Does anyone have a screepcap or link saved of the interaction about a decade ago when a trans girl on reddit asked an adult cis man how often he thought about being a girl and his answer was something like "I dont think ive ever thought about that".
That interaction broke so many people and i wish i had properly secured it for posterity. My brain remembers the guys handle had Panda in it iirc.
eg: closeted trans girl who will state "im not sure if im trans, i dont hate being a guy, im not sure if i want to be a woman but its an idea that comes up sometimes"
translation: I would make a pact with an unholy demon to be turned into a girl right now, please, are you an unholy demon? please tell me you are
@siege @JoscelynTransient I think it depends on how you define "trans".
From the outside, it's basically "live as another gender", with a spectrum ranging from "occasionally/for fun" to surgery/name change/etc.
If from the inside it's "fantasize about being another gender", then it would explain your reactions just as well as that screenshot.
I posted something a few years ago along those lines here, and the overwhelmingly kind reaction has been to effectively include me as trans. But I am...
@siege @JoscelynTransient ... 100% convinced currently that I will never live as another gender. I say that being totally fine with people applying the trans label to me. But I don't really, in my mind.
(The TL;DR is, I'm comfortable as I am, but if I could physically gender switch at will, I'd be happy to flip back and forth. Only time would tell in which form I'd spend more time.)
I think there's room for an in-between zone of the trans spectrum. Perhaps that would also make it less scary?
@siege @JoscelynTransient For what it's worth, this almost certainly relates to the relatively high statistic correlation of autistic and trans people.
The entirety of the autistic experienced, summarized, is "you do peopling wrong" - and that includes the expectations society projects onto your gender representation. It leads to a lot of introspection on what makes one "wrong", when one feels "right" on the inside.
Plus, personally speaking, there's a tad more distance between my mind and...
@siege @JoscelynTransient ... body than other folk seem to experience. I don't know if it's universal. But for me at least, it makes experimentation with the shell more "natural", because the ghost matters.
At least in principle; practice is where things get too hard to bother with for the most part.
It's less "yearning to be a girl", and way more "yearning to experience more lenses than one to experience life through".
I don't want to presume knowing what others feel, but it would make...
@siege @JoscelynTransient ... perfect sense to me if this was the source of some folks' dysphoria at least.
For me, it translated differently. I've just become stubborn about not letting others define me. And with time, getting more relaxed about this, too, because try as they might, they won't really succeed anyway.
Which is a large part of why I'm comfortable as I am.
@jens @JoscelynTransient I have several friends from my pretransition days who are in somewhat similar boats that you've laid out. They're aware they could be classified as trans, that they have gender desire internally but dont feel the need to act on it or label it. In the end its their life and call on what is and isnt important.
However: "there's a tad more distance between my mind and body than other folk seem to experience"
This sounds an awful lot like dissociation.
@jens @JoscelynTransient Denial is not something that a smart brain will simply overcome by being smart, that just means the brain is smarter at lying to itself. Worse, the smart person often thinks they're too clever to be tricked by their own brain.
And i dont want that to come off as stating either option is the truth. Just as long as you know the possibility and danger of the second, so you can recognise it if it occurs. I say that because you've replied to this thread..
@jens @JoscelynTransient you felt compelled to connect to it and talk about your own experience in relation to it - which means it must be important to you.
But if that second thing is true, and the gender desire you're talking about having is something that is in fact a core need that youve learnt to suppress then cracks will begin to occur in your psyche, body and life as it takes its toll.
@jens @JoscelynTransient Dissociation, depression, depersonalisation, hypervigilance, growing self harm and/or self destructive behaviour, loss of emotional depth, addiction, chronic illnesses, autoimmune conditions, and the big bopper: cPTSD.
The above are issues that arise and grow stronger from the human body not being able to have its core needs met. Ultimately ruining the persons ability to live happily and affects those around them as they collapse inward.
@jens there are in-between zones of being trans if that feels right to you! The key is, if you would feel better living your gender differently, you can!
You can be non-binary, genderfluid, or one of many other possibilities. You could chose to do no medical steps to change your sex characteristics, you could choose to do only some, or you could choose to change most of your sex characteristics - those are all options. You can also dress in different gender expressions day to day, you could express yourself a mix of ways, or even not change your gender expression at all.
When I started transition, I identified as nonbinary and genderfluid, and it was just about giving myself permission to wear a dress or feminine clothes and makeup when I felt femme and girlie, wear masculine clothes when I didn’t, and wear a mix when I felt somewhere in the middle. I would use different pronouns based on how I presented that day with my friends. And I didn’t know if I wanted to even use hormones or do any procedures, so I didn’t rush into that and let myself explore first.
