Gender Identity Disorder

[Alfonso Crawford]

Person, dude, I feel you! I was in the same boat.

I don't really identify with being male, either. Everything about being confused by your body; I've thought, myself. I look like some black/latin lumberjack/cop, but I sure as Hell don't always feel like it! My PROTIP: if you don't identify with your sex, and the alternative doesn't suit you…

Try not forcing yourself to be either.

****, it worked for Freddie Mercury, right? (To those in the know; I say "shut up," because that is a separate and solely minute practical issue.)

If whatever you feel is a barrier to you is so insurmountable, what do you gain by continuing to dwell upon it? What does the barrier mind, if you would act in any particular manner; considering it's so damned powerful? I won't say that disconnecting yourself from this (unfounded!) notion of yours, that you ought to be X or Y, is going to be quick and/or easy: continue reminding yourself that it's not healthy, and that you oughtn't be thinking about it. Such simple-minded obstinance as I've proposed may sound foolish, but I doubt that whatever beliefs got you into this mess are truly any more complex.

Want some secular justification? Male and female humans are largely similar: they're just slight spin-offs of the same mold; or, more accurately, males are just a twist upon the female-default. Nipples only have use for one sex; but both have them, because a large portion of initial development is spent as female. Stare at some anatomy-charts for long enough, and you'll see some structural similarities between male and female genitalia; like caricatures of the same base, with different emphases: have you ever wondered why males can accidentally push their intestines through the abdominal tear through which their testes passed from within the body, a tear which reeks of last-minute improvisation? Did you know that one lone chemical is responsible for every act that causes a female embryo to become male? In light of such… compounded versatility of genetics, can you honestly tell me that it's a true shock that any given person may by chance acquire any mixture of masculine and feminine traits?

***

From the looks of it, you're going along a "quiet life" kind of path; and, now that you've got survival down, you're looking to mate. You've ruled out one of two potential mate-types, so buckle down your focus with the other! ****, dude, reach a point of sexual attraction by way of getting to know whichever lady you approach on the grounds of liking them as a goddamned person. So what, if you don't stand at attention at first sight? Is that bad? Congratulations, you think with the big head! Many people will give you many general-use brownie-points, on that aspect alone!

Lighten the **** up, son, because what you've got going on is its own kind of blessing.

"Oh no, I'm a level-headed man that isn't driven by his penis; and I empathize strongly with women!" Gimme a break! I hear that lovers are ultimately optional, but having friends will make or break a person. How managed to find your computer, within the sea of estrogen that's bloody hunting for men like you, I'll never know. You're gonna be fine, one way or another, once you start letting yourself be: the girls of the world won't let you be otherwise!

Your lack of sexual identity is not a problem.
Your sense of obligation is not necessary.
Your belief that you are somehow destined to be alone is utterly false.

There's nothing wrong with you, that you ought to feel bad about. Many of us are walking case-studies of just how good life can be, being as you are: one of us is even a very hot young asian(?) woman [Wink-wink, hint-hint, nudge-nudge. Damn you for being, like, four time-zones away! Yeah; this is probably a bad time for flirting, but I don't care. — aa], so there ya go!

I'm-a close this with a thank you, ace; mostly on my own behalf, but if anyone else enjoyed meeting someone else with the same old problem they had, feel free to piggy-back on this one! Pers', baby, I wish you the best: it's exactly what you deserve.

[CroMagna]

I can relate to what you're saying. For at least 5 years, I have felt deep shame about being a woman. I feel deeply inferior and weak.

I wish that I was a man because:

1. Men are responsible for science, technology, philosophy, psychology, art, math, physics, politics, and architecture to name a few things. Women were just sitting at home cleaning the house and raising children. While men built civilization, a woman's highest honor was (and to many people still is) to give birth, which is something any housecat could do. Then men let women have jobs. Sometimes men don't like women to have jobs and subject them to sexism anyway.

2. Camille Paglia said "if civilization were left to female hands, we'd still be living in grass huts." You could never say that about a black man and get away with it. In fact black men aren't responsible for any of those things, but nobody points that out. And that's temporary, and it's incumbent upon black men pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Sexism is permanent.

