Disclaimer: I am not a psychologist or anything like that. This post merely presents my present, imperfect understanding of the matter.
If you are asking yourself, “Am I transgender?” you probably are. It is not the sort of question cisgender people ask. But “probably” is not proof.
There is no test you can take. Or single blog post you can read. Even a psychologist can only help you talk through the issues. And even then it could still take years.
Some say they knew since they were five. The signs of being transgender often appear early, but they are not generally understood as such till much later (that may be changing with the 2010s).
Gender dysphoria: Transgender people feel like they were born in the wrong body, what psychologists call gender dysphoria. It can be mild to severe. For those assigned male at birth it can come out in different ways. Some examples:
- Feeling different from other boys.
- Playing with Barbie dolls or playing mainly with girls (even when you have a chance to play with boys).
- Not liking sports.
- Not liking it when the teacher puts you with the boys.
- Trying on your mother’s or sister’s clothes – or wishing you could wear them.
- Wanting to be a mother, not a father, when you grow up.
- Wishing to be a girl, like when you make a wish on a birthday cake.
- Wearing a towel or T-shirt on your head to pretend you have long hair.
- Growing out your hair to be more like a girl.
- Being disgusted by your body, especially after puberty, especially by the things that make it male (hairiness, deep voice, penis, etc).
- Not wanting to shower with boys.
- Wanting to play female characters in video games.
- Being picked on as gay in middle school (ages 12 to 15).
- Wearing make-up.
- Going through a gay phase – which does not seem to fit even if you are attracted to boys.
- Going through a hypermasculine phase – like doing martial arts, wearing a beard, or joining the army.
- Researching about being transgender, like on Google or YouTube.
- In severe cases: depression, substance abuse, cutting, suicidal thoughts, etc.
These are just examples. Experiencing one, none or several of these might not mean much. The pattern is what is important: discomfort with your assigned gender at birth. That is what underlies all of the examples.
Being trans is not determined by your age, looks, family, religion or culture. That stuff might keep you in denial or in the closet, but it does not determine whether you are trans.
Sexual orientation (who you want to date) is not the same thing as gender identity (who you want to be). Just like cis people, trans people can be straight, gay, bisexual, etc.
Male transvestites (cross-dressers) like to dress in women’s clothing but still consider themselves men. Transgender women on the other hand want to wear women’s clothing full-time – as their real clothes.
My opinion: Gender expectations in the US are way too narrow and extreme. Some might be happier trading genders, but for most it would just be trading frying pans.
– Abagond, 2018.
Source: mostly YouTube, especially the experiences of trans women who grew up in the US in the 1990s, 2000s and early 2010s.
See also:
- cisgender
- trans women
- Barbie doll
- mermaid
- cutting
- Black love – and how ideas of Black masculinity came from copying White slave masters
571
jesus christmas well you are really going there and you and herneith were kind of on some type of this is perversion like recently, i believe. but my rapes led me to seek out more and more disgusting and wierd porn on the internet in my fruitless quest to ‘ask the question “why”,’ it’s a personal problem and certainly it has not made anything easier to understand it’s just the alphabet of ‘civil rights’ movements that again stood on the shoulders of the black american civil rights accomplishments of mostly the 1960’s. and the tmz like jawn you did a minute ago on eddie murphy or whatever, so ok, idk, and the queer thing it’s like do you have to post your purity test score on your forhead whatever yo
LikeLike
LikeLike
This mostly describes a person who simply rejects absurd gender roles. I’m not sure that’s necessarily the same thing as being transgender. I appear very feminine in some ways, in the classical sense, but also have a lot of preferences that might be considered classically masculine. I am straight and cis but often others assume I’m a gay woman because of my opinions, political leanings, and rejection of the more absurd expectations placed by society upon most women. Comfortable shoes and low-maintenance grooming while also sporting long hair and a short-nailed but manicured hand apparently equals “lesbian” in today’s society—except now some people are telling me that I must actually be transgender?!?!—when in reality I am a straight woman who demands equality and prefers what she prefers when it comes to practical needs or grooming or art or fashion or music. I really think we need to be careful how we define things. An awful lot of kids right now are being told that they must be transgender when it seems more likely they are having a visceral reaction against the hyper-stereotypes that have come to dominate our media and commercial markets. As a kid in the 70s and 80s, toys weren’t segregated by gender (even down to the color of the toys and their packages) in the store, and baby clothes weren’t a sea of only pink and blue. Somewhere in the 90s the backlash against second wave Feminism turned so hard right that even very progressive and liberal-minded folks were suddenly gendering EVERYTHING. I reject that.
Now, to be clear, I don’t doubt that transgender is real. I don’t doubt that a percentage of people struggle with this and legitimately were assigned the wrong sex—but sex is not gender. Masculine and feminine exist in all people to varying degrees regardless of biological sex. But biology isn’t the same as a social construct of what is “masculine” and “male” vs “feminine” and “female.” I can be a relatively masculine (according to society) woman and still be a woman. And regardless of orientation, my biology still makes me female, period. I’m trepidatious of pushing anyone to believe that the friends and toys and activities they prefer have ANYTHING to do with their gender. And I really don’t want to see kids making life-altering decisions about hormones and surgery when they’ve hardly experienced life. If someone needs to change their presentation and dress as the opposite sex is generally expected to, go for it. Haircuts and fashion and grooming are harmless and irrelevant to gender in a truly equal society. But let’s not decide that any person who rejects stereotypes is automatically transgender. That’s a huge step backwards in the fight for equality, and it only serves the effed up agenda of the patriarchy.
