Manliness vs Femininity

[Anthony Simon]

This is a thread that came out of an exchange on the "man enough" thread. I thought we probably needed a separate topic. So, here goes...

Carolynn wrote:
Ok, so we are getting an idea of what some of our members consider manly, but this place is a support for CDs who enjoy their "feminine side". So, what is your idea of femininity? Is it diametrically opposed to what it is to be a man? Or something else?


I replied (amongst other things):This is obviously a complicated topic and I'm just wondering why you've introduced it into this thread. Why not start a new thread if that's what you want to talk about?


And Carolynn again:My point is that for a cder, the concepts of masculinity and femininity are or maybe should be and have been said to be the two sides of the same coin. If on the one hand you claim to be male and express your masculinity, how can you know what you are expressing unless you have a good concept of the feminine too? I suggest if you do not, you may be playing dress up without understanding the emotional and sociological aspects of the two roles in our society. If you claim to have a feminine side, does it extend beyond the clothes and makeup you wear?

I have seen male swaggers on cders in full make up and dresses at "BE-ALL 2009", and attitude and base voices to match, clearly nothing more than playing dressup. What does that say about them as human beings?

Much of what a woman knows to be true for her is based on biology, and growing up as a woman within a society dominated by males in business and in determining what is "right" and "wrong" or acceptable in socio/religious settings and roles. When you dress up and go out, do you do so with an inkling of why women behave as they do and believe as they do, and react to one another and toward males as they do, or are you just a man in a dress?

That's why I brought it up in this thread. Also, it was mentioned several times that manliness was defined or should be by caring, being a good parent, maybe a good "father" (what is a good father? does that mean a role model or what), and loving to spouse and kinder, all characteristics attributed to women as well (except the father part: I still don't know what a father is other than some kind of emotionally detached person like my own father). How do those attributes differ between men and women, or do they, and/or are they transferable between clothing defined roles?

I grew up a confused kid, neither completely a biological male nor female, though I had to try to project a sociologically male role (not very successfully). I learned what my contemporaries and elders thought of as being a man by rote, never really understanding, just knowing in what circumstances certain actions seemed to be appropriate. I became an actor at a young age. Female attitudes, female emotions, were more understandable to me, but lacking the proper biology, I really couldn't fully participate in those either, just empathize a lot more than with the male ilk because I knew who I was. I started growing breasts at the same time as most of my female classmates, and felt the stings of male disdain for my attiudes and interests, and body differences at an early age, and I had a sister and a few cousins who I saw go through most of growing up female and sometimes got them to talk about. There is considerable differences between men and women, in expectations, attitudes toward each other, and even in communication.

So I find the topic of manliness vs feminintiy among cders interesting, expecially the "feminine side". How can you "be" one without knowing anything about the other? Because the understanding does not automatically reside in the clothing each gender properly wears by flexible social definition, a feminine side would have to come from what? socialization or referent role models?. If you have a "feminine side", where did it come from and how linked to the fem clothing you wear and your prejudices and associations is it? I know some people like wearing fashions from the skin out from the '50s or other time periods, while others use modern fashions. Do those preferences make a difference in ones understanding of feminine vs masculine?

Just asking for some thoughts and your self insights into masculinity and the feminine side here.

Carolynn

I actually think that I have quite a substantial chunk of, let's say, womanly qualities. The ones to do with caring, holding and development and not such a large chunk of the standard male ones to do with aggression, violence and competition. The whole sort of aggressive competitive thing which is so characteristic of men in this society (and elsewhere I'm sure) is a bit of an anathema to me. I also have a rather slight frame and am relatively short for a man (5ft 6 inches) and a kind of androgynous face - with a square jaw, prominent adam's apple, and thick bushy eyebrows but also some remnant of the prettiness I had as a boy. My sister once told her neighbours to look out for her brother who looked "just like her" - and with her hair cut short she's kind of androgynous too. Probably we get this from my father's side of the family (and the male side of that).

So I'm saying I have a physical appearance that has both male and female characteristics and it's probably genetically derived and a kind of mental makeup that has (maybe) a similar balance of characteristics and, I would guess, also came as a kind of birthright.

