I think this is a good conversation. My compliments to you Adina.
Gender comes out of are sexual differentiation. if there were not two sexes making everyone 'sexless" there would be no such thing as gender.
Gender needs contrasts because it is based on measurements just as sexual differentiation is.
There is a sexual binary created by nature that human beings have built on that they refer to as gender and gender roles. Gender binary as an extension of the sexual binary.
The gender binary is largely about sex and sexual relations which is why transsexuals are viewed as so threatening (abnormal)
If you believe as I do that transsexuals are created by nature and not as a social human construct than you look for your gender within nature and than by extension into the human social sphere.
Anyone can call themselves transgendered or transsexual and it is very possible to transition and not be a transsexual. Changing the outside will not change the physical brain to a degree great enough to change the physical experience and expression of gender. (sexual differentiation of the brain)
Gender is cut into you somewhere between when egg meets sperm and in the first years of life when the brain is still organizing itself but the template was laid in the womb and probably genetically influenced.
Transsexuals are born regardless of transitioning.
Transitioning does not make you a woman but only allows you to live as you already are.
It feels very much like a "becoming" because what is inside is allowed to bloom. Much like a seed holds its potential inside but needs the right environment to bring it forth.
You can breath when before you were choking. Things now feel natural.
Transitioning takes where nature stopped that affects how the transsexual can live and extends it.
It is shaping the external to conform to the internal. Modern medicine simply takes what transsexuals have been doing since the beginning "farther" but people have always shaped the outside to reflect the inside as they are "compelled" to do
I have found that the binary becomes almost meaningless once you transition but beforehand it is all you focus on as a part of the complusion to understand gender from living outside it.
I have also found I think far less about being perceived "authentically" because I am. It is when you are not that you are compelled to "be perceived as such"
I can see it in how I dress which is largely jean jacket, jeans and boots. I have a closet full of skirts but would only wear them for a reason other than "gender".
I think there is a tension carried inside to be perceived as you know yourself to be (authentically) and the distance you are removed from this experience by others.
This can create a type of fanaticism from the frantic need to be perceived and the fear you will not be and partly why some transsexuals are so militant.
This militancy is largely absent from those who transition and are able to go stealth. They have no need for it.
I do not consciously "act female" nor am I militant. There is no need for it.
Speaking to misogyny males are socialized "to not be females" because to be female is to be weak and "less than" males. Females are "pathetic" because they have no "power" and "resented" when they do.
Misogyny is a form of projection where the male rejects those unwanted "weak" parts of himself onto the female which he than "hates" (as hating her) but they are actually the parts of himself he hates from being immersed in the collective hate of women by men.
These men are very dangerous to transsexuals because they represent "failure" to men "to be men" which is something many men are terrified by.
Sex/children make women dangerous to men making her even easier to hate when he is already filled with hate for himself as that which is represented in her.
Hate is always personal.
