is it reali all internal?

[Inna]

reading so many now threads about gender this and gender that, I started to remember the movie I have seen some time ago "I am Legend" as one man and a dog and a slew of zombie people remain as sole survivors of the end of man kind. (those zombies weren't that far off from some people I used to know, lol).

Well, here it is where it gets complicated. As I remember the feeling of gender identity was brought when I realized I was a separate entity and my call sign was a boy. Then I looked at girls and also realized I was way more like them then a boy.

The need to realign later in life, when deceit became unbearable, took me over the edge and I did what I could to become what feels like me, a girl!
But then even though I did it for me, I really did it so that others may see me the way I feel, beside me seeing my self as me in the mirror, because outside of the mirror I am still the same as I always was, yet freed from denial and lies.

So if one would take away the society all together, and I was left alone a single survivor, even before my transition I would surely just be my self, and never seek the realignment because there would be no one to remind me of how wrong I was.

So as the glass mirrors reflection is a constant reminder of our dysphoria, so is the mirror reflection of societies pressure emphasizing our discomforts and the need to present as true self!

[suzy1]

That is one h**l of a question Inna.

If you were born alone in a world without people or pictures of people you would have no idea what a woman looked like so then you would have no desire for realignment or concept of it.
But you do know the physical differences between a man and a woman. And it’s that which drove you to realignment.
And the obvious [to me] reason is that you want to look lovely and feminine.:)

Or am I missing the point [It hase been known]:heehee:

SUZY

[Andie Elisabeth]

I don't think that it's all internal. I can cope when I have at least one girl with similar personality in my inner circle who is sort of an anchor to me and I have plenty of alone time when I am not reminded how I look and no one me judges by gender I was assigned, genderfree time. On the other hand when in my inner circle is no such anchor, mostly because of geography reasons, and I have little to none genderfree time it worsens.

I hate being SIRed (-_-)

[Bree-asaurus]

Well, it is all in our heads... so it is internal in that sense.

But even if I was all alone on the planet, I would still hate my penis. I was disgusted by it before I knew I was trans, before anyone else was allowed to see me naked, etc.

As it stands now, the one person I spend every day with, the man I love, sees me naked all the time. He doesn't care. I don't want SRS to make him happy, or anyone else that will never see me naked. I want SRS for me... and that isn't going to change regardless of who I'm with, or if I'm the last person alive on the planet.

[Julia_in_Pa]

Social interaction is the trigger that designs gender variance as it pertains to the everyday connection that the genders have with one another.
You would feel " normal " due to not having barometers gauging gender dysphoria.

The social construct of gender exists in the minds of men and women and is brought forth by the archaic need for procreation.
my body is different than your body so we must breed.

As society progresses we can only hope that the need for population increase is seen as the alternative lifestyle that it is becoming instead of the norm that it currently is.
Without an uncontrollable populace to dictate gender everything becomes a moot issue.
Procreation can then be controlled for the greater good as opposed to the drain on resources that it currently is.

With control comes education as it pertains to society as a whole as opposed to society as a single person.

Once society functions as one then and only then will the human animal become purely genderless.


Julia

[elizabethamy]

But there is something physical, subconscious, tactile about all this...it's not just what's visible in mirrors and in the women we see in daily life...something deep happens which is why we crossdress and which is why feel so much better and so different when we are dressed. I really don't think it's only visual or even a vision of what we would like in our heads...it feels almost..biological?

Bree, I hope that when you are the last one that there is one more left with you -- a really skilled surgeon!

[LeaP]

So as the glass mirrors reflection is a constant reminder of our dysphoria, so is the mirror reflection of societies pressure emphasizing our discomforts and the need to present as true self!

Yes. It is both internal and external. Alternatively, the intersection of the two.

How much of the discomfort is intrinsic vs social? I don't know that it matters, as the island scenario isn't real. That things proceed from an inner sense of sex and gender, I don't doubt at all, though.

The island scenario has been posed differently by gender constructionists, basically along the lines that, if society accepted trans people's differences openly, there would be no need to transition. I disagree. This is belied by the fact that many (most?) transitioned TSs have no desire to retain their "transness" - and that this stems not from ulterior stealth motives, but from a sense of intrinsic integrity.

Lea

[Kathryn Martin]

So if one would take away the society all together, and I was left alone a single survivor, even before my transition I would surely just be my self, and never seek the realignment because there would be no one to remind me of how wrong I was.

If you were the only person on this planet, you would still be you. And you would never experienced anything else but wholeness. But if you were suddenly picked up by other human beings what would you be: that is the question. For me, I would have always been Kathryn not a question. It seems to me who we are is whole, it's society that f*cks it all up.

