What does it mean to be trans?

Being sensationalistic won't do you any favors if you're interested in the subject.
The simple fact is that there there are x million people who feel out of place in their body and/or with the expectations society and people around them place on them. It's okay not to understand. I'm one of those people, and while I can say that I probably understand better than you, I don't entirely understand either. I don't know why I feel the way I do, I just know that.
Trying to explain to cis people what it's like to be transgender is rather like trying to explain what it's like to live without any limbs (not that that's the case for me, I just used a random example) - it's something so far beyond your own experience that only empathy or imagination often doesn't quite cut it.

You're right in that expression doesn't equal gender. Neither does body, or roles.
The basic line is quite simple, and that's identification. I identify as female regardless of any and all material circumstances that might somehow contradict that. Gender is about feeling where you belong.

EDIT: PS. As for your friend, don't be surprised if his feelings change over time, such as with preferred pronoun or so.

 

I think it has something to do with the white matter in the brain and the way it is structured. Although a lot of differences between men and women appear larger as it is emphasized by society, the differences are smaller than originally thought, but there are still differences. Men and women and NB brains are structured differently [in what I think is white matter] but he/she/they can be good at anything they are socialized into [through their parents, peers or themselves]. Whatever they're good at in terms of socialization doesn't determine their gender identity.

If a man's penis is cut off in an accident, that was an accident, and the man would most likely still want it. If you want to read more, look at the Bruce/Brenda/David case. Money makes a point about him still liking ''boy things'' such as cars to suggest that he was always a boy but even if David [as Brenda] played with dolls, it wouldn't make him a girl. It would just make his socialization ''as a woman'' successful, but not him being one.

About wearing dresses, perhaps your friend associates wearing dresses with female things to do, and that would help him solidify his identityof being a woman. In the same way, a guy who associates wearing dresses with a male (or non-conformitive since we still live in that society) things to do, that would help him solidify his identityof being a man.

 

I do feel that it is important to understand that transgender binary people are simply men and women, if your friend is a trans woman than they are simply a woman, seeing her as anything else is pretty much the same as viewing a cisgender man as a woman or a cisgender woman as a man. As you are a cisgender man, you technically know how it feels to be a trans man outside of the fact that your body reflects who you are inside. Because a trans man was born with a body that is not a projection of this internal sense of self, they suffer dearly, because every person sees them as someone that they are not. Imagine, if the world around you started addressing you as a woman and treating you as one, no matter how many times you shout out to them that you are really a man, all they can really see is your body and your clothes and they react accordingly. While people might be ok with you wearing men's clothes, they treat you differently, they see you differently and you feel it in every word that they say. Whenever you look in the mirror you see a girl, someone that you don't recognize as yourself and no matter how beautiful that girl is, it doesn't matter because it is someone else, you know that you are a man, you know how it feels and you long to have a body that feels as if it fits you well, so others will perceive you as you really are and so when you look in the mirror you will stop seeing the mask of a girl and actually see yourself and feel a connection to your body and who you are inside. :icon_sad:

 

I think the chemical difference in the brain you are talking about may be referring to a hormonal imbalance during fetal development. It's a theory that trans people are exposed to some different levels of hormones in the womb than our cis counterparts, and this causes the brain to develop a little differently. That results in an idea of oneself and one's gender which doesn't map up to the body they actually have.

This results in a lot of discomfort, and the only known way to fix it is to change the body to be more in line with the mind. Taking hormones does not "cure" being transgender; your friend will always be trans simply because they were born in the body of the opposite gender they identify as, and that is the meaning of being transgender. But hopefully it will make them much more comfortable with who they are.

 

You do kind of give the wrong impression in that you are not careful with your words. For example, you saying that men and women are only trivially different trivializes the experiences of those identifying with a gender other than that assigned to them.
Also, if you truly value your friend, you won't downplay his emotions or pretend to understand them better than himself. He, and no one else in the entire world, including you, has the final say.
Just because your own identity is 100% clear to you and always has been, doesn't mean everyone else feel the same way.

 

Okey. Male and female bodies do not differ that much, men and women can get along, because we are all sentient and human. Agreed. Nevertheless, there is a slight difference between male and female bodies and between male and female brains. Probably it is very difficult to spot the difference unless you have a mismatch, unless you always feel something is off and you try to figure out what that is for something like 15 or 20 years. I cannot know and you cannot know who your friend is - maybe they are a trans woman who can't articulate herself properly and you do not see her point, maybe they are a man who just likes a feminine look. None of us can know for sure, hence - turst them, they are the only person who knows what is inside their head.