In your post you posit the idea of "Manliness vs Femininity" (and in your original comment you talked about one being "opposed" to the other), but for me that's a terrible trap in the sense that having the masculine elements of me fighting the feminine elements of me (The vs) has been a recipe for disaster. I mean I've had that sort of war going on inside me for most of my life and all it means is your life gets hacked up. Much better, for me, is to come to terms with the two, that I have both elements - and achieve some sort of balance. To me, I'm not the standard man out of the textbooks or the foundational myths of so many societies, but some sort of soft man. Not soft in the sense that I don't function when I absolutely have to, but in the sense that I have the womanly holding caring qualities and need to express them to be fully who I am.

I'm not sure where that leaves me with regard to dressing up as a woman - or presenting like one to the outside world (which I have yet to do and may never do.) And I don't really have the experience to comment on that in others. But I do know a fair amount about what goes on inside of my head (as above) and can extrapolate that to others.

[Ralitsa]

for my own part, I can most accurately decribe myself only as a man in a dress. I can't really ascribe to many "typical feminine" attributes, except maybe a tendency to cry at sappy movies (which I really try to hide).
I'm not very enamoured with the stereotypical male traits of aggression, etc. but I do see their usefulness in certain situations. Nor do I think very highly of the stereotypical female characteristics of silliness, ignorance and dependance. So really I guess I don't like stereotypes. I like women who are strong and smart, who don't need me to be strong and smart for them. But neither do I want them to be strong and smart for me, so I can be stupid and weak.
So I don't know what masculinity and femininty really mean either. I guess it's true that much of it is biologically determined, and we can never be entirely independent of that no matter what level of culture and sophistication we achieve. But I still like to think that I am in control of my personality, that I cultivate the traits I like and eliminate those I don't. But even if this is true (and not just wishful thinking) there is still the question about how my likes and dislikes are determined.
I guess my biggest disagreement with the notions of masculine and feminine is because of it's biological foundation. It then reduces all of us to mere animals who are behaving according to instincts with no use of our intellect. Unfortunately this seems to be true for most people
I prefer to think that we can adopt different charactersitics according to necessity. So if I need to cut firewood for the winter I can rely on strength, etc. for that. If I need to cook supper for the kids, or read them a story, then I can use compassion, consideration, or affection, as needed.
Some guys refer to some tasks as "skirt work", somehow implying that they are too good for it. But if it is skirt work, then I guess I will just wear a skirt while I'm doing it
I can't pretend to understand what it is really like to be a woman though, exactly because of that. I guess I have experienced the "you have to do this because you're a man", but I don't think it's the same as "you can't do that because you're a woman". And what I really can't understand is that a lot of men and a lot of women accept those statements for themselves, not only trying to apply them to others.

[Absaroka]

So now we have two threads on the same subject, and I'm going to try to resurrect a third in another forum.

As usually Carolynn's points are excellent. I would have to describe myself as a somewhat odd man, not as a woman. I have a glimmering of what it is like to be a woman, but it is just what I have learned from listening to and observing the women I am close to, my wife, my sister, my daughters, some close friends. But really on this subject I only know what I've been told or seen. I've watched two people transition into becoming women very closely. Prior to that they were girls.........

For a long time I enjoyed reading the biographies of men who transitioned into women. Kate Bornstein, Jenny Boylan, Diedre McKlosky, others. I always finished the book with a sense of frustration at what wasn't written. How did they know they were women in men's bodies? What was it like to be a woman, not a man?

Then I read Max Wolf Valerio's The Testosterone Files. It's a wonderfully written book and it made such sense. He was a man in a woman's body. How could he NOT know such a thing? It was all so obvious. I also enjoyed his description of the changes. What it was like just to walk down the street as a man, not a woman. How things were more 3 dimensional, more visual. How he could no longer safely give people the finger.......How feed up he got with his girlfriends (he went from lesbian to straight male) feelings. How porn suddenly appealled to him.

I've lost my train of thought here. But I agree with Anthony and Ralitsa. I'm not a woman, I'm a slightly odd man. And as I said I loved Carolynn's post (I usually do) It brought up what to many men is invisible, the sense of male privilege. When we go out in a dress we lose that and don't like it. We assume the role of women, that of being judged sexually by our dress. Women dressed too sexually get called sluts. Maybe we think this isn't so bad, after all don't so many of us at some level, sometime, think it would be fun to be a male slut, at least if our partners were all attractive women? But in man in a dress is viewed by many as dressing in an overly sexualized manner, and we get called perverts. News flash! That term for us has the baggage that slut has for women. And so tremendous effort has to be expended by transexuals as a group to reassure that they aren't having SRS for sexual reasons, but because it realigns their body with their psyche.