[Noemi]

Inna,

You are on it. It is the relative universe, that is how it functions in this realm(that sounds so sci fi LOL!)but the correct word.
Our gender is absolute, we are born, with out the paradigm. Once we are exposed to all the that is our world(the paradigm) we compare and collect information and compare it to that information we possess. We are expressions of the universe, as if it wants to know how it would feel to be us male/female and function in our current environment. Perhaps we are transmitting all of this info and it is collected and becomes the new developments to the paradigm changing what is relative of course(of course).....I want to make jokes here but this is how things work.
Great post and you are so pretty, and slim!

[Inna]

Inna,

You are on it. It is the relative universe, that is how it functions in this realm(that sounds so sci fi LOL!)but the correct word.
Our gender is absolute, we are born, with out the paradigm. Once we are exposed to all the that is our world(the paradigm) we compare and collect information and compare it to that information we possess. We are expressions of the universe, as if it wants to know how it would feel to be us male/female and function in our current environment. Perhaps we are transmitting all of this info and it is collected and becomes the new developments to the paradigm changing what is relative of course(of course).....I want to make jokes here but this is how things work.
Great post and you are so pretty, and slim!

Hey I like it, the quote about me being slim, lol, but more so your perception of universe and all expressions of and by as the same. Sort of me looking at the mirror seeing me looking at the mirror seeing me...... and so on. Through science I have learned the intricacies of quantum mechanical nature, through philosophy I learned to unlearn and distrust the obvious (sort of same as quantum mechanical picture so to speak) but through spirituality and abandonment of all wisdom I tooled, I can clearly see that God, universe, me and you are the single multiple expression of omnipotent self looking in the mirror seeing it self. So what is there to lose, simply put, nothing honey! For if what I do will cause my death then such will only return me to the dreamer of my dream in which I awake to dream again and again.

[KellyJameson]

The movie for me that represents living with gender dysphoria is Altered States where he goes in search for original man but I related it to searching for my authentic self that was lost when I tried to be what I am not because others more powerful than me as a child insisted on it.

My authentic self is when I'm not self conscious and thinking about what I'm doing or why I'm doing it. It is going back into the past before I became aware of others watching and possibly judging me.

I do not try to act like a female because that would be inauthentic and a continuation of trying to act like a male. When I stopped trying to act and just was me that is when my feminine persona was forcefully expressed but this is not my definition of a feminine persona but societies and I have little interest in what is masculine or feminine according to others I just want the freedom to be me and be free from the learned fear that being me threatens others because it is not the expression of how they think things should be.

I have been taught that I'm feminine through comparison of my behavior to that of men and women as well as the negative reactions from men and women because I do not act like how they expect a person to act in the body of a male.

This is for me a state of mind that slightly contours and touches all of my behavior. How I move, What I'm attracted to or not, How I express myself emotionally. My mind finds it easy to think (feel) intuitively and empathetically when many if not most men have minds that work more on the surface in a rational practical ,logical approach to solving and interacting with the world, I easily understand a womens motives and reasons for her behavior and emotions but I have to work at understanding a mans. In general I experience men as foreign but they intrique me where with woman they at first are attracted to the fact that I relate to them and understand them but than they begin to fear it because I'm able to get inside them so deeply that they are left feeling like they have no privacy, as if I can read their very mind. Consistently women have told me they never have met another man like me but I was slow in understanding the reasons.

Most men and women have problems relating to me beyond a superficial level because I am the opposite of what they expect to find and they become uneasy. I would be this way regardless of life experiences or if I looked in a mirror because I have always been the same and can feel what makes me "me" all the way back to the first years of my life, what I express (feel) is innate not learned and this is what has insisted on my adopting a female identity because the male identity does not fit into the shape I was born with, never has and never will.This identity was learned but I could only learn (become) that which my mind was capable of.

It feels normal to have breasts because my natural innate energy that I was born with makes it so, not because they are symbols to others or to myself that I'm female because once again I do not care if others think I'm female and certainly not because I experience it as erotic, it just feels normal like I have always had them.

For men the brain has to be masculinized and from male to male to the degree this change takes place their behavior will be influenced after birth. Some say that Autism is a form of hyper-masculinization of the brain and if this is true than nature probably creates the opposite expression as well, a hyper-feminization of the brain, if so I think I would be a good candidate to do the research on.

Slipping into femininity is like slipping into a warm bath, very easy, natural and comforting because I do not have to work at it and I will not work at it. I rejected being a man as unnatural but I rebel against someone else telling me how to act like a woman, that gets me angry.