LOL. Love this post Marleena!
On the unqualified advice stuff: If you want ONLY qualified advice based upon identical experience it's not possible - no two moments in time are ever identical.
I love to give advice. People PAY me to give it. For a $5,000 retainer I can give an opinion about ANYTHING. And I have a LICENSE saying I'm qualified to give opinions about things I have never done or experienced or which maybe no one ever has.
My entire professional career is about learning about another persons problem, one I have never personally had.
Then I research and learn what rules might or might not apply, to remedying that problem.
I then calculate possible outcomes from various possible remedial actions.
My client picks the final remedial action to pursue, then we put the remedial strategy into motion and hope for da best.
This process is sanctioned by all of society. Maybe we break it up some, law, medicine, psychology, engineering, but the process used by each discipline is identical.
These boards are home to pre-ops and the uncertain, and they study up on their life with incredible seriousness and earnestness. They become "experts" in gender and transsexualism. And some of them are damn smart minds. I read these posts and am in awe of the intellects here. I'm not dumb, God blessed me with enough to land me on the smart side of the IQ bell curve, but some pre-op posters here smoke my ass.
And I note that a lot of girls here qualify their comments, and limit their comments to ground they have covered even though maybe they are not done with a transition (I am in that group).
And how that "am I TS" question gets answered has varied over the times I have been on and off these boards, varying with the personalities who make this forum home for a while. Today's TS forum commentators are different from last years, which are different from the 2005-2006.
And my response to the Q are you TG? If you come here and ask it, you probably have some serious TG issues and no one should assume that person is lost in a pink fog.
And are you TS? My view has changed. I have to say the term is narrower than TG, and it invites a nomenclature debate about the meaning of TS. I personally think there are TS who are not destined for the other side of the gender binary, but who are no less TS than those who are destined for RLE - SRS and life on the other side of the binary. But if you define TS as someone who is only happy on the other side of the gender binary, then such people who aren't going the RLE - SRS route would be genderqueer or gender outlaws or some other name no one can agree upon. So, to someone coming here and asking, the answer is "Maybe" "lets talk about you."
;-)