3. A male friend of mine said women are weak and at the mercy of whatever men they happen to find themselves around. He said if Americans converted to Wahhabi Islam the women including feminists would have no choice but to start veiling. He said if things got serious in the army women would get swept aside very quickly. He said that men "let women have jobs so they can feel like they're actually doing something important."

4. Ann Coulter said that women should lose the right to vote because they vote so stupidly. You couldn't say that about black men either.

5. Malcolm X is venerated in the black community (I'm black) as a saint and patriarch and he was extremely sexist. When a woman named Andrea Dworkin came out saying she hated men, she was the most maligned figure of recent history. If she had been racist, her reputation would have been even more damaged. (I hear voices and one them is one who looks and sounds like Malcolm X. He is extremely cold and overbearing and tries to keep me in line).

6. There is a double standard where a promiscuous man is valorized and a promiscuous woman is hated and ridiculed. Camille Paglia said "promiscuity in men may cheapen love but sharpen wit. Promiscuity in women is illness, a leakage of identity. A promiscuous woman is incapable of clear thought." You have no idea the amount of cruelty that promiscuous women often face.

7. I went to a comedy club where the comedian said the women should shut the f*** up and fix him a sandwich. Again, you couldn't say that about black men, otherwise it would been national news.

8. Barack Obama was handled with gloved hands whereas Hillary Clinton was harassed and treated very badly. There is a facebook group called Hillary Clinton Shut the F*** Up and Fix Me a Sandwich and I think it has 76,000 members. Clinton has been called a ♥♥♥♥♥ by Glenn Beck and a c***bag. Not many people seem appalled by this.

9. It should be obvious by now that sexism is more socially acceptable than racism. Katie Couric and Gloria Steinem have both pointed it out. To add insult to injury, some black people will actually get mad at you for daring to point that out.

10. Every major religion has men being dominant and superior to women. Islam has a clear doctrine of male superiority. Yet many people respect Islam including the conservative Dinesh D'Souza. It's really terrible to read about what goes on in Muslim countries to women.

11. Multiculturalism defends the sexism that goes on in other cultures, saying "well that's their culture." They don't do that about racism in other cultures, like the racism in Latin America. These people will say that the West is racist, sexist, and homophobic, but protect the sexism in these other cultures because really it's all about these other cultures taking over the West even if they're more sexist. Like David Horowitz said they only mention sexism to create a laundry list of greivances against the West, but they really only care about racism.

12. In the Dartmouth Review someone wrote the Solomonic observation "any man who thinks a woman is his intellectual equal is probably right." (Think about it).

These types of things are on my mind a lot and they really make me feel bad. I am thinking of joining a women's organization that is libertarian or right of center and these days I'm doing the research now but I feel discouraged and unmotivated, especially with the voices in my head constantly reinforcing the sexist thinking. I keep thinking of my friend saying men let women have jobs so they can feel like they're actually doing something important. It makes me think that women's activism would just be a BS job that's not really doing anything. I don't think I can do anything about these problems. Some of them involve free speech which has to be left alone (at least as long it's not black people they're talking about). Some of these involve the invasion of non-Western cultures which is like watching a train wreck that can't be prevented or stopped. These problems are much larger than what one woman can do.

I have tried to find ways to cope. I thought about throwing myself into larger political movements like the libertarian movement and just ignoring sexism. But really I can't that is like being lobotomized and not having a sense of self anymore. I have tried getting into Christianity but prayer doesn't seem to work isn't really doing anything it's just hoping God will do something. Really the only thing that has helped me cope with this is the prospect of returning to stripping and maybe dipping in prostitution. It's hard to explain why I want to go back to stripping and prostitution but it feels right psychologically. It's like when life gives you lemons make lemonade. I would be capitalizing off of my assigned gender. I would using my body as a tactical tool to get what I wanted like another poster mentioned. I will be really shocked if I get hired to work at a strip club with the figure I have right now but I have to try something. I can't just keep sleeping all the time and going to through the motions at work.