My my Ralitsa, you've certainly started something interesting with your other post. Thanks, and I've really enjoyed a lot of your threads.

[Paula G]

I think this is a very different thread to the earlier one from which it sprang, I felt that was the difference between a Man and mear masculinity. The differences between feminine and masculine are maybe more obvious but less easy to define. I do not believe that other than in engineering terms they are not opposites, rather complimentaries.

Although the stereotypes can help they are always going to miss the mark simply because they are stereotypes. I know that I am not a woman (not sure I can even look like one) but through my cross dressing I can experience a small part of what it can be like to be a woman, but at the end of the day I am always a man, maybe the best to comment are those who have fully expeienced both aspects.

I am interested to hear Max Wolf Valerio and would now like to read his book, it sounds as though this could explain a lot - thank you

[Anita]

I think I can reply in the spirit of this thread. When I go out dressed as a woman, I personally am making a statement to the men I see. It goes something like this: "I have laid down my weapons. I'm vulnerable when I present this 'person' you see in front of you. Will you lay down your weapons too?"

So I'm acknowledging up front that whatever privileges men may have in this culture, I'm not claiming them right at that moment. I can't say I know what it is to be a woman, but I can say that my behavior is very different from what I do in 'regular' life.

It takes on some aspects of what most of us think as womanly, based on knowing and watching women all of our lives. It feels very easy to me to act out these things--they are ways of behaving that were trained out of me as a boy, but actually are more like "me" than the so-called male stuff that I had to learn.

I questioned in another thread some years ago, whether I could defend myself very well as a woman. I just don't have access to those kinds of feelings and aggressive behaviors that I have used in the past. If any of you have acted in a play, you'll recognize this. You don't want to "break character" when you're onstage--it just doesn't feel right to do that.

In the same way, I don't want to behave in ways that don't fit the person I am that day. She may not be a woman, but she's not what I know of being a man, either. If the situation were desperate enough, I know that I would come up with some defense. How much and what kind, I don't know.

I know that we all have certain concepts that we come back to again and again. The old timers on the forum are all going, "Oh no, there's Anita with her 'I'm just a version of a woman' routine again!" But that's the best way I can describe it. I don't claim to be a woman, but I'm not behaving or feeling like what I know of myself as a man, either.

I'm 'something else,' but it's not what I would think of as third gender. It has more of a female flavor than anything else, and people generally treat me the way they would treat a woman. So I get my own benefits from doing this. They might not be what someone else would consider benefits, but I only have to answer to myself on this one.

[Davita]

How do we know if we are women? How do we know we are men? How the heck should I know??!!! What I do know is I'm not masculine by any particular norms. My GG friends call me a girly girl. I'm guessing they have a clue since they are girls.

Back to that man and woman thing... I tell my friends, sex, gender and sexual preference are on their on gray scales and they really don't have anything to do with each other. There are no "causal effects" between the 3 scales. Okay, with this said, you can be a man because you have the physical parts. You can be a woman for having those parts. Being a man -- masculine -- has to do with how you behave and how you behave works towards your gender identity. Same with having a womanly identity. So how do we know if we are men or women when none of this stuff has ever been explained? We don't; we get told about it later when everyone else is trying to cope with it. Kids are kids and eventually learn about the differences. Kids just know what they like and how they feel about stuff. Growing up, I was happy in both a girl's world and a boy's world, but I had my limits of comfort in the boys world. I never realized this until Mom and I did a bit of reflection on my childhood. To this day, there are some things i don't understand about boys and glad I don't. Am I woman? Could be. Was I a girl and didn't know it? Could be. Am I feminine? Oh yeah -- no doubt. Do I do manly things? Yes, because I can and we raised our daughter to not have that arbitrary separation of things men do and things girls do.

Okay, so that was my half cent.

[Anouk]

What is to be a woman or what is to be a man is probably impossible to describe accurately. What comes to myself, I can only describe the gender oriented characteristics inside me.

I totally lack the aggressive and competitive macho characteristics. I’m rather sensitive and have sort of fragile confidence and tend to be somehow a caring person. I’m really poor parking the car... So I have many things that suggest I’m rather ill-equipped for the men’s world. Maybe that’s why I feel very uncomfortable in macho environment.