When you say you are a guy, you mean you have a penis and identify with the group of people who has penises. You identify with your sex organs. I suppose. When I say I am a guy - I say I identify with the group of people that usually have penises, but I do not mean I have one. Trans people do not identify with their sex organs.

 

First of all, here's a study that shows fairly clearly that gender has an innate element to it:

Discordant Sexual Identity in Some Genetic Males with Cloacal Exstrophy Assigned to Female Sex at Birth

To summarize it: Boys were assigned female at birth because they were born with disfigured sexual organs under the pretext that gender is nothing more than a social construct. Their parents were told never to reveal to the children that they are natal male and the children were followed during varying periods of time. It turns out that a majority of the children eventually identified as transgender and began transitioning. A few of the children spontaneously identified as male at an age as young as 5 insisting they were male despite being raised as female from birth.

Now, concerning your views about gender. It is important to understand the difference between biological sex and gender. With regards to biological sex, you are assigned male if you have a penis, female, a vagina and if it is ambiguous you are usually considered intersex. When people write AFAB or AMAB it means that the person was assigned female at birth or male at birth. However, there is more to being female or male than a person's anatomy and to encompass these differences a second term was coined which is called gender. In a sense our bodies are nothing more than external indicators that help us differentiate between men and women. They are symbols of who we are inside and as such when you see certain external features you connect certain schematic views with the visual feedback. However, this is a flawed system as any schematic representation tends to be. If you view someone with glasses or wearing certain clothes, you might assign certain stereotypical attributes to that person. Biological sex works in the same way, we make assumptions based on generalizations about people without considering the possibility that that person might be different. What does it mean to be female or male, think of how complicated the concepts really are, how many assumptions we make when we assign a gender to a person. When you see a man, you react in a completely different way than when you see a woman and this is based on nothing more than visual and sometimes auditory feedback. You see body shape, clothes, length of hair and facial hair and assume that these signifiers give you a huge amount of information about the person you are talking to. The problem is that there are always exceptions because people are complicated constructs that depend on an endless amount of internal cellular interactions based on genetically encoded information. For most people gender and biological sex are one and the same, however, this is not true for everyone and for those that pulled the short straw, the endless misgendering leads to a painful and tormented existence because gender can be seen as a person's soul, our internal sense of self and being. It is who we are inside and every word that we say or action that we take is heavily influenced by this integral part of ourselves.

Think of how you would feel if you saw a cute baby and asked their mother how old he is and she responds by saying that the baby is a girl. Think of the amount of distress you would feel as a result of this unintentional misgendering of the baby. Why would something as seemingly meaningless as using he instead of she lead to such an uncomfortable situation. The problem is that within that pronoun lies a huge amount of signification. By gendering the baby wrongly, in your eyes, you opened a gap between yourself and that baby and accordingly the mother, it might seem absurd but people depend on shared knowledge and schemata for intimacy and gender serves a huge role in establishing connections between people. That's why when you see a baby girl, you will try to establish a connection with the mother by saying things like "She is so pretty" or pick up a doll and hug her. If it was a baby boy, you might pick up a car and go vroom or some other action that communicates that you acknowledge that the baby is a boy or a girl. You will do this no matter how you feel about gender roles or stereotypes because you want to establish a sense of intimacy with the parent. When the child grows a bit older and develops social conscious we risk alienating the child by misgendering them. The huge amount of importance that gender and pronouns hold in interpersonal relationships and intimacy means that people who are transgender often struggle to form strong intimate connections with the people around them because of being constantly misgendered. That's why pronouns serve such an important role in social transitioning. People who refuse to use the correct pronouns are in fact transgressing against one of the fundamental rules of establishing social connections and over time they will distance the transgender person.

