About "never fully understanding"...

[Lisa Maren]

Hi everyone

I think I might have hit on something (or at least come to understand or acknowledge something old lol).

I think that what I seek is not so much to understand what I am, per se, but to understand how to think of myself and how to explain myself to others in such a way that none of us will experience any surprises down the road... other than when I come out, of course. lol

I think we can come to an understanding of how to think of ourselves in such a way that we don't feel lost anymore. I do not believe that we all do this by letting go of definition altogether -- some do, but not all.

I think it works like this (the analogy is imperfect, but it works):

I'm a liberal. Liberalism, however, is seen differently by different people and the same argument could be made that I'll never understand my own political beliefs. Yet, I have no doubt at all that I am liberal. Why not? Conservatism is a poor fit for me (duh lol). Centrism feels to me like straddling the proverbial fence... a picket fence. Really, it's the process of elimination coupled with the fact that I share more common beliefs with liberalism than any other mode of political thought that fuels my abiding conviction that I am a liberal.

Is liberalism a perfect description for me? Heck no. Liberals are not any more perfect than anyone else nor is the concept of liberalism a perfect thing. It is, however, the best match and so my feeling of conviction comes, not from a perfect self-understanding, but from the feeling that liberalism is the best match to who I am. I'll never have a complete understanding of myself, but I do understand myself more than enough to identify with liberalism without wavering. That is what is enough for me. It's what feels, to me, like having "arrived at the answer" and I think that's the point.

To rephrase, my political convictions come from knowing what I understand myself to be about and what I understand various political viewpoints to be about. These two things then equip me to identify where I stand on the political spectrum.

Perhaps, since I am having great difficulty figuring out what gender I am, I should understand my quandary as a result of one of two things (or some mixture of both):

1) Lacking understanding of the genders, or of gender itself
2) Lacking understanding of myself. I know who I am politically. Who am I with respect to gender? Which gender values, traits, behaviors, etc (putting aside the traditional labels imposed upon them) are the best match for who I am? Are most of the ones I identify with mostly centered around what I believe femininity to be or what I believe masculinity to be or a mix of the two?

I.e., instead of asking myself what I am, I should be working on understanding the two concepts above. Gender is something completely built in (at least, I believe it is in my particular case), but the understanding of that will look much like my understanding of my political beliefs. I suspect that once I know well enough what I understand gender to be about and what I understand myself to be about, I will know how to think of myself and how to explain myself to others; I will also be able to enjoy the confident feeling of a stable self-understanding.

I feel sure of that.

Hugs,
Lisa

[windycissy]

Wow, that's pretty heavy stuff! But it makes a lot of sense to identify yourself as a liberal, since historically liberals have been much more accepting of diverse lifestyles, and politically the champions of legislation to remove discrimination against GBLTs.

[Kali]

However the analogy falls apart because once you label something like "liberal" the meaning begins to change. The "liberal" of 2007 is not the same as the "liberal" of 1967. However gender remains pretty static.

[Casey Morgan]

I suspect that once I know well enough what I understand gender to be about and what I understand myself to be about, I will know how to think of myself

As best I can remember (I had tried to bury as much of that as I could, once) that's pretty much how it was for me. Once I had a pretty good idea of who I actually was, I could then ask myself based on my understanding of the two if I was male or female. (My answer was "no", but that's another story.) For what it's worth, I'm still not sure exactly how to describe myself to people outside the Transgender community. But your mileage may vary, as they say. It does feel darned nice to understand myself the way I do though.