On the other hand I‘m not very good “feminine skills” such as remembering names or voices, identifying emotions in someone’s voice, hidden words or looks. And I tend to think and argue logically and primarily try to solve problems and avoid the argumentation based on pure emotion. So I could have some troubles in coping with the life as a woman, too.

Equipped with such characteristics I tend to be with people who are somehow in between the extreme gender archetypes. My own sense of identity is somewhere in between, as well. From the early start my crossdresser identity was more a boy looking at a girl inside me. Nowadays it has changed clearly, although not totally to the direction where there’s a woman looking at herself - and the world around her.

[Gillian]

I'm not odd, I'm eccentric.
Quote: I've lost my train of thought here. But I agree with Anthony and Ralitsa. I'm not a woman, I'm a slightly odd man.
By defination eccentric means; deviating from the normal pattern, or behavior. I have been eccentric all of my life. I view things differently from most people, both male and female. If my thinking and life view are different from others, it only stands to reason that I would possibily dress differently also. So what's wrong with being different? If we as a culture would imbrace diversity, instead of comformity, we might have a better world. It is the thinking outside of the box that has brought us some of the great inventions of our time. Comformity to convention does not make room for free thinking.
I am a slightly eccentric man, and I want to think outside of the box!

[Absaroka]

Eccentric works for me. So does wierd.

[Azurielle]

I'm quie eccentric myself.
Then again I've been quite the Cynic ever since I started going to college, so it was only a matter of time before I got hooked onto the glorious world of womens' clothing.
I do consider myself womanly, but more as a social role than body integrity.

Like my friend once said: I come from a world we may not understand.

[Robyn Katie]

Hi sisters,

This is a stunning thread. I didn't realize how stunning till I printed out most of it as excerpts and started bolding the things you were all saying. Carolynn, Anthony, Ralitsa, Absaroka, Paula, Anita, Davita, Anouk, Gilian, Azurielle, you've all opened up wonderful cans o'worms!

Each of you is different, and seeking different things in our "gift" (quoting Virginia), and I'm different from all of you but find so much in common it's exciting to read it all.

Replying is hard but I want to try. I'll take the points in turn and see if I can be helpful (a feminine trait, huh?) ...

I'll number things (a masculine trait? but girls are very good at math...OK I'll stop trying to categorize) so if anyone wants to refer to them it’ll be max easy.

Really females and males, as a group, are amazingly good across the spectrum at nearly everything. But as individuals we each come up with our own slice of that.

I hope you will ‘scuse that this will be long. I’ll try to keep each point brief.

1. I don't think femininity is diametrically opposed to masculinity. Within “human,” the overarching category, I think males' and females' behavior, awareness and identity overlap. I think of them as two big overlapping ovals, within which there is a good-sized shared territory.

2. But I do believe that male and female worlds are significantly different, based primarily, if I read people’s accounts correctly, on hormones and hormonal effects. So many sex-changed people speak of how powerful those hormones can be, revolutionizing feelings, perceptions, and how the person acts and thinks.

3. Me, I think of myself emphatically not as “playing dress up” but as deeply female in my identity. That’s based on something deeper, I think, than behavior, certainly way deeper than appearance. It has to do with my encountering the world, also with my bodily feelings, graces, vulnerabilities, what have you, and my very selfhood vis a vis the world around me. I feel I have considerable feminine instincts that go to the core of me and far back into my life history.

4. On the other hand I lack much of the whole range of feminine instincts. Often I’m surprised and disappointed to feel myself reacting out of my old learned male instincts with aggression, hard-edged behavior, lack of sympathy, and I wonder where that came from, when I want so much to be otherwise. But you can’t junk a life’s reflexes in a year or three. So I guess I would say it’s in the area of feminine reflexes that I find myself most lacking.

5. Manliness? The very concept makes me feel bored and sour. I prize girlishness and womanliness even if I only half know what those are. On the other hand it’s a sort of colorless norm and I can act up to it as necessary. (I try to do that less and less.) I don’t think I ever, or hardly ever, react with “manly traits,” however. Just don’t have ‘em in my makeup. Example: I wasn’t a good parent, I was a poor one. What’s a good father? I was sexually abused by mine, though in some other respects he was an inspiring, interesting and helpful father.

