Page 1 of 1 [ 7 posts ] 

Dessie
Pileated woodpecker
Pileated woodpecker

User avatar

Joined: 15 May 2011
Age: 31
Gender: Female
Posts: 177

04 Sep 2011, 10:48 pm

Aw hell. :oops: I don't know why I always feel so embarassed posting about stuff like this.

I'm female. Biologically speaking, I guess: I've got all of the required parts to be considered female and I was born that way. Thing is, a lot of the time I wish I didn't have them. I wish I didn't have breasts (or mostly I wish that they didn't get in the way so much). I wish I didn't have a uterus and get a period every month.

I'm not a very feminine person: I hate to play on gender stereotypes here, but: I almost never wear makeup (when I do it's like costume makeup for Halloween and such); I almost never wear skirts or dresses or high heels, I don't devote hours a day to my hair or carry a purse, or any of the things like that.

As far as sexual orientation goes....I still don't know. I've been interested in guys; I've been interested in girls; I've been more interested in girls than guys. But I've never really acted on any of those interests though....

I don't want to be male though....I don't want to have a penis and I don't really have many (stereotypically) male traits.

I remember this personality inventory I had to do for a psych class last year. It was to determine one's gender by determining what traits a person had....Male=agression and Female=compassion (just as examples of traits).

The results were Male: high on male traits, low on female; Female: high on female traits, low on male, and Androgynous: high on both male and female traits.

I didn't really fall into a category, as I was very low on both male and female traits....

Since then, I've been wondering. Is it possible to not have a gender? Or to be something that doesn't fit neatly into any gender stereotype?

It's not that I don't like being female, I just kind of don't like the stuff that goes with it. Not on/in my own body at least.

I'm female because that's what the world tells me I am everyday. But really I'm just me.

I'm mostly just wondering if anyone else has had an experience like mine and how they deal with it.



Jory
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 2 Jun 2011
Gender: Male
Posts: 17,520
Location: Tornado Alley

05 Sep 2011, 2:05 am

mori_pastel
Sea Gull
Sea Gull

User avatar

Joined: 11 May 2011
Age: 32
Gender: Female
Posts: 219
Location: GA, USA

06 Sep 2011, 3:51 am

Dessie wrote:
Aw hell. :oops: I don't know why I always feel so embarassed posting about stuff like this.


Don't worry. I say some really embarrassing stuff here. Hope you don't think I'm too weird. >_<

Quote:
I'm female. Biologically speaking, I guess: I've got all of the required parts to be considered female and I was born that way. Thing is, a lot of the time I wish I didn't have them. I wish I didn't have breasts (or mostly I wish that they didn't get in the way so much). I wish I didn't have a uterus and get a period every month.


I'm pretty OK with my body, but I'm with you on the uterus and period. I'm curious, what do you think about your face? Personally, despite a fairly feminine outward appearance (i.e. I'm pretty curvy. By my standards, anyway.) I think my face is pretty masculine. Or gender-neutral, anyway.

Quote:
I'm not a very feminine person: I hate to play on gender stereotypes here, but: I almost never wear makeup (when I do it's like costume makeup for Halloween and such); I almost never wear skirts or dresses or high heels, I don't devote hours a day to my hair or carry a purse, or any of the things like that.


Same on all counts, except I carry a purse because I'm a stuff-person. I feel kind of naked without a huge bag of stuff (mostly my ipod, DS, books, notebooks, and so on). My "purse" really isn't a purse so much as a huge, canvas bag that my mom thinks is ugly. xD

My mom is huge on appearances. She was a cheerleader in high school, which is stereotypical to say, but she fits the stereotype well. She's also blond. But that's another horrible stereotype. Anyway, she's so big on appearances that she'll still correct me and my siblings in public if we don't say "yes ma'am" and mind our P's & Q's. She's so big on appearances that up until I turned 13, she picked out my clothes and curled my hair every day of school. Me not being big on appearances drives her absolutely nuts, especially since I'm her firstborn. After my sister hit puberty and turned into a mini-her, she laid off some, but before that we didn't get along well.

It absolutely sucks, being told that you've got to look a certain way or dress a certain way to be liked. It sucks worse coming from your parents, because it comes with the implication that you have to be a certain way for them to love you. It also sucks when your friends drag you clothes shopping and you feel like a freak while you try to feign interest, wondering all the while what the hell is wrong with you and why there's nobody in the world like you. If you're there, I feel for you. The only advice I can give to you is to wait for it to get better. Maybe one day your parents will accept you as you are. Maybe one day it'll stop mattering. Maybe one day you'll have friends who get you hate shopping for that perfect shade of lipstick because, seriously, they're all just shades of red. Waiting it out has been working pretty well for me.

