Feeling like a male

Hi Soup,

You know, I think most people that don't have a mismatch, really don't really feel any kind of gender at all. I am reaching that point myself, and getting there means being able to focus on the things I actually want to do with my life.

This is also really tricky, because a gender mismatch means different things to different people. I'm only able to talk about myself. But we can't assume we know what it's like for someone that, say, needs to wear clothes that are not allowed by their gender role.

So for me, this was actually something that was hard to figure out. In a lot of ways it shouldn't have been, but it was.

A huge part of what made it hard, was the stuff I got from other people. For some reason, other people have huge mental blocks about accepting people like me for who we say we are. And the trouble is, when you're surrounded by ideas and people repeating them like fact, they sink in and you kind of believe them. People will tell me just anything that has nothing to do with my gender. And so I have at several points in my life taken ideas like "lots of straight guys like to cross dress", "maybe you are just gay" (implying I'm a gay guy), "is this just a sex thing"... on and on. I have taken those ideas, believed them, and made decisions based on those beliefs, that have all ended disastrously. What I came to understand over time is that that advice comes from two facts about other people. First, the idea of changing my physical sex is somehow extreme to them. And second, when they accept someone as one sex, it is hard for them to see someone as another sex.

So that was a huge part of why it was so hard to figure myself out, but it wasn't the only part. The fact is, this stuff is all feelings, and so it's really hard to match it up to words like that. I honestly did not understand why, when I was seven, I felt the way I did when I accidentally used the girl's bathroom. I don't understand why I would cross dress when I did dishes, after everyone was asleep, or why cross dressing stopped bringing me that relief it used to. And that was really why I would try everyone's advice to begin with, because I was looking for any kind of answer. Part of me deep down just needs to be a woman, and whatever being a woman even means, that part of me seems to have a darn good idea.

So that gets into the deeper question. What is a woman anyway? I can't really tell you how I feel like one if I don't even know what one is, right?

So the answer to this question, to me, has two parts. The easier one is physical sex. Hormones affect every single part of the human body. Your arms, your chest, your face, your brain, every single part of you is set up in advance to turn into a girl part or a boy part. It just waits for the right signal. Some parts, like the skeleton, only change once. But other more fluid parts that change frequently, can be changed twice. So I think a girl is someone that has mostly girl parts, and a boy is someone that has mostly boy parts. Simple, right? And it leaves plenty of room for things like intersex conditions, situations like hysterectomies or orchiectomies for health reasons. I mean, if you lost your genitals in an accident, I would still consider you a man. And I think, right or wrong, most people would feel it was still more appropriate for you to use the men's bathroom in that case.

But the other part of being a woman is harder to explain. I have a part of me that seems to know. It seems to know when I look at other people. It always classifies people around me as boys or girls when I look at them for me, before I even think about it. Some of those people I recognize as girls are attractive to me, and the people I recognize as boys are not. That part of me knows when people are treating me the way they treat girls, and the way they treat boys. I know intellectually this part of me has been taught some of these things by other people, because I know things like the color pink used to be for boys decades ago. This part of me knows that pink is for girls. But I can't solve my problem by just telling this part of me different things about what boys and girls are, and some things it does seem to be not taught. There are behavior sex differences in animals, whether they have been raised by a pack or not, and some of those sex differences exist in human beings. I feel some of these urges to act a certain way directly, especially in less PG-13 situations.

So my definition of woman, and I really think the answer to your question, is "whatever the heck that part of me thinks a woman is". When I say I feel female on the inside, that's me trying to describe what it's like with this part of me that insists instinctively and all the time that I should be a woman, while being surrounded with people that insist all the time that I should be a man. Without all the other people - I absolutely LOVED camping as a kid - I still have a problem, because my body still feels wrong. And even when I get my body looking and feeling right, and there are no people around, I still had some of that feeling that only went away when I started taking estrogen and got rid of my testosterone. In fact, when I did that last thing, the feeling of wrongness almost completely went away even in situations when I was around people I knew were treating me like a boy. Part of me knows that I am doing something to fix the problem and sees some results, and I think that is why it is laying off a little now.

So that is what it is like for me.

Other people have their own perspective and their own problems. We're all in this together. I'm careful when I share personal stories like this, because sometimes other people figuring themselves out feel pressure to be more like me. It worked for me. But really if you think about it, that's the same thing I was complaining about when I first started. They're liable to get advice that doesn't work for them, just the same as I got advice that doesn't work for me. So I don't want to do the same thing. These are just my experiences, and what I did about my problems, so I could live maybe not a normal life - "normal's a setting on a washing machine" - but a life that I want to lead that makes sense to me, focusing on things other than this nagging sense of despair and hopelessness.

