Ada

Sadly, it only runs on genuinely ancient smart phones. I can’t even re-purpose my old pre-loved phones that I’ve kept after upgrading, because most of them are still too new for postmarketos

I have complete aphantasia. No mental sounds, imagery, etc.

But even so, I think I probably didn’t word my reply as well as I could have.

Stuff with genuine interpersonal interactions, with characters that have personality and feelings, that stuff I can read. But that’s because it doesn’t rely on the visual.

But if the erotica is just a verbal description intended to help picture a scene, then it’s not of any interest to me

So my intuition is wrong there, thanks

Maybe, maybe not. Your own intuition about your experience of gender may not be wrong. There’s not really any way to know. What we do know though is that at least some cis people have a strong sense of their own gender, that can cause dysphoria in certain circumstances.

So, much of gender is a social construct, but being a social construct doesn’t stop it being real. Society has a bias towards a gender binary, and that creates the social context in which we come to understand and experience our own gender. These social frameworks creates the lens through which we learn to understand ourselves.

Lets say I grew up on an island full of men. I had never seen or met a woman, and didn’t have a concept of women. In that environment, my experience of gender would have been different. I’d still have experienced the discomfort, and disconnection, I’d still have experienced dysphoria, but it would have manifested very differently. I wouldn’t have identified as a binary woman in a world without women, and I wouldn’t have had the language to describe my experiences, but I’d still have had a discomfort I couldn’t address, and I’d still have known that I was different to the men around me in ways I didn’t have the language or the concepts to explore.

But I didn’t. I grew up in country town Australia in the 80s, when societies bias towards a gender binary was strong. And my own gender is binary too.

I do sometimes wonder what my experience of my own gender would be like if I’d have grown up in a different context, if society allowed space for genders that don’t have to fit a binary. Would I still be binary? The truth is, I don’t know. But what I do know, is that my experience of my own gender does fit on the binary, and knowing that, and thinking about it doesn’t change it, because however I got there, my gender isn’t a choice. It’s just who I am.

What I was getting at with saying I wouldn’t be comfortable switching now, but I would have been fine born into

David Reimer was forcefully transitioned as a child, when he was young enough to not remember. It created a lifetime of dysphoria for him, and he transitioned back to his birth gender as soon as he understood what had happened to him, and was able to.

But my experience with being cisgendered is one of feeling like my spirit would belong wherever it was born to

The few cases we have of cis people being medically transitioned in some way without their consent suggest that this simply isn’t the case, at least for many cis folk.

Alan Turing and David Reimer are both examples of cis folk who were medically transitioned without their consent, one as an adult, one as a child, and both experienced severe dysphoria. They ultimately both took their own lives

Femininity has nothing to do with my own experience of gender. I wasn’t feminine before I transitioned, I’m not feminine afterwards.

My very existence challenges gender stereotypes, and I wouldn’t have it any other way

Are there any self-identities which you would consider invalid?

I just want to be clear. Blahaj lemmy does not allow invalidating of other folks identities.

That particular episode was one of the final steps in breaking down my own internal resistance to accepting myself.

Right, but if your wife was yelling at people all the time, and writing emails to co-workers in all caps, and constantly getting on peoples bad side, you wouldn’t go “Oh, she’s hormonal”. You’d probably assume that there is something else at play.

Same assumption applies here.

No one has my birth name. My parents made it up by combining their names!

Unrelated to being trans (well, at least I think it is), but I have aphantasia. Written erotica is basically useless to me, because I can’t visualise!

For me, it looked like doing voice training. It was largely self guided, watching videos here and there. This was in the time when trans instructional videos were far less common than they are now, so it was a bit hit and miss. But, I got my voice to a point where people didn’t know how to gender me by voice alone, and looked for other cues and clues.

Ultimately, I ended up getting vocal surgery to shorten the length of my vocal cords.

I’m a trans woman. I’ve never been feminine. No one picked on me because I was “girly”. No one secretly thought I was gay. My interests were geeky, but they were “boy” geeky.

I don’t believe in gendered personalities. People have genders. Personalites don’t.

it does seem like those with body dysphoria actually feel uncomfortable in their bodies, and want a different body

That’s often a part of it, but it’s not universal. There are many trans and gender diverse folk who don’t experience things through this lens.

if there were no gender norms or societal expectations, would you still want to transition?

Yes, but it would look different. The social part of my transition was important to me, because it influences how people see me. It shapes whether they see me accurately, or see me as someone I am not. My appearance can cause them to stick me in the wrong gender box, and that is something that I needed to change.

But if we existed in a world where there were no gender boxes, where gender was as diverse as people themselves are, then my transition would have looked different. I’d still needed to have addressed the physical aspects of my body. But socially? If my birth name didn’t automatically carry a gender with it, if my clothes and my presentation didn’t automatically carry gender with them, then my social transition would have looked very different.

The way to approach this is to make it absolutely clear that you’re supportive. Use “they/them”. Tell your neigbour about your friends kid and how happy you are for them etc. And then just follow their lead. They’ll tell you what they need when they’re comfortable doing so, but you’ve just made it a lot easier for them to get to that point

Are there cis people that are angry and emotional all the time for reasons you don’t understand?

Well, it’s the same thing when you see it from trans folk…

dysmorphia

Dysphoria

At what age do you think it’s appropriate for someone with gender dysmorphia to make a decision to go through the medically assisted chemically induced transition process?

This is another one of those questions that exist as a wedge tactic designed to make trans people sound dangerous.

The reality is, the only medical option offered to young trans kids is the option to pause their puberty until they’re old enough to be responsible for their own decisions, at which time they can choose which puberty they want to experience.

And what time is the right age for that? Whenever they need to do it, because going through the wrong puberty is a traumatic experience.

It’s a non issue. Broadly speaking, trans people are far more afraid of rejection and violence from cis people than cis people are of seeing unexpected bits. Which is to say, this idea that trans people are just wandering around bathrooms flashing their bits at people is nothing but a narrative designed to stir up fear and anger aimed at trans folk. In reality, we tend to do everything we can to make ourselves small and invisible in spaces like that, because there is no safe way to navigate it

2 day old account. First and only engagement is to defend a transphobe…

At the end a gender, any gender. Is a sum of behavioral characteristics.

This doesn’t really align with my experience of gender. Which is to say, I think what you’re describing here is a large part of gender, but it doesn’t encapsulate it completely. I’m trans, yet I’ve never had a strong sense of “femininity” or “masculinity”. I don’t really “get” gender expression, except in so far as it’s a tool to have people see my gender. I certainly don’t have a sense of it being tied to my internal experience of my gender. Yet for all of that, I’ve always had a strong sense of gender.

In a genderless world, I don’t think we would all be genderless in the strict sense of the term, but more, our internal experiences of gender would be assumed to be unique, and as such, not really something that can be grouped in to labels and compared to other folks. In this world, what we now call gender expression, would just be self expression.