6. I should explain: I’m not “out.” That’s different from some of you. While I do wear all-women’s-attire-all-the-time indoors or out, what I wear in public is not a tipoff. I wear, not skirts, but women’s slacks. Blouses that aren’t a huge giveaway. My less conspicuous-sized breast forms. Occasionally a highish heel or a Mary Jane strap, but pretty inconspicuous. I have mid-back length hair, mostly it’s in a ponytail, but in any case not overwhelmingly feminine in style except at home. I do wear two-piece bikinis, pretty blouses, skirts and so forth in the yard or away from home when I am not seen or not obvious, but I keep pretty neutral wherever it might be an issue with other people. So while a close observer is going to realize I’m dressed female, I’m not challenging others, not facing issues of presenting myself as fully feminine in people’s faces outside home.

7. Carolynn you put it in a nutshell: “Much of what a woman knows is true for her is based on biology, and growing up as a woman,” etc. That’s the hardest hurdle, and I have no way to get over it.

8 I too grew up confused, never fit into the male gender role, learned it superficially “by rote” as Carolynn says, managed to do some male things, play baseball, served my minimal army time, acted like a guy if not a very intense one. Avoided power situations and shunned power temptations like the plague. As a musician, student, I fell back on non-masculine ways of life, never could really much like or value male things or male ways of being. Machoness? Forget it. Growing up my main self-impression was pretense. I had to study everything and pretend to be it. As I was putting on my mom’s bras and slips by age 8 or so, I can hardly remember a time when I wasn’t pretending to be a whole entire person whom I wasn’t, and I think never had been. By about that same age I was wishing I’d never grow hair on my legs, fantasizing about having a sister (I had only one brother whom I disliked), and feeling female more often than was comfortable.

9. How would I know what a feminine side is? “A feminine side would have to come from what?” as Carolynn put the question. I am sure that if today I had the op, changed sex and “became a woman” that question would vex me sorely, for I could never be sure that I knew what a woman was, having spent nearly all my life being a man. But I tell you this: as myself, now, this minute, the question doesn’t bother me at all, for I feel I know instinctively, within myself, what a feminine side is, since mine is huge, dominates my mental and emotional horizon, has always been there, and completely outweighs my “masculine side,” such as it is.

Okay, this is a long enough message to post. I will continue my reactions to the thread in future messages. I do hope this has been helpful and informative.

Thanks so much to all of you for making this thread so darn compelling!

Love, Robyn Katie

[Robyn Katie]

Hi again sisters, here’s more.

10. I don’t know if caring, holding, development, and so on are feminine qualities. I tend to think they’re human qualities but that stereotypical male behavior (big in some testosterone-choked guys) can blind people so that they find it difficult to express or feel those qualities.

11. Equally aggression, violence, competition are human, I’d say—many females have quantities of some or all of them, but it’s true to say the feminine identity has a smaller share on average.

12. Anthony (please excuse that I left you out of the list in my first message, your original post is what started the whole thing off!), you talk about being a “soft man.” I don’t share that description, since I feel myself so strongly as a woman in man’s shape. (I do not contemplate sex change as that would flout the love of the best woman I know, and my age—¬73—makes me feel, not that it’s impossible, but that it probably isn’t for me.)

13. The war going on inside that you speak of, however, is exactly the story of my life. Often I’ve not known what it was, how it worked, what it was doing to me, but I’ve always felt like I was in combat, in gender and other terms.

14. Ralitsa speaks of stereotypical female qualities like silliness, ignorance, dependence. Guess I should admit that all those are qualities of mine, at times. Again I’d say they’re human. I agree on not knowing what masculinity and femininity really mean, or are.

15. Biology being at the base of femininity and masculinity, my first guess is, you gotta be born female to know what it’s like to feel female. But then I realize that I was born male and still, to this day, know very little about what it’s like to feel male. Maybe we overestimate the individual of either sex’s ability to feel hir gender. Some women claim their most basic experience of feeling female is in giving birth. Till then, I’ve herd more than one claim, she hadn’t felt distinctly female, except in terms of role. There’s a bunch of questions that needs lots more light shed on it!

16. Ralitsa, you’re right in saying a lot of men and women do just take masculinity-femininity statements for granted, and I think they only scratch the surface of what that question is about. Probably the vast majority of either sex never go very deep into the question of their gender, even as relates to how it feels and how it differs from the other gender. Cliches rule!

17. To sum up, it seems most individuals just feel like who they are, and gender is a part of that, but quite often not very evident compared to the background of their total personality. Hormones’ powerful messages notwithstanding, it seems men react as people first, women react as people first, only as sexual beings second and in special circumstances—that’s the impression I get. In the workplace, for example, in sports, in numerous activities, a man or a woman is a person first, a sexual being considerably less. Or that’s the impression I get.

