with conventional feminine mentality -- in order to be "really" dysphoric (and therefore genuinely in need of real-world external changes of some sort, as opposed to being able to solve the problem internally e.g. "get over it" or "cure myself" or whatever).
Even knowing this, however, I still find myself thinking that I don't "deserve" femininity -- so it may be that this is a difficult idea to escape from -- the idea that you have to take on the whole package at once, or else the individual parts are invalidated.
For what it's worth, there are many masculine traits in my ideal version of what I think of as "femininity"... and of course "femininity" is just an arbitrary label to refer to some volume in multidimensional gender-space (http://wiki.hypertwins.org/Gender_identity), for which there is a sort of culture group-consensus but considerable variation between individuals.