If it calls to you and think you might find joy there, know that it is okay to explore that, you have a community that will support you, and you can change your mind later if you decide it’s not for you. 💜
@JoscelynTransient I don't know if I got my point across at all, but I want to express my gratitude anyway. Because I can see that your response is meant to be encouraging, and it certainly is kind.
What I want to get across, though, is something else entirely. I guess it's more like this question whether turquoise is a shade of green, or a shade of blue.
There's evidence that this distinction is largely *cultural*. In some cultures it is strongly associated with one, in others with the other.
@JoscelynTransient How I feel about myself is very similar to turquoise.
Cishet folk assume I'm cishet, trans folk may want me to be trans simply because I am not obviously cishet.
I don't feel a need to be in either category.
Now the screenshotted post above, that's a little more on the side of one interpretation, but holding on to the other. I get the reactions folk had on this thread.
I just... want to urge you to also consider that turquoise is turquoise, not green/blue.
@jens it's like, people are so busy deciding whether the turquoise paint fits in the drawer with the blues or the greens, they forget that that's not what art is about.
Every shade is its own thing. Every person is their own person. Paint is for painting and life is for living.
@JoscelynTransient
@Tattie I don't think that was so much the case here, but that would be the extreme, yes.
I run into this issue a fair bit. I have an urge to categorize, and I think it's generally a human urge. In my case, it may even be stronger, because autism makes it uncomfortable when things don't fit.
Once I discovered multiple categories can apply simultaneously, I was a lot happier. And when you then apply duck typing, categories fit the messy world even better.
In that sense,...
@Tattie @JoscelynTransient ... I find that most stuff one encounters can be duck-typed into many categories, and each may provide valuable feedback: if I apply this lens, what does the thing look like?
So I truly do not mind being interpreted as green or blue. It's a necessary thing, IMHO. I just don't like being told, effectively, "because I have viewed you through the blue lens and everything is clear, you must be blue".
That misses the green bits, and vice versa.
Not that it happened here.
@jens gender diversity definitely is something that is different culture to culture, for sure! In some cultures, they have 3, 4, or even more genders. Some of these look similar to what people today would call trans men and trans women, but some don’t. Transness is just a way of understanding some of this based on how things are in Western countries where we were forced to think there is only one way to be a man and one way to be a woman. My wife for example, a Filipina, identifies both as a Bakla and a trans woman because her identity is primarily rooted in her culture.
And the metaphor of turquoise is great! Maybe some people are sky blue and some are pastel pink, but some are dark blue or neon pink or purple or turquoise or yellow and off the spectrum altogether. Some people are told they are blue and discover they are actually purple or pink or maybe even just a different shade of blue. And the words we use are just ways of trying to identify and describe parts of the spectrum to understand what each other are talking about.
@JoscelynTransient THAT I got, and I'm very happy about. That's why I don't want to push back to the point of arguing, either.
Anyway, I hijacked this enough. Thank you for your thoughts!
@jens
> From the outside, it's basically "live as another gender", with a spectrum ranging from "occasionally/for fun" to surgery/name change/etc.
That's also how I understood it for a long time, would probably have cracked years earlier without this wrong understanding.
(Well, knowing about enbies would have helped a lot as well.)
@JoscelynTransient
I, too, thought like that, until I went through the Gender Dysphoria Bible with a highlighter¹… and, wow… (probably still missed a few things to highlight because of strong denial)
I wanted so much to be reborn as a girl as a teen :< then it faded. When I finally cracked, I had been putting myself to sleep by imagining I woke up turned into a woman¹ the next day… for months! (still took me almost 2 weeks to accept I was trans, while still doing that xD)
1: very cis thing to do, right?
@siege The sentence-to-sentence juxtapositions are next level.
"it hurts"/"no pain"
"no desire for change"/"yearn [...] to be reborn"
I hope she figured herself out.
@siege Oh, no judgement. I used to fantasize about waking up one day having been somehow Freaky-Fridayed into a girl's body, so I feel her vibe. Yet it still took me until my late 30s to figure myself out. 
More the English nerd in me being like, "Ah, masterful use of contrast to demonstrate a state of inner turmoil."
@glowtayto i am quietly plotting a freaky-friday marathon on my discord movie night crew.
All films where people swap bodies or create a version of themselves in another body (preferably gender swapping) ala Virtual Sexuality
@siege I used to be in this post and I don’t like it 😅😅😅
…yeah, definitely no signs when you have thought through the exact wording of the demon pact / genie wish…nope, normal cis guy stuff…
CJ "siege" Bellwether
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