18. Absaroka, it was fascinating seeing you quote from Valerio. “He was a man in a woman’s body. How could he NOT know such a thing?” And yet as a newly made man his perceptions changed, wow. More 3D, more visual. This goes back to what I said in my first message about hormonal effects changing perceptions, thinking, everything. (I’m assuming hormones are the primary causes here.)

19. I was interested in Anita’s speaking about presenting vulnerability. Not being “out” I can’t know this, but it sounds powerful, as is Absaroka’s statement about losing male privilege when going out dressed. I just don’t know. I suppose staying closeted I’m ducking the issue.

20. I do know that, oversensitive as I am, exposure would hit me on a raw nerve, let alone any insults, aggression, or namecalling like “pervert!” Guess that’s why I haven’t risked it. Guess I’m a bit of a wallflower. I do think it’s interesting reading Anita’s statement that her behavior “out” is “very different from what I do in ‘regular’ life.” And to think of it like acting in a play, staying in role, is fascinating. Not sure I’ll ever know this firsthand.

21. “How do we know we are women? How do we know we are men?” Davita, you went right to the heart of it. Clearly “having the physical parts” hasn’t done it for me as a lifelong man. Yet my behavior oscillates, falling into male cliché, then falling back the other way.

22. “Was I a girl and didn’t know it?” That sums up much of my erratic behavior from childhood on. I was certainly *supposed* to be a boy, and sometimes even managed it without thinking. But my girlhood seems to have haunted my whole life, imbuing me with the sort of fragility Anouk speaks of, liability to emotional upset, breakdown, prey to, and partner in, nuance, grace, sweetness in a way I find utterly unmale.

23. Anouk’s distinction between “a boy looking at a girl inside me” and “a woman looking at herself and the world around her” still poses a barrier I can’t quite cross.

24. Oddly Azurielle’s considering herself womanly, but as a social role, is the very thing I persistently cannot manage. I find myself stubbornly unsympathetic, unable to enter into the spirit of women’s companionship, mutual support, sympathy, affectionateness, etc. In that, perhaps, I’m most male, and I don’t like that about myself. I’m impatient with it and find myself outside that charmed world where it’s second nature to offer and receive sisterly aid and comfort. Just can’t seem to do it! I’m too harsh, judgmatical, unsympathetic and downright unfriendly in that role. So in that respect my male heritage still has big claws in me.

25. Last point, honest! “I come from a world we may not understand” (Azurielle quoting her friend) — that really tromped me when I read it. True, true, true …

Love, Robyn Katie

[Absaroka]

Great posts Robyn Katie,

I was reading about Jung the other day. He had a number of archtypes that he thought were part of a sort of ancestral memory. I was actually looking up some of his other stuff like the "shadow" Anyway what he believed was that somewhere at I guess the instinctual level we all have an idea of what constitutes masculine and feminine and that this shapes how we feel others should be and also what we are. Not everyone is the field of psychology agrees with his thougths but it's an interesting idea in this context.

Onto something I learned in anthropology class decades ago. Every society in the world divides people by sex roles. (Just as every society has dance, music, and a bunch of other stuff) And similarly to things like dance and music, every society does it a bit differently.

It would appear that every society also has a few folks who fall into the "in between' category of gender, whether it be because they were in fact transexual, or they were transgendered, or if they filled a niche (eunuchs and prostitutes are two very common examples of people who fill an important function outside "normal" roles. Just as every society has those who are insane. Some kill the insane, some lock them up, some ostracize them, some consider them religious leaders.

I guess my point is that every society seems to think men and women are different, but a consensus as to what those differences are is sometimes elusive.

[Carolynn]

Hi all. Well my big question has stimulated the introspection I was hoping for, at least in a few folks. All of you presented your current view of yourselves, and it is, I think, also clear that this is not the first occasion that the question has not been considered by you, at least on some level. I came to ask this in the other thread on femininty and masculinity because I was seeing a lot of stereotyping without an understanding of where it was coming from. I hoped that thinking about it would bring that understanding.

From my studies and from reading the research of biologists and other social scientists, most of the stereotypes of the characteristics of being a man or being a woman began with the underlying physical characteristics, as modified and formed by hormones and NEED. In another thread, we mentioned our grandmothers who lived in what for us would have been hard times, often working very hard, and sometimes taking on roles and activities that they just had to due to a vacuum in someone to fulfill a needed role.