Quote:
As far as sexual orientation goes....I still don't know. I've been interested in guys; I've been interested in girls; I've been more interested in girls than guys. But I've never really acted on any of those interests though....

I don't want to be male though....I don't want to have a penis and I don't really have many (stereotypically) male traits.


OK, here I am going to say some really embarrassing and fairly sexual stuff because there is no textbook on this nonsense! Most everyone in the world gets it easy. Tab A goes into Slot B, grow up, get married in a white dress, get the white picket fence and the 2.5 children. The rest of us just get to wake up one day to the horrible realization that something isn't working right. Things aren't going the way that everyone assured us they would. Something's wrong, and it's wrong with us. So, I am going to share the incredibly embarrassing story of how the heck I figured this nonsense out because there was no textbook to help me figure this out and I'm thinking maybe it might help you. So just, um, ignore the awkward parts if you don't find this helpful and it actually freaks you out.

In high school, I fell onto the yaoi bandwagon. (JIC, yaoi is a Japanese term typically referring to media, typically comics or cartoons, that focus on relationships between gay males, where the target audience is straight women.) Seeing two manga guys kissing was the first time I can ever remember finding anything to be attractive. But, as it turns out, liking yaoi doesn't make you straight. Which makes absolutely no sense and had me confused for several moons.

Basically, first point I'm getting to here is the kind of (for lack of a better word) porn you like DOES NOT necessarily define your sexuality. It is absolute, complete nonsense, but sometimes people just work like that. Sometimes ideas are sexier than reality. So don't make the mistake of assuming that just because you like the idea of something, you'll like the actual something.

A guy came on to me, I kissed him, it sucked. Same story, different guy, it still sucked. It was like pressing two pairs of lips together. That was it. None of the magic I felt just watching two cartoon guys kiss in black and white. We might as well have been rubbing elbows for all I got out of it. I started wondering if it wasn't those guys but guys in general.

Don't freak out if kisses go bad. It's silly. It could be ANYTHING. It could be the guy, it could be all guys, it could be where you are, it could be what you're thinking about, it could be what went on before hand, it could be a thousand different things. The only way to know for sure is to stick with it and do some soul-searching. And even if you think you know which gender you prefer, you never know when "that special someone" will come along and prove just how little you know about yourself.

So, I freaked the hell out, thought I was completely asexual and would spend the rest of my life alone. Then (true story, bro) I saw a chick belly dancing on stage during a school play. I looked away because I can be a horrible prude and that was just my knee-jerk reaction to anything sexual. Only this time I felt the little twinge I'd ignored a thousand times before and a little voice in my head says "You wanted to know, now look." So I did. Then I freaked out again. I spent the next year freaking out and trying to find some sure-fire way to tell. I looked at pictures of naked people, didn't work. I tried finding actual porn, realized I had no idea how, and gave up because I was scared of what I'd find if I tried too hard.

Guess what? There is no sexuality test. Which is another one of those things that sounds like it makes no sense but really does. You'd think if you tied someone down to a chair and flashed fifty nude pics up on a wall, they'd be able to tell you which ones made funny feelings in their pants and which didn't. More often than not, it DOESN'T WORK like that. Which is lame because the question itself is so deceptively simple. Do you like guys or do you like girls? Only it's not simple at all for those of us who don't wind up with the answer everyone expects us to have.

The only way that I managed to figure this nonsense out was by connecting sex to my own physical body. Not in a literal sense of going out and having sex with people, but in my head. I stopped thinking about "is he/she sexy?" and I stopped looking to any sort of pornography. So what if A & B are super sexy when they kiss? It doesn't mean I'm attracted to A or B. The way I figured it out was by imagining what body parts I would actually like to touch. And it was more than just imagining whether I'd like to touch guy-parts or girl-parts. Actually, thinking about that was just as confusing and unhelpful as looking at the nude pics. . I imagined people half-dressed, fully-dressed, focused on specific parts of people, focused on clothes, and so on. But the important part was I imagined myself in those situations. I wasn’t thinking about characters in a book or an anime. I wasn’t thinking about the people. I was thinking about myself and what I would do and what I would like. That was the important part, finally connecting sex to my own body.

OK, now comes the really weird awkward part that I was alluding to earlier.

Something that really worries me sometimes is that I honestly think I could live happy without a vagina. Which ties back into this whole "gender" question. What is more vital to womanhood than a vagina and all the nonsense attached to it? I don't like mine. In fact, I hate it. It hurts, it bleeds, and it generally causes a nuisance of itself at least once a month. I am OK with all of my body except for that. Maybe you don't experience this at all, but it really kind of worries me more than anything so I just thought I'd mention it.

