At what point ,,if ever does our fem personna meld with our male side and be at ease with both personnas??Or am I over thinking this?
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At what point ,,if ever does our fem personna meld with our male side and be at ease with both personnas??Or am I over thinking this?
Is it fair to respond to your question with a question, Suzy? Do you feel you have two personas, one female and the other female?
I really cannot say that in my case. In evidence, one of my GG friends remarked, “you’re the same person as ever, just with nicer clothes.” I took that as a compliment.
I think just about everyone would give you a different answer to that Suzy - we're all very different. As for me, I would not interpret my personas as melding, but rather influencing and informing one another to the benefit of both, and I like it like that. I'm at ease with both, but that's just my approach.
i dont think my fem side and male side were ever that far apart so them melding together happened pretty early in my dressing
I'm not sure I have two different personas to meld together. I figure when I'm dressed en femme I'm still pretty much the same person I've always been. I just happen to have much nicer clothes on. Maybe the only difference is I feel much more comfortable in my femme attire.
I floundered in my 20s. Started going out all the time around 32. A year or 2 of that then I started growing my hair then ditched the wig and plucked my eyebrows. Probably around 35 I started laser which took a few years to cover (uncover? ) my full body. Kept going from there. My personality has always been one.
I think my male side and female sided blended into one a few months ago and I very happy with myself. I am Diane and Diane is me, it's that simple.
My femme side took over because it so much easier to socialize. I'd male fail badly because my clothes didn't fit and my presentation fell into "uncanny valley" territory.
I'm no help, Suzy.:straightface:
After arriving here 20+ years ago I excitedly waited for the "woman inside me" to show herself!:battingeyelashes:
For 2 years I waited, and waited, and waited----finally I gave up on her!:sad:
No matter how I'm dressed, no matter how hot and female I look in my mirror?:daydreaming:
Inside I'm still just ME!:doh:
For my part, I'm intentional about it. I never wanted to perceive or believe myself to be two different personas. I'm just me.
It was almost immediate for me.
At the moment Emily and I are quite separate although we are the same person. Full Emily only shows a few times a year other than that yes there is a collision. I creep bits of her into my everyday life when ever I can buy underdressing and occasional lippy in male mode.
Also I feel like Emily whilst I read these posts. Sometimes I respond as her and sometimes as male depending on the questions
It is called merging in the expert's lingo. It doesn't happen to everyone, but is a common pattern in most. You can think of it this way. It is difficult for your brain to manage two identities within one personality. So there is a tendency for your brain to "weave" them together to reduce discomfort caused by conflicts which brains really don't like. Your sense of self becomes one that can switch on and off behavioral traits in accordance with the circumstances your brain perceives exist in your environment. When with women you tend to use a lot more of the female-like behavior and thinking patterns and with males those are reduced and the male-like behaviors are used. However, in people like us both are usually active at the same time. That way we present as more psychologically androgynous - a lot of gender neutral behaviors mixed with male-like and female-like behaviors that round out the identity.
That said, a male may also exhibit almost exclusively female-like behaviors and sense of self and the reverse for women who are the same way. These behaviors come mostly from adapting to various experiences we have had, especially when young. But they are not fixed and the brain can quickly rewire those neural networks to fit immediate circumstances. However, there is likely a foundational state that is established by the genes that control social behavior and are involved in forming a fundamental personality pattern that is not very specific for male or female but can be developed to exhibit the behaviors that more or less work within the culture you are a part of.
In a nutshell that is the way it is currently thought gender behaviors develop and operate. But an important point to keep in mind, not many of those behaviors are linked to your sex even though they sometimes seem to be sex linked. The sex linkage sensation is more a function of your cultural expectations but the linkages don't actually link up except for the gender aspects of reproductive behavior. Pretty complicated but it works very well and is not limited to humans. Similar brain functions occur in social primates, mice, and probably at least any of at least mammals that have fairly social life styles. They probably also work in birds and maybe some reptiles, but that apparently has never been investigated to see if it works the same way in them. Loners may have it but really don't need it as they are not very social. So, in them it remains fairly dormant.
I think I see myself as two selves, public and private. The private self is an integration of feminine into my masculine identity. The public self needs to hide most of that femininity in order to protect those around me. The private side is real and authentic. The public side is a performance or actual persona as I understand Jung's definition of persona.
The integrated/authentic self is vulnerable and the persona is a defensive mechanism.
My femininity is ALWAYS a part of who am and that part completes my masculinity. It does not replace it.
Some days I do not think I even have a persona. If it do, there is just one of us.
I don't think I have two personas. I have one but the balance between the femininity and maskulinity is not stable. I am always a man when among other people but I naturally lean towards femininity when alone. It guess my natural personality has been formatted and strained by the education and society's expectations.
It depends what you mean by having two personas. When in female mode do you feel like a different inner self? Or are you just acting, pretending to be different because it's pleasing?
