See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8BRdwgPChQ&t=25s

I refer you back to my previous comments in this thread: I don’t know what it feels like to be a female, or male. Just ‘me’ There were lots of times when my ‘outcastedness’ was based on normal boy things: I didn’t go to the Catholic School nearby, I was short, my family was amongst the poorer in the neighborhood, I liked to read….lots of normal peer group issues that were not related to the internal issues. It wasn’t something that occupied every waking moment. We had girls in our neighborhood that beat the crap out of the boys, were better at sports….

The phrases ‘feel like a woman/man’ or ‘a female/male trapped in a man’s/woman’s body’ are useful to convey a notion in general conversation, but fail utterly to explain the range and depth of “wrongness” that was going on at very early age when there were no words to convey the emotions THEN and trying to explain them years later necessarily lacks the nuance and finer grained details.

We can’t imagine what is like to be another person though we understand that attempting to do so ‘walk a mile in their shoes’ is a common mental process in order to feel sympathy/empathy/concern for another person. Ask a 3 yr old boy to put on his sister’s dress and you likely get simply compliance. Ask a 6 yr old boy to do the same and watch him run like crazy. Get a man to wear a dress and he will be hugely uncomfortable, even in private. Is it because of a LEARNED behavior, cultural taboo? Or something else?

I knew a couple back in the early 80s that raised their children ‘gender neutral’ (obviously long before it was ‘a thing’) and were astonished that the boy and girls were stereotypical boy and girls by their teens. Culture? Genetics?

You own you without thought. I don’t know if you ever questioned WHO you are – most people don’t. When did you learn to be heterosexual? It was inherent and you probably never even questioned it. It goes back to not noticing the mechanics of walking until something happens to gum up the works.

I’ve never looked back, never questioned my choice. I am the whole, correct me.

Over the next century we might learn more about the process that created us, we might develop the language and be able to articulate better the emotional/psychological turmoil/wrongness that drove/drives us. Until then, don’t get caught up on a phrase or trying to understand an emotion/feeling you’ve never experienced. I don’t wish this on anyone, even people I really don’t like. It utterly sucked. And it is tearing parts of the community and us individually when we KNOW it would have been better to have never had to experience the ‘wrong puberty’ and yet CONDEMN the next generation to having to do the same because we don’t know how to ‘prove’ to anyone what is/was going on in the head of a 8-15 year old to say it is ‘ok to dose this kid, but not this kid’ with hormones different than their what genes say is appropriate. F8king sucks.

Thanks to all that participated in this discussion. It was respectful and I very much appreciated it.

Oh, sure, I’m a female person who is physically attracted to men: that started right on schedule, without my conscious involvement, at around 13. But sex has nothing to do with who I am as a person. That’s a point we all seem to agree on.

I wanted to address one of Tracy’s comments in particular: “We just don’t seem to mesh with our peers. Boys act out in ways that confuse us or don’t make sense.” You can’t even imagine how I didn’t “mesh with my peers.” If you were a boy, you didn’t even begin to experience what it’s like to try to “fit in” with girls if you are a girl. Here’s the truth they don’t tell you. Girls – in a group – are vicious little animals who treat their friends worse than they treat their enemies. A group of girls is basically a flock of chickens, whose every act is orchestrated by pecking order. Just like chickens, most girls, most of the time, know their place and stay in it but there is constant pushing around as individuals rise and fall in the group. As soon as weakness shows – a bunch of feathers lost, blood drawn, a flock of chickens may peck that exposed, weaker member to severe injury or death. And this is exactly what girls do to each other, except they use words and threats about social status as weapons. Do you not see that from the outside, when you say that you desperately wanted to be a part of that sh1tshow?

It’s interesting that many women on this forum also report not being at home with girls in general. Speaking for myself, I usually had one female friend – one other person who was enough like me that we could be friends with each other without the stupid, pointless girl drama – but as late as college, I remember losing such a friend as soon as a third girl came on the scene. We’re all 20-somethings and as soon as there were three of us, one started playing one of us against the other, with nothing – not a job, or a guy, or anything else – at stake. I said FU and walked away; I don’t have time for that BS. I was that girl who always had guy friends. At no point did I think that I should be a guy. Nor did my guy friends think I was a guy. 30 years later, I work in a STEM field on an all-male team.

