First of all, sorry for another thread. I'm just trying to get my life on track at the moment and need some advice. I've been looking for work for months now and have one of two options. I can either postpone choosing a career for a while and just take whatever work I can get with my current qualifications by which I mean retail, fast food outlets, cleaning etc. etc. The other alternative is to do some internships to decide what I want to do in the long term. Whatever I choose, I think I'm going to need to do some voluntary work first of all to get back into the swing of things. However, the problem I have with either option and the voluntary work is what I think is dysphoria. If I think about working in retail or in a kitchen, it makes me anxious because I somehow associate it with being female or feminine. It's like doing those kind of jobs is degrading to my gender identity because it makes me less of a man. Similarly, the only voluntary jobs I can apply for with my skills and experience are typically female dominated. For example, working with children, caring for the elderly, assisting people with learning difficulties, caring for animals. Before I realized I was trans, I used to volunteer with a children's group (although I never really felt comfortable in that role) and I would have jumped at the chance to work in an animal shelter but now, I associate caring for animals as being a feminine thing to do. I know that this isn't true but I can't shake the idea and the dysphoria. It makes me feel anxious about my gender doing work which isn't exclusively performed by men. This brings me to my long term plans. I have just obtained a good degree in art but have no desire whatsoever to pursue this as a career. I realized this mid-way through the course but felt I had an obligation to my parents to finish what I started. I lost my enthusiasm for the subject years ago. It became a chore and I realized I wasn't as creative as I thought. Yes I could draw and paint with great accuracy but had a total lack of imagination and instead, was much more methodical and literal in my approach. What's more, when I started to get the feeling I was trans, the subject gave me dysphoria because it was a female dominated department. So now I'm back to the drawing board and I'm having the same problem with the dysphoria. The only work I can imagine myself doing comfortably without getting dysphoric is working in a practical job predominantly populated by men by which I mean as a mechanic, electrician, engineer etc. etc. However, I don't have a natural interest in the kind of work I'm looking at or even a natural ability and I don't particularly relate well to cis men, probably due to the 25 years of female socialization. This is what worries me. My strengths at school were in art, design, science and english, not maths and mechanics. I was pretty useless with my hands when it came to working with tools in my design workshops and I'm rather useless at fixing things. However, if I ignore this 'need' to be as masculine as possible and settle for something else which plays to my natural strengths and my existing skills, say a desk job for example, it feels as though I am compromising my gender identity. I guess what I am wondering is whether this is just dysphoria and if these feelings I have about work and gender are even valid. I just fear that if I ignore them and try to live with working in a feminine occupation, I will feel constantly dissatisfied both with my job and my gender.
I'm not educated enough on dysphoria to say whether or not that's what you're feeling. Your feelings are totally valid, though. I get the impression that while women are encouraged to break into male-dominated spaces, men are still seen as weaker for going into female-dominated ones. That being said, this attitude is rather sexist against femaleness, so the words I would use to describe what you're feeling are internalized misogyny...maybe? Misogyny is such a strong and terrible word and I feel it's overused on the internet, but I don't know of a better one. By "internalized" I mean that society has taught you to feel that way, not that you yourself actually hate women or anything. The jobs you described aren't actually gendered tasks, no matter who tends to dominate them, so I think you should do the thing that makes you most happy, and try to work through your feelings of shame with a therapist or through journaling (or whatever works best for you).