Quote:
I remember this personality inventory I had to do for a psych class last year. It was to determine one's gender by determining what traits a person had....Male=agression and Female=compassion (just as examples of traits).

The results were Male: high on male traits, low on female; Female: high on female traits, low on male, and Androgynous: high on both male and female traits.

I didn't really fall into a category, as I was very low on both male and female traits....


Personally, I think those tests are all BS. They're geared towards the majority, but falling outside that doesn't make you not male or female. Also, the test shouldn't have scored "androgynous" as displaying copious amounts of male/female traits, it should have been an equal amount of both.

Quote:
Since then, I've been wondering. Is it possible to not have a gender? Or to be something that doesn't fit neatly into any gender stereotype?

It's not that I don't like being female, I just kind of don't like the stuff that goes with it. Not on/in my own body at least.

I'm female because that's what the world tells me I am everyday. But really I'm just me.

I'm mostly just wondering if anyone else has had an experience like mine and how they deal with it.


Like I said earlier (probably even two or three times earlier), you're born and the world has all these expectations for you. Then you grow up believing you're just like everybody else, until all of the sudden you're not. Something makes you different. And different doesn't feel like a good thing. And there's never any answers for how and why you're so different. As simple as the questions seem, there are no easy answers. And it sucks for those of us who wind up outside the bounds of normal. We didn't ask or choose to be like this, we just woke up one day and realized that the way everyone else is isn't the way we are, and now we're beating out own trails through the thorny wilderness instead of following the crowd down the beaten path. And at the beginning it feels like being lost. There are no answers, only questions and you've got no idea which way to turn to get out of this wilderness you're in. And when we do eventually find answers, they're never perfect explanations. There's never any undeniable proof. At the end of the day, you're probably always just going to be you. Labels will provide as much trouble as they do help.

Best we can hope for is to find other people like us, wandering around, looking for answers. And maybe we'll never find someone exactly like us, but chances are we'll find someone out there who gets us, maybe even better than we get ourselves.

But enough with these silly Hallmark metaphors.

Did you know that a lot of what you talk about here can be related to Asperger's? Not fitting gender stereotypes, not having a strong gender identity... I love what Rudy Simone says in her book Aspergirls:

". . . now I finally recognize myself in other women. This is something I was never able to do before; I have never identified with my female classmates, peers, and certainly not with media representations of what a female is and should be."

She's got a whole chapter dedicated to everything you're talking about.

This probably sounds weird, but it helps me to think about what I would be like if I were a guy. When I do, I feel like I wouldn't be any better off. I'd still be this silly creature who doesn't really fit in anywhere, I'd just be a little different. Plus, when I really start thinking about it, I realize I have some pretty feminine traits. I hand-flap and jump up and down when I stim. It looks pretty weird on a 20 year old girl, but I think it would look even weirder on a guy. The kinds of traits I value in myself I express in a way that is probably feminine. Kindness makes me sweet, for instance. Physically, I think I move more like a girl. I have an internal focus on problems as opposed to an external one, which is generally more feminine, I think. In a lot of ways, I'm starting to think it's lucky I ended up a girl. I may not be very good at being a girl, but I'd be a lot worse at being a guy.

Yeah, sorry this is so long and nonsensical.



Dessie
Pileated woodpecker
Pileated woodpecker

User avatar

Joined: 15 May 2011
Age: 31
Gender: Female
Posts: 177

09 Sep 2011, 4:54 pm

Jory wrote:


Wow. I wish I'd noticed that thread before. Thanks for sharing that. :)



Dessie
Pileated woodpecker
Pileated woodpecker

User avatar

Joined: 15 May 2011
Age: 31
Gender: Female
Posts: 177

09 Sep 2011, 5:20 pm

Thanks for the reply mori_pastel. :D Reading through it was actually very eye opening for me.

mori_pastel wrote:
I'm curious, what do you think about your face?


My face...the shape of my eyes and lips is really feminine, but other than that my features are fairly androgynous, I think.

When I have my (already really) short hair pulled back, people sometimes have a difficult time determining if I'm male or female. I've been called "sir" many times before in person and over the phone (my voice is very low and monotone). When I was in high school people were kinda mean about it, they even picked out a guys name (as an insult) and always called me by that instead of my own name. :x

mori_pastel wrote:
Guess what? There is no sexuality test. Which is another one of those things that sounds like it makes no sense but really does. You'd think if you tied someone down to a chair and flashed fifty nude pics up on a wall, they'd be able to tell you which ones made funny feelings in their pants and which didn't. More often than not, it DOESN'T WORK like that. Which is lame because the question itself is so deceptively simple. Do you like guys or do you like girls? Only it's not simple at all for those of us who don't wind up with the answer everyone expects us to have.