In female mode I can sometimes be more conscious about how I move, maybe some postures are slightly different when I take pictures, clearly more "posing", but all in all I am just good old me in a female presentation, and no actual feminine inner self seems to want to reveal itself. The feminine traits if any always were there, boy or girl mode notwithstanding.
It depends. If you comfortable with being non-binary, you are, by definition, at ease. On the other hand, if you are "gender fluid", there may never be a point of equilibrium. And on still another hand, it may be that you are having trouble accepting that you are trans. Professional help can make sorting it out a lot easier.
I'm not sure I have "sides" that need to meld - I have various facets of my personality, that, taken together, make up the person that I am. Masculine and feminine, traveler and stay-at-home, book reader and movie watcher, whatever - all parts that make up ME all the time!
Suzy, you're a long way from overthinking it. Here's what overthinking really looks like:
I've struggled for years to FIND my identity at all. It seemed like I just mirrored the "personna" of whatever group I was with. The "work" me was different from the "home" me which was different from the "visiting family" me, which was different from the "hanging with the guys" me, which was ... (I hope you get the picture). It didn't seem like ANY of these were the genuine me. They were all masks that I wore to fit in.
If it was too difficult to fit in, I learned how to disappear into the background so well that people would forget that I was even there.
Now, add a desperate desire to have been born (and to BE) female.
Couple that with an almost toxic need for acceptance as "normal", and you end up with a desperate struggle between "him" and "her." It got so bad that I literally had arguments between the two voices in my head. I honestly thought that I was going to end up institutionalized over it, it was so bad.
Now add a major bout of depression, at least partly due to my efforts to suppress half of myself.
This drove me to finally seek out professional help where, surprise of surprises, I wasn't condemned for my feminine urges. Instead I was "given permission" to seek out and explore my Sara-ness. In fact, for a while, I was even on hormones and transition bound.
Eventually, the "war of the personas" settled into an uneasy truce, which mellowed into a cooperative effort, and finally (largely unnoticed) morphed into a singular blended whole that is "me" today.
Who am I today? What label do I use? I'm still not sure, but I figure I'm some sort of "trans-something" person.
I still overthink things. I still worry about being "accepted" and blending in, but I've given up obsessing over it or being destroyed if I don't (see my "last trip" posting in the NB section).
TLDR: IMO -The two sides can only meld when they both can accept (and love?) each other.
I really only have one side, I am just a Guy that loves to dressup and look Pretty,
For me they are separate. I am either Jamie or Jim, but never a mix of the two.
I think our fem persona is always with us. We may not think about it all the time, but she is still there influencing our lives. Sometimes we might try to ignore her but we soon find that we are happier if we embrace her.
To a hammer everything looks like a nail... right?
If one visits a website devoted to crossdressing, you can imagine the questions that matter have to do with who I am and how do I present myself to the world. Since most of us were born as little boys, our affection for things feminine will doubtless put us at odds with the world we occupy. I know there are some among us whose mothers wanted another or a first daughter who dressed us in pretty things, but that certainly didn't solve the problem because when we went to school we used the boy's lavatory and the boy's locker room during phys ed.
That we cultivated ways of presenting ourselves to the world to contend with confusing feelings about who we are isn't surprising. A persona is just that... a way of presenting ourselves. It is never who we are... that goes much deeper. It doesn't have anything to do with what we wear or how we look. The challenge eternally is to learn how to be simply who we are. Self-acceptance is where we will find ourselves but that invariably involves a deep dive into what we've done to survive along the way. And that very often leads us to the shame we've carried about who we are and what we've done. The solution is not in the next attractive outfit.
So here we are asking important questions with others who've often struggled in exactly the same ways we do. That is comforting. Somewhere along the way we might even find peace.
I think society has created female personna and male personna concepts to stick everyone into a nice box. Since I was born with male genitalia I "must" act and "feel" in a manner that fits into societal molds. My PTSD counselor's position is each of us are born with some genetic makeup of the other sex; in some it is more than others. Perhaps that may explain the great angst some experience and ascribe to "being born into the wrong body." Me? If people were to be accepting I'd feel comfortable expressing myself differently as the day/week/year develops. Since the earliest days of remembering I was always draw to colors. I was a good artist in my youth. Now, I like growing colorful flowers, and my favorite attire in male or female attire is colors and patterns; graphic men's tee shirts, dress shirts, ties to women's colorful floral dresses and colorful undergarments. One one societal extreme I functioned as male infantryman in Vietnam (Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster) to doing domestic chores, baking, etc.
Many days I look like an unshaven shaggy bear wearing torn clothes. Other days it may be a floral dress on a closely shaved face. I don't feel any different. Maybe, if left to my devices it is nothing more than how I wish to express myself at that time. It's rather simple. As I stated in the beginning, there are some where the genetics have created havoc.