I still want to pull myself up by the bootstraps one day but not at the price of my mental health.

I hope the above helped you by giving you something to relate to. My advice follows.

[CroMagna]

My advice:

It seems like you don't know what you want. On the one hand you have an external problem that is making you unhappy (your body) and on the other hand you don't want your happiness to be incumbent upon external factors.

So is your happiness based on external factors or isn't it??

That's what you need to figure out before you can move forward. If you can agree to have your happiness based on external factors (like me and many others here, I myself going through with the stripping) then you need to start consulting with surgeons and find out what your chances are. You don't need to go overboard, like getting a hair transplant. You can just wear a wig, like tons of women do, including Tyra Banks. If you can't live with your happiness being based on external factors then you need to just choose happiness now not based on anything other than just *being*. An alternative is if you find a coping strategy that will enable you to be happy without changing your body.

btw you don't need to be "happy" per se, just neutral or satisfied.

[Valkyrie]

person, I feel you. I'd give you a big hug if I could, because while I don't experience it, I can only imagine how you must feel.

I think a lot of people, including perhaps some people in this thread (and including myself!), probably take some of the most simple, fundamental things for granted sometimes. People may not think that gender and attraction is such a large part of their lives, but I would wager that for most people, it is. It has influenced my personality, decided who I'd be attracted to, and all that. I can't even begin to imagine the emotional discord I'd have if I had the exact same personality I did now but with a man's body. I'd freak out. I mean, it would probably be fun for a week or so to see what it's like, but only if I could come home to this body.

Maybe just view it as a lesson, which you said you have already done to some extent. It's your lesson on how, if we can't express who we truly are, it hurts so bad, and this is often overlooked in society. It's your time to feel the deepest of sorrows so that one day you can feel the greatest of joys. And you can turn it into a mission- relate with other people in your situation, help them, comfort them, because you experience what they do. It has obviously made you deeply introspective, which catapults you light years ahead of where you might be otherwise if all of your external factors were in alignment.

[magickpsychonaut]

Hello Person,
First of all *hugz* to you. I know it is hard to talk about it.
A little background about me: I am also a transgendered person who has managed to get all surgeries and am now post op. I was raised in a very bad cult and was sexually, physically and emotionally abused as a child by parents. Most people comitt suicide with just one of these major life problems, let alone having to deal with all 3 in one lifetime.
Depression has been on going since approximately 6 years of age and like you, I have often wondered what the purpose of continuing to live would be, even after my surgeries I feel that my soul is tired, there is just too much pain to deal with. I've even thought of not having surgeries before having gone ahead, due to the fact that I was sexually abused. Although, I have always known what I was since my earliest memory of consciousness, the psycho books do say that sexual abuse is a cause of transgenderism.
So for many years I put it off, until I read "As Nature Made Him" by John Colapinto. Reading David Reimer's experiences and how he thought and felt throughout his life was like reading my own thoughts and feelings. That's when I realized that I was this way not because of any abuse, it just so happens that I was also a child victim of abuse ON TOP of being transgendered. It happens people.

Let me say this to all of you who are not transgendered: Despite your well meaning advice, you really do not understand. Please stop saying you understand, because you absolutely *cannot* understand what it is like unless you *ARE* transgendered. I know you mean well, but it's more of an insult than comfort to say you understand.

I'll give you an analogy, perhaps it sounds silly to you, but it's the best I can come up with to give you an idea of why you do not understand.

It's a lot like swimming, you can read thousands of books on swimming, sit on the sidelines and watch other people swim for 100 years, take notes from them, study them for all your life, but until you get in the water and swim, you have absolutely no clue about what it is like to swim.

Having said that, I must say that I am delightfully pleased to see so much positive support for Person from all of you. You're really great bunch of people here.

Person, as someone in similar boat, I can't give you any advice that will magically transform your life. One thing I would like to say to you is that you have a physical body and you live in a physical world. There are schools of thought that absolutely demonize the physical and any physical desires. It's destructive to people's lives.