This is just one of the struggles that we face as a result of the incompatibility between our bodies and minds. Gender is simply everywhere and the fact that our external presentation doesn't match our internal gender is constantly reinforced. For many this manifests as an ever growing internal sense of unease and loss as the wrongness of our situation shrouds a dark mask over our lives. As young children things aren't so bad as our understanding of gender is really limited and we can often use our imagination to fill in the gaps in our life but once we reach puberty and our body starts changing, things usually take a turn for the worse. Part of our internal sense of gender seems to be connected with an instinctual understanding of how our body should develop and when it doesn't develop as expected, we unconsciously or consciously realize that something is going awfully wrong. Personally, at that point in my life I started praying daily that I would wake up as a woman but every child responds differently. In general, the world becomes darker and you start feeling a growing gap between you and the people around you. While our friends start developing stronger intimate connections as they establish themselves as boys and girls and adopt stereotypical predictable behavior, we often lag behind and feel lost and confused in the rapidly changing social dynamics of middle school and high school. This is the point when many transgender children start to question their gender and tr to get the world around them to see them for who they really are. Some like myself, disconnect and start living through others, changing their behavior to fit within the boundaries of what we perceive as acceptable. However, this is nothing but a mask and everyday that passes we feel more and more empty and alone, no matter how many friends we might have. Each of us has our own way to deal with this situation but in general, it is nothing more than using coping mechanisms to cope with a very serious condition. Something that will haunt us for the rest of our lives and leave deep scars that often never really heal.

Just to be clear, people don't transition to become happy, if you were depressed before transitioning, you will often remain depressed after. The reason why we transition is to relieve our suffering and sense of unease; we transition to feel the world in color and feel alive again; gender dysphoria can physically hurt; it feels to me as if something is strangling me from the inside, as if my soul is being torn apart. It is a deep and truly awful sense of unease that is always there, waiting to burst in a flash of agony that makes me want to find a deep dark hole and hide away in it until that feeling subsides.

It is something that is always there festering inside of you and the pain never really goes away and often just gets worse as the years go by. You never stop being misgendered and every time it happens it leaves a tiny cut that over time becomes a huge gashing wound. I am a cancer survivor and the trauma of having cancer lasted for 8 or so years but as time went by I was able to move on, I learned to accept the disability and made it a part of who I am. This way of coping doesn't really work in the case of gender dysphoria because the trauma isn't a one time event. We can't piece together the fragments of the past and build a new life for ourselves because it will quickly become destabilized and we will go back to stage one.

My description here is fairly extreme and is based on my own experiences. I wanted to paint a picture of how serious gender dysphoria can really be, so you will be aware of how complicated it can be to try to cope with it. In my case, the combination of having a serious childhood trauma and suffering from severe gender dysphoria took a huge toll on me and at 35 I am still trying to build up some sort of stable life for myself. However, here is the real problem, because of how misunderstood the condition is, we not only have to find ways to cope with the tough process of transitioning, we also have to cope with severe discrimination and prejudice. My story took a turn for the worse when I came out to my family and was rejected, despite everything I went through, nothing could prepare me to how hard it was to cope with the extreme sense of despair that you are left with when you find yourself all alone and everyone that you loved and cared for turned their back on you and did so in one of the cruelest ways possible. It left me with such a profound sense of hopelessness, as there was simply no way out, transitioning meant that I might lose everyone that I loved and I had no idea if I would even make it without their support, the journey ahead terrified me and I didn't know how I would ever cope, I still don't. On the other hand, not transitioning meant to live the rest of my life hiding behind a mask and never truly being alive. When those are your only two options, suddenly suicide becomes a very real solution. I am not unique and there are so many stories of people who find themselves in the same situation, that somehow find the strength to live on, to walk a path full of peril, they find themselves on the streets alone but they still survive. I do know that I will never give up, that I will find a way to survive and I will eventually transition. These are the cards that I was dealt and many others were given similar cards.

I posted this to try and help you understand what your friend might be going through a bit better. We suffer immensely both because of the fact that we were born in the wrong body and because to fix it, we need to go through one of the toughest experiences a person can possibly go through. We walk this path because we know without any doubt who we are inside. In the same way that you know that you are a woman, we also know that we are women and men, it's a feeling of familiarity and of being at home that we don't feel in context of our birth sex and our body. It is easy recognize that part of ourselves because of the discrepancy that exists between our biological sex and internal gender.

Your friend is clearly at a very early stage of the process of acceptance and they still have to deal with a huge amount of doubts and fears. This stage is marked by extreme vulnerability and it is important to be sensitive and supportive and avoid reinforcing doubts by trying to persuade them that they are wrong. If they came out to you, they are with all likelihood trans and you can do very real harm if you try to convince them otherwise. They entrusted you with something that is extremely intimate and personal and it was undoubtedly hard for them to do. I hope you find a way to be there for them and accept them for who they really are.