You know what, that's a good way to put it. Feeling like a woman, to me, means being able to start my own business. It means feeling the way you do, not even having to keep track of my gender or even fully understanding as deeply and automatically as I used to what it even is, and my own understanding of the way it feels becoming more and more a memory.

 

well GENERALLY there is some dysphoria involved and that'd be your leading indicator but it's different for everyone I assume

Dysphoria can be discomfort with sexual organs/secondary sex characteristics (i.e. breasts, facial hair and whatnot), wanting to be seen as a different gender in public, and discomfort with your name and the pronouns people refer to you as (he/she/they/whatever) and a whole lot of other stuff probably.

The way I figured out I was trans was that as soon as puberty hit (~11 or 12 yrs for me), I started feeling like everything was wrong. I came out as questioning at age 14 and later on figured out I was indeed a dude (though I'm not super masculine so it was confusing for a while)

As for your last question there, yes! Nonbinary people are not male or female. Some of them are in between, some of them are more masculine or feminine and some of them are not either. I'd suggest maybe researching that??

Some people don't feel "like a woman" or "like a man" but are content identifying with their birth sex and that is also totally okay.

Good luck finding answers.

 

Personally, I think it's really difficult to pin down what it feels like to be a man or a woman. It's a really subjective thing.

For me, knowing I'm the other gender comes from 2 things:

1. I feel extremely uncomfortable with the female aspects of my body and generally always have done since puberty. This is body dysphoria. However, it's only been in the last couple of years when I suddenly became 'aware' of this discomfort that was going on undetected in the background of my life that I have started to realise that actually, I want to be male bodied. I just wanted to add that bit in to show that you don't necessarily have to have always wanted the body of the opposite gender to qualify as transsexual.

2. Because I am physically female, people read me as female. They call me 'she', 'her', my birth name, refer to me as a 'woman'. This hasn't always felt wrong. It has only been in the last couple of years since realising my body dysphoria which then created a mismatch between how I feel internally and the way I look externally. This mismatch between how you feel internally and the way that people behave towards you, how they treat you so to speak, is social dysphoria. This also causes discomfort and anxiety. People have certain expectations of you according to your birth sex (how you should dress, behave etc) and you can't fulfill them because it isn't who you are, hence the anxiety. When people refer to you using the pronouns of the gender and name you were assigned at birth, it can feel as though they aren't talking to you or about you whereas pronouns of the opposite gender (for me anway) feel more comfortable.

I have spent time wondering if I'm neither male or female, or both but again this feels just as uncomfortable. That's basically how I know I'm male and not female or non-binary.

 

People that aren't trans don't have to worry about gender so they typically don't "feel" like a gender

For me when I say I feel like a boy what I mean is that I'm uncomfortable having a female body and I feel like I was supposed to be born biologically male and I want other people to see and treat me like a boy (male name and pronouns). Being a girl never felt right, my whole life I've known something was different and I never felt comfortable with myself and when I realized I was trans it all made sense

 

Like others said, it feels like I was just supposed to be born male, and I feel less caged and self-conscious when people call me by male pronouns and such.

It's not my entire identity, however. Like you, I don't really think about me being transgender. I just think about me being male.

"I can't wait to transition."
"I need to work hard in school for that."

To me, being a trans man doesn't mean I'm a trans man. It just means I'm a man who happens to be transgender, and I view transitioning as a "rite of passage" - something I just have to do because I'm me, not because I'm transgender.

If that makes sense.

 

Seriously, best poster ever, is you. I swear we have the same brain, only yours is a chick and mine's a dude :lol: I would say much of the same things you did. I spent so long listening to those people around me and believing them too, believing them right into the pits of hell really (and I'm atheist, so that's saying something!). I had to eventually blockade myself away from the world just so I could try to live the way I wanted to and be the way I wanted to be... only I wasn't really sure what that was. I only knew that what I was currently wasn't right.

The hormone stuff, when they tried to put me on birth control (with estrogen) to regulate my horrendous monthly curse, I became so incredibly sick, and they couldn't figure out why. Well. My body was having no more of that estrogen shit and was rebelling!

For me, "feeling like a man" means having what is in my head, my real self, reflected on the outside and in my veins. Actually, literally, feeling like a man. I want testosterone to deepen my voice and grow hair and quell the uneasiness I have when I look in the mirror. A bonus is having other people see me as a man. That is important to me too. I want to be called he and him and sir and mister. I want to introduce myself as Kyle and for once not have people act surprised when I firmly shake their hand (because chicks totally don't do that apparently).

Feeling like a man means a lot of things to me. It always has. What it means the most is being able to feel it freely and letting others know that yes, I AM a man.