What isn't clear is that all the stereotypical roles are culturally determined, and that changed with time and place, as one would expect.

There is a basic biological divide. Men cannot have kids. Women can. A man can usually only nurse a child at his breast under very rare circumstance (other than acting as a kind of pacifier as in some Southern Pacific Island cultures), but women can and do that routinely unless cultural mores of the time say it's ok to feed a kid by bottle, as has been done in the past, ('40s and '50s, beginning in the late 1920s). Now that pendulum is swinging back the other way with justifications presented by research showing a kid that is nursed at breast has a much enhanced immunity and other basic physical advantages, not to mention the mental/emotional ones of bonding.

But when it is a matter of Need, the culturally established social roles break down, so women can chop wood and plow fields, and toss hay, though they may have to develop skill with an axe, or how to drive a tractor in a straight line. Men can "mother" kids in the absence of their mother, or maybe even in today's US society, be able to become house husbands and care for the kids.

In Japan, social roles are in a state of flux. The ideal is still the old one, that the wife will be demure and stay at home and be subservient to her hubby who is lord and master and do her work. The reality is that for a family unit to make it, both spouses may have to work long hours, they may live in a tiny apartment unsuited for raising a family, and they will put off having a family until they have enough money to afford a larger place to live. Formerly predominantly rural, now the population is predominantly urban, and many social roles have changed and are modifying even more.

The same goes for parts of India, Thailand and other non-western countries. China is remaking itself at a rapid rate, and the government has passed laws making children beyond a certain number illegal, and for many familys, a single child is all that is allowed. Any more draws social and political punishment. Sterilization after the obligatory child is born is encourage. Forty years ago, lots of kids was the long held and sought after ideal, especially sons. Girls, not so much. Now living in more urban environments or larger towns, large populations are not so needed, and both parents work at something, kids are limited and more of a families resources go into raising the single child. Changes in social and cultural mores and political needs bring alterations to social/cultural roles.

Returning to all the responses, it is really hard to put yourself in the shoes of the other gender -- well not so hard in the physical sense, but you know what I mean. It might be called the head space of the other gender.

Why?

Much of it I think is because of differences in rearing, but a lot of it is blinders from our own brains. I have a list of over 20 research papers that point to portions of the basal ganglia of the brain that are responsible for emotion, sex drive, sexual preference and gender identity. There are others who look at gender behavior and hormone balance, not so much in the brain but in the body.

Example, being me. I am intersexed with a transsexual medical history, twice. Like many infants born intersexed, a choice was made for me before I was really even conscious of the world or at least had tools to deal with it. I went from a sorta girl to a sorta boy with the slice and dice of a knife, and then I became a sociological male with the stroke of a pen on a birth certificate. That was the first part of my trans-medical history.

For the first 5 years of my life, I was really trapped between the physical sexes, and when I went through the developmental stage that all young kids go through of comparing myself to the adults and other kids around me, I found that I was most like girls, and assumed, happily, that I was or would be a girl when I "grew up". Many on this forum apparently did the same thing, but saw themselves as most like daddy and less like mommy, and so went through the first steps to accept themselves as future men.

When I was 5, a second surgery to remove scar tissue that partiall blocked my urinary tract and to finish moving my euretha from where it had been moved to in the first surgery to the end of my "penis" where it "belonged" was completed. We know now that a strong hypospadia, for that is the medical name for my birth defect, is a really good clue to a infant being intersexed. Not that it would have made an difference to the medical practices of the time. After the second surgery, I began the struggle to deal with the changes in my own self image, to match what my parents and others seemed to want for me. I was never entirely successful, until I finally changed my body to match my mind. That was my second SRS of my trans-medical history.

According to Dr. Milton Diamond, all fetus go through the organization-activation process or mechanism. It is biological. As our bodies and minds develop, different parts are fully formed at different times in fetal development. The body develops it's potential as a male or female in response to the genetic messages encoded in our genes and cells within the first few weeks of pregnancy. That determines our physical sex.

The brain develops during the second half of pregnancy, months later. It is thought that the potential for gender identity is encoded at that time, since there are well documented differences in the basal ganglia of heterosexual men and women as adults. If for some reason, either genetic or external influences (such as artificial hormones like DES thought to prevent miscarriages) that affects the balance of hormones in Mom's and fetus' bodies, then the gender identity mismatch apparently is set up at that time, months before birth. That means we may be born with the strong potential to be gender dysphoric, through no "fault" of our own. Oddly enough, at the same time, one's preference for same sex or opposite sex partners may be formed, and much more strongly than the more subtle gender identity effects to come.

