I read a story somewhere about a mother who gave her son stuffed animals and such, no guns, and at one point she caught him “shooting” his stuffed animals, pretending that one was a gun.

Anyway, I don’t know what would happen without any influences. It does seem pretty clear to me that I absorbed what I did because I saw myself as a girl and I wanted that life.

sorry, i didn’t mean to imply that you were. i’m wondering how much a feminine identity is tied into a love for girly things. i always imagined that was something that feminine “identitied” people were conditioned to enjoy.

if one were to give a human baby dolls to play with, and encouraged their play and enjoyment with that doll, and give another human baby trucks to play with, and encouraged their play and enjoyment with trucks, how would that pan out in the end? would enjoyment of trucks or dolls be equally distributed across gender, or would masculine babies always tend toward trucks, and feminine babies always tend toward dolls? would the type of play with each of those objects also follow suit?

i tend to believe there’d be no gender distinction. assuming one could keep current cultural influences out of that equation. which would most likely be impossible.

regarding violence in cultures against third genders, we seem to hear that some cultures do (or did) have valid space for “not male/female” people. but at least these days, i never seem to find that actually happening. and i wonder if that’s a result of “modern” western society’s influence (or contamination) on those cultures, and at some time in the past “not male/female” (or maybe that should read “not masculine/feminine”, or not male feminine/female masculine”) were accepted as valid people.

somehow, i just don’t think that anyone outside of any specific culture’s gender roles were very safe or valued. maybe i’m just tainted. it’s just that people tend to other those individuals who do not conform.

I’ve been thinking lately about how much violence this culture does to people whose “gender” doesn’t fit neatly into “man” or “woman,” and what it meant in other cultures that do have room for fully valid thirdgender roles. I’m having a hard time finding a lot of discussion about this online.

I mean, seen as valid, as opposed to this culture which pretends they don’t exist at all. Not that they’re not valid if society doesn’t make room.

for the past couple of years, i’ve been working in a call center. so i sit all day. i find the work extremely stressful, so i’ve taken to eating as a coping mechanism. and as a result, i’ve put on maybe 20 pounds or so. and on a skinny body, 20 pounds makes a big difference. and it bothers me. it’s like it’s not my body. my “neural map” has a body that is skin and bones. so it’s weird for me to be carrying around this extra weight.

regarding all things “feminine”, i hesitate to equate “girly things” with a female identity, because there are too many exceptions. specifically, i know men who enjoy girly things, and women who enjoy manly things, and they each have what i would imagine are “standard” gender identities.

when i was maybe 9 or 10, i had a friend who was fairly feminine. our classmates would tease him because of it. we’d play “dress up” on occasion, until my mom caught me one day, and made it clear that i wasn’t to do that anymore. and since i saw how my friend was treated, i purposely avoided being feminine as a child. not that i didn’t want to, but rather it was socially dangerous. and being the non-confrontational, compliant person i am, i went with the flow. if playing baseball (even though i never really liked the game, or played it very well) meant the other kids wouldn’t tease me, well, i saw that as a small price to pay.

i have a wide variety of interests. so i always tended toward traditionally masculine things for survival. or things that are neither manly nor girly. i can be happy doing all kinds of things, so it wasn’t a great loss not doing some of them. which is perhaps why, now, i’m a bit uncomfortable wearing skirts for example, even though my friends say i look nice on the rare occasion i do (usually when all my pants are dirty).

perhaps i’m just androgynous, but so much so, that it drove me to transition away from maleness. or, perhaps this is part of my quest to find that “middle ground” i always tend toward. “male” and “female” always seemed so extreme to me. i never really identified with either. even as a child, i have clear memories thinking about how “ungendered” i felt. or perhaps, a lack of feeling a certain gender. or sex.

With the sex thing, my body was dissonant, I knew it should be one way, and it was another, so I had to change it in a way that I don’t feel like I have to lose weight, even though I didn’t like having a male body or being overweight.

Of course, I also feel I have a clear gender as “woman,” so it’s another way we’re different, but I don’t think it’s a big deal that we are different. It’s just, like this thing.

My identity was “girl” even when I was young, even though I tried to hide it. I picked up social cues for boys (to protect myself) and girls (because that’s who I was), which probably got me into a lot of trouble, because my mask-ulinity wasn’t perfect, and I know that pretty much everyone ever thought I was gay before I transitioned.

So I loved girly things, and have always been feminine, although I’ve never had a perfectly smooth relationship with my femininity.

give that lady the prize on the top shelf! it’s especially complex because it’s constantly in flux, and means different things for different people. not to mention the fact that gender manifests differently in different cultures, and subcultures. as one mere example, long hair in the first part of the last century, in america, was considered “woman”. then came the sixties. now it seems it’s back to being a woman thing. who can keep track?!?!?

and to be honest, the “neural map” thing is as alien to me as “gender identity”. i never saw that, or felt that, my body ’should’ be female, instead, i just ‘wanted’ it to be female. i was always pretty aware of my body, and it was, well, for lack of a better word, “normal”. not the way i wanted it to be per se, but i never felt like it didn’t fit - it wasn’t like a pair of shoes that pinched my feet, if that makes any sense.

my motivation for transition was firmly rooted in my desire to be female, not that i had a “female neural map”, or gender identity, or played with girly toys. i mean, i like a few traditionally girly things, like a few stuffed animals, but i like to play with guns, audio/video, power tools, and motorcycles mostly.

but anyway, i’d imagine that you’re right - it follows that gender would be different than the feeling that one’s body is wrong. at least in the context of how i understand the term “gender”.

I don’t think living as female means having a female gender identity so much as being comfortable with having a female body. I mean, lots of genderqueer women live under such a definition without too much (or any) cognitive dissonance.

I have to say that I’ve socialized approximately equally with men and women, and I get along with both about the same. It’s like when I was in my early teens and still into toys, and about half my toys were action figures (Star Wars, Transformers, etc) and the other half were stuffed animals (I played with dolls, but I never owned any).

The idea of gender (or whatever) just seems, on a personal level, to be far too complex to collapse down to “man” and “woman.” On a social level, it is those as well as “other,” but that doesn’t say anything about how people see themselves.

I also think that gender - constructed from nature or nurture - is separate from, I guess, the “neural map” that says which sex your body is.

many trans women i know, irl or on line, claim that they always felt more comfortable with women, or get along better with women, have mostly women friends, and so on. and while before transition, i might have said the same, these days, i tend to hang out with the guys. i sometimes joke that if i weren’t trans, one could accuse me of having penis envy.

i never understood the whole identity thing. i fully accept that most (if not almost all) trans people identify with a particular sex, it just doesn’t resonate with me. i’m not sure why.

as a child and teen (and lets face it, even now), i still spend a good amount of time wishing i was born female. transitioning was a method i saw to come closer to that dream. i’m happier moving through the world being seen as female than i was being seen as male. though if i had a choice, i’d dispense with the whole gender thing.

did we meet on technodyke? i remember posting on that board for a while a few years back. then someone made some kind of comment that was something like “what the fuck are you doing here if you’re not lesbian?”. so i left. i usually avoid confrontation. i’d never make much of an activist :\