Echoing the thanks by others for everyone making this interesting, thoughtful and respectful conversation* possible. (* “conversation” with apologies to neo.)

Judge me on who I am not on my genes.

How do you KNOW if someone is XX or XY? Walking down the street in NY or Chicago…how do you KNOW?

One point about the ‘acting like a girl/boy’. We learn lots by mimicking others. A ‘fake it til you make it’ type of socialization that makes breaking into new social groups a hit or miss affair that early in life. We make friends and want to be ‘like them’ or have them like to be like us. Tons of learning by doing and failing and trying again. I don’t know what it is like to ‘feel like a girl/woman’ any more than they understand what it is like to ‘feel like a boy/man’. Did I feel like other boys? Sometimes…? I apparently fit in, sometimes. I very much did in mixed boy/girl groups where the dynamics were less divided. What does it feel like to be a male/female? Context matters – we don’t have clear explanations of it so we are left with approximations that have enough ‘exceptions’ to drive an aircraft carrier through..

Context. I am trying explain, AFTER, years after, a set of emotions and feelings of wrong in ways that seem to make sense in the CONTEXT of what was going on internally.

When you walk into a room sometimes you can ‘feel’ the atmosphere is unexpected. You don’t know why so you try to look around and figure out what is going on. Context will matter but you also ‘feel’ something. Explaining what that ‘feeling’ is will rely on concepts you have learned over the entirety of your life. But at age 7 or 8, you’d barely even notice because your inwardly oriented, but the experiences begin building understanding.

In your day to day, you catch a momentary glimpse of someone from behind and you instantly know ‘boy/girl’, even if the physical cues are ambiguous at best. THAT recognition, even in the rare occasion it is wrong, develops early in childhood as we learn to recognize those cues and what they mean.

I, and we for those I have discussed it with over the years, still try to put a really poorly understood emotion/recognition process into some words and concepts that others at least can grasp. How do you know a friend had a REALLY GOOD time the previous weekend just by looking at them? Or how does someone ‘recognize’ another woman is pregnant without being told (early in pregnancy)?

My daughter often asks how I know something, she wants the evidence. How do I explain it is based on decades of reading, understanding and experiences? How do you obtain wisdom? BY EXPERIENCE! Sure…but the process?

My descriptions are poor examples of science but are based on the combination of everything I’ve learned and experienced. None of those explanations of childhood emotions were contemporaneous. They are an attempt to explain, sometimes decades later, what was going on then.

Last point. I tried to understand what changed between the years of 5-8 that provoked my deep need to wake up a girl…to PRAY for such a miracle. No events occurred in my family life – a stable environment without the abuse or drama many others dealt with. What ‘understanding’ or concepts do kids gain in that time frame? Certainly we start attending school and a greater knowledge of the greater community we lived in. It is the one internal awareness that I can point to that seems to be common, but certainly not universal I THINK.

I, and people like me, have the large repositories of observations and understanding of the situation and VERY LITTLE is scientific. I can’t even imagine how to usefully test the hypothesis’. But explaining the color blue to a blind person is a real pain….

It wasn’t until I started studying psychology and statistics that I realized I was just in the long tail on a lot of personality trait distributions.
As I got older, I consciously modified my behavior and speech to work with different groups (male and female) so as to use their assumptions about stereotypes in my favor, rather than fighting the current.
Sometimes (especially now), I just don’t bother.
That’s one of the great advantages of the anonymous internet. 😉

Leah & Tracy: thank you again so much for your comments and insights from the “front lines,” so to speak, and affirming for us that not everyone is on-board with the activists’ extreme demands.
Several groups that I used to have great sympathy for have squandered that good-will by going from “don’t persecute and demean me” (which I totally agree with) to “don’t get in my way while I destroy the things you cherish” (which I emphatically do not support).
I personally don’t care much what people choose to do in their private lives; I only object when they start telling me what I MUST believe and do because of THEIR choices.