True multiple personalities is exceedingly rare.
Most often, what is being experienced, is allowing ourselves to express and feel the feminine traits which we don't allow ourselves to feel, because we don't think it's acceptable. After all, most males grow up being told that behaving or feeling things that we think are restricted to what girls do, is absolutely prohibited, and it's the worst shameful thing, for a boy / man to feel or think in any way that a girl/woman might. To this day, both mothers and fathers, exert the belief that boys must NEVER behave like girls in any way, that it's the absolutely the worst, most shameful thing a boy could ever do.
And so we repress it, as deep into our subconscious that we can. And when the feelings emerge, we distance ourselves from them by trying to attribute it to some 'female side' personality, hoping to pretend that it isn't what we really are. We assign those feminine feelings to 'our female side', insisting that 'it's not really who I am', it's just 'a side of me, but not the REAL ME', because we can't accept that we have all those feminine feelings.
Reading back through so many forum posts, there are an astronomical number of comments about 'it's just a side, it's not the REAL ME', in desperate attempts to deny what people are feeling, all because our society simply cannot accept males having what are perceived to be stereotypical feminine feelings.
I'm now 67; and had thought that social acceptance would have changed over the past 50 years. But, it turns out it has not.
I'm here now for 15 years; and still, the most common posts are of men desperately hoping to express that the stereotypical feelings that they experience, are just 'a side' of their personality, absolutely incapable of accepting that it's a true part of who they are.
I'm not chastising anyone. This isn't their fault. We all grew up with this, and believe me, I understand why you can't accept what you are. I went through it myself, and it took years to accept.
But accept it, we must, because until we do, we will continue to deal with all the internal conflicts that come with it.
Be who you are. You don't have to do it publicly. But try to accept it, even if you feel you have to hide it from the world, because you don't want to deal with all the problems of being OUT will cause.
Very good, Sometimes-miss. I could not agree more.
I have noticed some feel they have two inside them. I am just one. One who would rather slip into a dress than jeans and do my things like pull and engine out of the car or make holiday crafts. I like to call myself a boy in a dress. But it's such a lovely one with all it's accessories...now let's try not to get grease on it. God forbid we snag our shiny tights...
rreally awesome post sometimes_miss!
I have come to terms accepting who I am but that don't change the situation we often find ourselves in. To me CD is part of me and tbh I like the unaccepting taboo element but also wish to be accepted by loved ones. Very conflicted I know this is the real me but I still see me as two personas or maybe refer to me as separate identities. Part of me wants to meld the two together but part wants me to be separate. I guess while I have a He name and a She name them it will always be that way. You can't refer yourself as two different names and be the same. Otherwise I'd just be "Dave" who dresses as he pleases (not my real name lol)
I think sums up my feelings and approachQuote:
Originally Posted by Kris Burton
WOW,,,Ty all for such thoughtful responses. I can it seems to glean a bit of everyone`s comments into my personna. Its just that I feel like I`m so lucky to have such feelings of at times of diff personnas, but still know that this is me, confused at times, but so relaxed now and comforting now that I`m in total acceptance of me and my needs. Even my wife has said that I`m much nicer and easier to talk with when `Susan` and that I`m a nicer person. Hmmmm. I still love that Taboo element i guess, as EmilyShy just stated.
I have only one persona: John as a.man. I never pretend I'm a woman even though I look like a woman in my appearance and clothing.
In the beginning the duality was cool. I could look good as a woman yet also look good as a guy. many. If my friends joked how we would make good secret agents. We all had this secret we were hiding and proud of how well we could hide it.
after a while the fun of the challenge wears off and then it's just like at least for me.
Why have 2 different sets of underwear 2 different sets of pretty much everything. I started just becoming 1 person. Now I know I am just 1 person but that goes beyond this question. It probably took about 5 years or so to go through this process to just be myself.
Sometimes I think I'm gender fluid, switching from Steffi to boy me and back in an instance. Kind of like Clark Kent changing into superman in a phone booth, but without the phone booth. Thinking about that, how does Clark Kent change into Superman without the phone booth?
Getting back to the point, boy me is an introvert. In fact he pins the introvert scale according to Myers-Briggs. Steffi is an extrovert. Introducing Steffi into my boy life is converting me into an extroverted introvert.
For example, I often complement GGs on their dress or nail polish. I used to think that an introvert wouldn't walk up to a complete stranger and make such a personal comment. I was sure that Steffi was coming in from behind the boy facade. Now I wonder if boy me is becoming more extroverted.
I have always been a male that looks forward to every opportunity too fully dress and enjoy my feminine side. For me both needs have always been a part of me. I have noticed that I get older my femside has become more an important part of my thoughts and actions. Not sure if a collision occured but it sure has evolved.
I have been trying to integrate both sides of me into one person for some time now, but it hasn't been easy.