What does that have to do with cding or ones feeling of masculinity or femininity? Possibly a lot. Gender Dysphoria is what CDers experience. It is a discomfort with being in our skins, in our gender identity. It doesn't matter if one is so strongly affected by the mismatch between mind and body that they are considered TS, or less affected and are CDs, or maybe affected and become gender queer instead, the same areas of the brain seem to be encoded for that behavior from fetal development.

The expression of the behavior is hormonal driven in many cases, and may not be strong until puberty, but for all, you feel different from others in your continuing comparison to find out who you are from an early age, and it may last well into your teens and later, all your lives. There really seems to be little to be done about it, except in extreme cases you undergo surgery because to remain as you are is to be miserable and can easily end in suicide. If it is not so extreme, one may seek relief in clothes of the gender that is other than your physical gender. Folks that are gender queer seem to be angry at the world and take it out on them by doing mind f**ks in some ways, and mixing clothes and other signals to mess with the mundane's minds.

What cultural mileau we are raised in is very important. People on Samoa have no problem with gender and sexual diversity. So they don't have transsexuals. They just have people.

People in the USA have lots of problems with us, and that becomes our problems with guilt and other behaviors that can lead to mental/emotional pain.

And now I have to quit (aren't you glad) and get ready for the telephone man.

Carolynn

[Elizabeth]

Hi girls,

I have watched this thread since it's inception and every time I catch up on it, I have wanted to write something. Only to later change my mind because others were already saying much of what I wanted to say. Many times much better than I would have.

I have been in this discussion many times, not only here, but also on other forums. Many times this subject can reach a fevered pitch as we try to define what it is that makes one a woman or what it feels like to be a woman. Even here there has been much controversy about the expectations of those appearing in the garb of the opposite sex.

Is it ok to go out unshaven or even with a beard or mustache? One must make the utmost effort to "pass" when out dressed as the opposite sex? Well, in my opinion it wasn't true when women first started wearing "mens" clothing, and it isn't true when it comes to men wearing women's clothes.

Wearing female clothes does not make me female and in that regard the same is true for most crossdressers. When I say that I am a female, it's because that is who I personally identify with. I wear women's clothing as a way of identifying myself as female.

My personal feeling is that this is really how most girls are. There are those who believe that certain clothing makes them more desireable, while there are others who want someone who will desire them without wearing certain clothing. I personally think it may have a great deal to do with how secure a girl/woman is in her own feelings about being feminine or masculine.

I was watching a show on tv not long ago and it was a reality type show and it featured three girls who were getting breast enhancement surgery. Two of the girls, but one in particular, focused on "just wanting to feel like a real woman". All discussed a feeling of having been "cheated" out of getting to be a "real woman".

Wow, those are the same feelings I have. And since then as I have focused in, what I have found is that every girl/woman wants to be a beautiful woman. When we compliment little girls was tell them how "pretty" they are. But for boys we tell them how big and strong they are.

I have never been able to relate to men the way that other men seem to do. I couldn't make it anywhere near normal. But I think we may be all over looking the point that there is no normal. If you took the 16 million colors that windows and most video cards can produce and made a golf ball for each color in that pallet, the average would be some color of brown. Now put all the balls into a big hole in the ground, except the one ball that is the exact color of the average of all the colors.

That would be humanity. The sum of all of us makes up what we call "normal", but no one actually has all the attributes of a "normal" person. So to make up for this we have other rules we make up that are politically, religiously, ethically, and morally immersed before being sanctioned as "normal".

To me the discussion becomes somewhat pointless because we can never know what it is that someone else is feeling. Perhaps someone is feeling the same exact thing as me, except we express that differently. We mistakenly believe we are feeling different things, when in fact we are not. If someone feels like a woman when they put on women's clothing, who am I to argue with that? It is not what I experience, but that is all I can really know, other than what others tell me.

So for me I believe that if someone believes they are a woman, they are. Will there be men who just dress up because it turns them on? Probably, but again that experience is no less valid than my own. Just different. By asking others to not discriminate against me, I concede that I also will not be involved in setting the standards by which others must believe or behave. Do what makes you happy.

Love always,
Elizabeth