(*hug*)

Eveline

 

We aren't trying to paint you as a bigot. Nevertheless, you are being insensitive.
No one, no social scientist, biologist, and even less people on a forum with no formal expertise, can give you an exact answer to any of your questions, because there isn't one - sorry. All we're trying to do is explain a bit and give what hints we can so that you might be able to understand a little better. Kindly do stop lashing out and try to see things from the perspective we are providing, which you asked for.

 

In my opinion, being a man or a woman in terms of gender is a matter of reassembling mentally a member of one sex or the other. In your way of thinking.

 

I don't think anyone here thinks you're a bigot or is trying to make you feel bad. It sounds to me like you're a very good friend who's supportive of your friend and would like to understand his experience better.

Here's the thing. This might not be something you ever understand. Some people can kinda imagine what gender dysphoria is like, but for some people it's just such a foreign concept that it never quite clicks in their brain. To some extent, it's something you never quite understand unless you feel it.

I think the best explanation is the one Eveline gave in her first post. What if you woke up tomorrow morning and nothing about you had changed, except suddenly every single person who saw you thought you were a girl. Everyone addressed you by a female name that felt unfamiliar and called you "she". You saw yourself clearly as male when you looked in the mirror, but for some reason, nobody else saw you that way. Wouldn't it feel strange and uncomfortable? Wouldn't you feel like there was a disconnect between how you were seeing yourself and how everybody else was seeing you? That's kinda how I feel.

When I look in the mirror, I see a guy because that's what I'm hardwired to do. When we see people, our brains instantly judge whether we think they are male or female, and my brain sorts me as being male. Other people don't see me this way which makes sense because objectively I look too feminine to be a 19 year old guy, but it's still uncomfortable for me that other people see me so differently. I'm a guy because I want to be physically male, I want other people to see me and think I am male, and it feels more natural for me to be called by he/him pronouns and to be called a guy.

Having dysphoria over your body is like if you looked down right now and found that you had grown a third arm. You'd be pretty alarmed by this when you first noticed it, and over time you'd grow very uncomfortable and unhappy as you realized that no matter how long it was there, you never seemed to realize it was there unless you were looking at it or it was touching something, and you never seemed to get used to its presence. Your doctor said it was perfectly normal for you to be sprouting your third arm at this age, but you could never seem to shake the feeling of wrongness that came with having the extra arm that you were pretty sure wasn't supposed to exist. Although it is a fairly absurd analogy, those feelings are basically what a lot of trans people feel like going through puberty. For example, a trans guy might start to grow breasts and be alarmed at first that his body was going through female puberty when his brain expected male puberty instead. As he gets older, he doesn't get used to having breasts; he just grows more uncomfortable with them and wants to hide them or get rid of them entirely.

There isn't an explanation for why any of it happens. We don't know what causes transness, and frankly I hope that we never do. When there are "cures" for these sorts of things or tests you can run to see if your baby's gonna grow up to be trans, it leads to parents curing kids who didn't want to be cured or aborting or abandoning their future trans children. So maybe it's brain chemistry, but we don't know how to "fix" it now (thank goodness), and maybe it's something else entirely.

 

It's good that you're being inquisitive--it's the only way we learn--but it is very difficult to explain because for us the answer is so obvious and you--who are perfectly comfortable with your gender identity--will never really understand it.

It's great that you support your friend, but I don't think this is a question you can have answered; if there even is an answer to your question at all, it's highly unlikely that you would understand it. I'm not implying you are stupid or that I'm trying to be special or elitist, you're just lacking a perspective that you'll never have.

 

Hmm... I just posted a subjective explanation that I wrote a while back of gender identity and how it feels to have gender dysphoria because I thought it would help give you understand things a bit better. As darkcomesoon explained, my first explanation might be a bit better in this case.

I didn't actually mean to make any sort of assumption. I gave the example of how parents behave around children of specific genders, I did write this for someone else a while back and truthfully the example didn't really work well in context of your situation so I apologize for that.

Ultimately, we can only do the best to explain how we feel using our own life as an example. We don't know your friend and we don't know what he is going through. I tried to help you as best as I could. Unfortunately, I was not in a state earlier to write a more comprehensive explanation beyond my initial explanation so I shared with you something I wrote in the past.