LikeLiked by 3 people
“My opinion: Of the 18 things on the list, I have experienced half of them. At one point I even wanted to be a mermaid! But to me that just proves how narrow and extreme gender expectations in the US are for straight men.”
Too much information. What happened to my comment on the bootstrap myth tread?
LikeLike
Ok, I see it’s up. Never mind.
LikeLike
oi vey
LikeLike
@abagond do the purity test lol
LikeLike
cf se puede baphomet, knights templar, bohemian grove
LikeLike
A quick note on the origins of the terms cis- and trans- in reference to gender roles. They originally came from chemistry to describe the position of the hydrogen atoms on a molecule:
http://blogs.plos.org/dnascience/2017/05/25/5-new-buzzwords-borrowed-from-biology/
LikeLike
@ gro jo
Updated. Thanks.
LikeLike
@ Melanie
I agree.
LikeLike
@ v8driver
Not sure what you mean by a purity test.
LikeLike
Let us leave this to those who know!
LikeLike
@ Melanie
“I really don’t want to see kids making life-altering decisions about hormones and surgery when they’ve hardly experienced life.”
I don’t disagree with you, but I want add the caveat that early hormonal treatment (including chemical delay of puberty) can be beneficial in cases where the individual has known from a very young age and especially when the gender dysphoria is so strong that they become suicidal during puberty.
It is a tricky balance because of their young age, as well as the possibility of undetected outside influences, e.g., Munchausen by proxy. I share your concerns. But on the other hand, there are adults who say that early intervention and early transitioning literally saved their lives.
LikeLiked by 1 person
to add
LikeLike
@abagond it’s old school
http://www.armory.com/tests/purity.html
LikeLike
cisalpine and transalpine gaul!
LikeLike
@ v8 driver
I remember these purity tests circulating in the ’80s. Blast from the past!
But why bring it up with this topic? Being transsexual has nothing to do with sexual orientation or sexual experiences.
LikeLike
@ Abagond
I disagree that it was TMI. Who didn’t want to be a mermaid??
LikeLike
@ Solitaire
Exactly! But apparently not all of us.
LikeLike
@ Melanie
That is how I think of it too. If you are more masculine than feminine, then you are male, and vice versa. In most cases it matches your genitals, but not always. Most hypermasculine and hyperfeminine people are faking it in my book.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@ v8driver
re: purity tests
As I said in the post, there is no test that can tell whether you are transgender. The 18 examples are just that, examples, not a test. They are the sort of things trans women commonly experience before they realize they are trans, things that pointed to that fact in hindsight. But you can experience some of them and still not be trans simply because you do not fit the ridiculously narrow ideas of gender in the US, as Melanie noted.
LikeLike
The whole issue seems circular to me. Unless there is something other than the outside body that defines the gender (and to my knowledge nothing of the sort has been found), it makes no sense to say that somebody IS another gender than the person’s sex.
To use the gender role somebody likes to present outwards to use to define his/her identity makes no sense either. I think that is the reason why there are so many more trans women than trans men. Woman tend to have more leeway to not gender-conform and don’t have to frame it as “being a man”.
LikeLike
While nothing has yet been definitively proven, research suggests that transgenderism may be caused by biological (e.g., genetic, neurochemical) factors:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_transsexuality
LikeLike
Nobody deserves to be tormented this much. If they must they must. I sympathize with these people.
LikeLike
@blakksage
Comment deleted due to transphobic slur.
LikeLike
Looking back over this, I think many of us are getting hung up on the difference between gender identity and gender expression. I mean this only as an observation, not an accusation. It is something that I also am currently struggling to fully understand.
Basically, the way transgenderism has usually been addressed in popular media is that trans people’s gender expression (how they dress, their hairstyle, etc.) very strongly correlates to their gender identity. For example, trans women are conceptualized as wearing dresses, high heels, makeup, long fingernails, and jewelry.
And of course, this is true for some individuals — but it isn’t true for everyone.
Many trans people have a gender expression that — while it does match their gender identity — doesn’t go to hyperfeminine or hypermasculine extremes.
Other trans people may present as androgynous or genderfluid. A lot of the time, people with this type of gender expression identify as genderfluid or agender or something else along those lines. But not always. Some trans people dress this way but still identify very strongly as male or female — just the same as cis people who also prefer an androgynous look.
There are also trans people whose gender expression still matches the gender they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify as. A lot of the time it is because they are just beginning the transition process — but not always. I find this the most difficult to understand: why would a trans woman want to wear a beard? But it does happen, and there are apparently any number of reasons for it.
As far as the relative number of trans women to trans men, I don’t believe we have accurate statistics. Most of the studies have only counted individuals who have gone through the full gender reassignment surgeries. But the F2M genital surgery is, to date, much less successful than the opposite, so trans men are less likely to choose to undergo that operation than trans women. Also, many trans men report that hormonal therapy provides enough of a masculinizing effect that they don’t feel the operation is necessary.
LikeLike
I have to attempt to post this again I really don’t have the language or knowledge about this subject, but i do think it’s horrible that a large number of black trans women being murdered is prevalent in many black communities.
LikeLike
I didn’t see this post coming and I’m glad it’s here!
LikeLike
I have a transgendered co-worker, who filled me in on the process, surgery etc. She was male to female. There is currently another transgender female to male(i don’t know him except in passing). It is a grueling process both physically and mentally. This person suffered from severe depression whilst going through this whole process. She still has depression due in great part as to how she is treated and viewed by society.
LikeLike