I'm figuring that out. It all seems so easy for everyone else, and for me there doesn't seem to be any easy answer.... :?

mori_pastel wrote:
Something that really worries me sometimes is that I honestly think I could live happy without a vagina. Which ties back into this whole "gender" question. What is more vital to womanhood than a vagina and all the nonsense attached to it? I don't like mine. In fact, I hate it. It hurts, it bleeds, and it generally causes a nuisance of itself at least once a month. I am OK with all of my body except for that. Maybe you don't experience this at all, but it really kind of worries me more than anything so I just thought I'd mention it.


I do experience that. There are parts of me I could be much happier without, and it actually makes me feel a bit better to know that I'm not the only one.

mori_pastel wrote:
Like I said earlier (probably even two or three times earlier), you're born and the world has all these expectations for you. Then you grow up believing you're just like everybody else, until all of the sudden you're not. Something makes you different. And different doesn't feel like a good thing. And there's never any answers for how and why you're so different. As simple as the questions seem, there are no easy answers. And it sucks for those of us who wind up outside the bounds of normal. We didn't ask or choose to be like this, we just woke up one day and realized that the way everyone else is isn't the way we are, and now we're beating out own trails through the thorny wilderness instead of following the crowd down the beaten path. And at the beginning it feels like being lost. There are no answers, only questions and you've got no idea which way to turn to get out of this wilderness you're in. And when we do eventually find answers, they're never perfect explanations. There's never any undeniable proof. At the end of the day, you're probably always just going to be you. Labels will provide as much trouble as they do help.

Best we can hope for is to find other people like us, wandering around, looking for answers. And maybe we'll never find someone exactly like us, but chances are we'll find someone out there who gets us, maybe even better than we get ourselves..


Some of that feels very familiar; it also gives me some hope too. :?

mori_pastel wrote:
Did you know that a lot of what you talk about here can be related to Asperger's? Not fitting gender stereotypes, not having a strong gender identity... I love what Rudy Simone says in her book Aspergirls:

". . . now I finally recognize myself in other women. This is something I was never able to do before; I have never identified with my female classmates, peers, and certainly not with media representations of what a female is and should be."

She's got a whole chapter dedicated to everything you're talking about.


Really? I've heard of the book, but I've never read it. Now I'm going to. :)

mori_pastel wrote:
Yeah, sorry this is so long and nonsensical.


Thanks so much for your reply! It was long :) , but it was also very helpful and informative.



ShadesOfMe
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 30 Jun 2004
Age: 32
Gender: Female
Posts: 16,983
Location: California

30 Nov 2011, 3:09 am

You are a lot like me. I finally figured that i'm Pangendered, or genderfluid. I'm not very masculine, nor feminine, but i'm more masculine than feminine. I often wish I wasn't biologically speaking a female. At times, I do know I am male. But others i'm female. but in the end, though gender is confusing, i'm just me.

Sorry to necro this. It came up on a google search when I was searching for a topic on wrong planet. I'd love to talk to you more about gender identity! :D Maybe we could be friends. :)



Tiggurix
Deinonychus
Deinonychus

User avatar

Joined: 5 Aug 2010
Age: 31
Gender: Male
Posts: 323
Location: Kristiansand, Norway.

03 Dec 2011, 12:52 pm

mori_pastel wrote:
Like I said earlier (probably even two or three times earlier), you're born and the world has all these expectations for you. Then you grow up believing you're just like everybody else, until all of the sudden you're not. Something makes you different. And different doesn't feel like a good thing.


Speak for yourself. I've always been different, and proudly so. It is not me that has a problem, but society for not accepting anormality. That's how I've always thought, and it seems healthier to me.

And as for the original post, I completely feel with you. I'm male, but I do not want to be male, and neither do I want to be female. I wish to fall outside all these dumb gender expectations society has and forces upon us.

To be male is stressful, as it feels tense, often. I often harbour feelings of aggressiveness towards other males and they do so back. But I do not want to be aggressive towards anyone, and I don't want anyone to be aggressive towards me, and overall I refuse to conform to a gender type.

I have quite a voracious sexual appetite, but I do not want to have. To feel a yearning for erotic love is a major inconvenience for me, as that is not want I want to seek and not what I feel I was made for. I wish to study the world, as an outsider, and being drawn so powerfully into it through sexual desire is unpurposeful, to me.

I'm considering castration, likely chemical at first, but after that probably the real deal, as it seems to be able to solve some of my problems. And also, the satisfaction of knowing that I will have rid myself of these relatively useless organs is something I believe I will feel.