In truth, physical and spiritual are only varying degrees of the same thing. Yes, the spiritual is very important, but so is the physical. The key is balance. Focusing on just one part to develop is extreme and destructive. The Tao symbol has both black and white, and the heart of the white is black, and the heart of the black is white.

I guess what I'm saying is this, physical gender reassignment surgery is not a cop out and it is not just about making yourself look female. I've studied and researched for about 6 years on the topic of Shamanism and medicine men/women.

The fact is that ancient cultures around the globe held transgendered people in high esteem before the Christians came along with their bloodshed and bigotry. The ancients believed that a "two spirit" person (these were both trans people and people who exhibited both feminine and masculine traits) was able to have a closer connection to source or "God", or nature due to their being transgendered. (If you think about it, life source or "God" or whatever you call it really isn't all male or female either) Although the Hijras in India are exploited with prostitution and bigotry, the original attitude before the Europeans came to India was that Hijra had special powers and were held in high esteem.

The same is true with the Native American Indians, Phillipine Aetas, Thailand's Catooey, and so forth.

It is only after the Christian Europeans came to conquer and ravage the natives of various countries that people like us were seen as "evil" and "outcasts".

You have a physical reality in which you live, and it is my personal opinion that it is not only OK to work within that physical reality towards your happiness, but it is also a *requirement* since it is really just different degree of the *same* thing that spiritual realm is. There are light waves we can perceive and there are light waves we don't perceive (microwaves for example), that doesn't mean one is better than the other, and they are actually one and the same.

To the person that stated "gender is only a construct and don't worry yourself about it, stop worrying about sex" bla bla bla... Please, if you are trying to comfort someone don't ever say that again. It is like telling someone who's child was just murdered "hey you can always have new babies, this world is only an illusion, just focus on the life you want and you'll get it". It's cruel and heartless. I know you meant well.


Person, I'm currently having to struggle with existential depression myself. Although I am so glad that I finally had my surgeries and the fact that my body is aligned with my spirit helps, I am having to deal with the child hood abuse and the fact that my own mother stuck to her abusive boyfriend and basically gave him the green light to do whatever he wanted to me. It is a hard fact I have been in denial about for many years and have just recently come to terms with it. Due to the state that the abuse occured, there was no statute of limitations so I brought it to the authorities and DA, after realizing that other victims may have been too and that he may continue to hurt other kids. Unfortunately the justice system failed me too as anyone with enough money to hire influencial lawyers can get away with this, plus my being transgender, having tried suicide in years before and having alcohol abuse to help cope in the past certainly didn't help things.

Everyday there are moments where I wonder if it's really even worth living, I think about all the &*^% I've had to go through and my soul is truly tired.
I think that I just don't want to go on anymore and that I'll never get to live like other people. It's the truth. I won't.
Some days it's easier to live with these facts and I can even manage to enjoy things and other days I just go through the motions.

Best thing I can tell you is take it moment by moment. I've used psychedelic therapy with great success in helping to alleviate a lot of emotional and spiritual pain, but I've still got a long way to go, and that route may not be for everyone. Even with psychedelic therapy, it is hard, I went through PURE HELL on several trips, which I may add was worse than any hell I've gone through in physical life. But throughout all that I came out knowing the truth, healed of my perception just a little more and more, and willing to take another look at this world with a fresh pair of spiritual eyes. Once again, this may or may not be for others, so it is just something I'm sharing.

I pray for your healing Person, there are no easy answers, and whatever answers you come up with are going to determine not only your life but also how you feel inside. You can let someone else with an expensive suit, lots of credentials and lots of fans tell you how to heal, how to be happy, what to think, or you can go inside of yourself. Trust your gut.

Although this video comes from the psychedelic community, I think anyone can benefit from the words this man has said. YouTube - Terrence Mckenna - Nobody is smarter than you are !!!

Hugs to you Person

Thanks everyone for letting me post, I'd like to know your opinion and view on what I've presented.
Kind regards ,
Magick