I wasn't trying to be critical and I'm sorry if you got that impression. I do believe that I did give two very strong explanations of what it means to be trans and how it feels but I can only open up the door for you. It is up to you to decide if you want to take it and delve deeper into what I said or to focus on that one line that you found that you can argue against...

I hope everything works out,

(*hug*)

Eveline

Edit: here's a link to the thread called Torn that I took my reply from, I wrote a second reply which fills in some gaps and it might help you understand it better under the context of the thread:

http://emptyclosets.com/forum/gender-identity-expression/203945-torn.html

 

What does it mean to be a man or a woman or some other gender?
Ah, my friend, that is the question is it not? It is the question that has as many answers as there are people on their Earth, because we all experience our gender in such awesomely different ways.
Tell me, what makes you a male. No no, don't say its because you have a penis or because you have XY chromosomes (funny story, in butterflies the females have the XY chromosomes while the males have XX).
Pretend that you have no physical body, you are just an orb, a soul, a thing of energy traversing through the world. You, without a doubt, know you are male...but why?
Its not because of how you look, or how you act, or what you do, or what you play with. It's about how to feel.

It's the only answer I can think to give.
I gather you are trying to understand, and this is a very hard thing to understand. A lot of us really don't understand it ourselves. Most of us really don't want to understand how it happens. Its like when they wanted to figured out what caused homosexuality so that they could cure it. A lot of homosexual people do no what to be cure. They can not imagine living their life loving anyone different than they do now. Its the same from trans people. We do not wish to be cure, we simply wish to be who we are, who we were meant to be.

Perhaps ask your friend what exactly makes him feel like a woman, besides wishing to look good in a dress. Instead of asking us, ask him. He can far better explain his situation than we can. We do not walk in his shoes, we do not see life through his eyes, we do not think his thoughts. We can not answer your questions for him because we are not him.

Now, if you are asking US feel like we are such and such a gender then that would be a different.
And there would be a lot "because I like dress/I hate dresses.", "I play videogames/i play with dolls." sort of thinks mixed in there. We have found that people understand stereotypes better than some other answer.
By the way, I had an easy bake and played with dolls too. I usually had princess birthday cakes and Belle was the Disney character I most identified with. I also play video games, watch soccer, and do some pretty "boyish" things. I also wished I could look great in men's clothing. I am aware none of these things makes me a female and none of these things make me male.
I consider myself a trans male because when I look in the mirror I see a guy. When I see a guy instead of a girl I feel that is who I was meant to be, and who I will work towards becoming. Because when I imagine my future self I am always physically a guy, though I will never have a penis. Because I find breast, periods, and ovaries utterly useless and can not begin to understand why the person in charge of assigning new bodies gave me one with them. Because I spent much of my life saying "I should of been born a boy" even though I often never understood why I felt this way. These are my reasons, and I understand they might not be good enough for some, but they are good enough for me.

So go ask your friend what his reasons are. Explain that you are confused and wish to understand. And try not to look as life in shades of just black and white.

 

I hope you don't mind if I try again to explain. This is an interesting discussion.

So when a person wears a dress or acts in a stereotypical way they are expressing their gender. Gender expression has nothing to do with what it means to be trans. As you said, guys can wear dresses etc. Gender expression is a social tool that allows us to reinforce our gender identity. So when a man talks to his friends about sports, he might reinforce the idea that he is a man in his eyes and in the eyes of his friends. Can women love sports, of course! I love basketball... but I can't use sports to reinforce my gender identity because I don't connect it with femininity.

In the case of your friend, they are most likely attempting to use gender expression to reinforce their identity as a woman, in your eyes and maybe in theirs and that's why they used their desire to wear dresses as an example.

However, as I mentioned, this is not what gender identity actually is. Gender identity, is at its heart simply a feeling of belonging to a certain gender, feeling at home when identifying as a woman or as a man. The thing is, for most cisgender people this seems a bit meaningless as they feel at home in their body and in context of their gender. They take it for granted and find it hard to imagine feeling anything else, they are a man or a woman and it is obvious that they really are a man or a woman. If a person is transgender, in the same way that a cisgender person knows without doubt that they are a man, a transgender person also knows that they are a man and it is completely obvious. However, when they look in the mirror, they see the body of a woman and it can be really hard to process what they see as it feels so wrong.

 

Being trans means that you have physical, social, or psychological needs that can not be fulfilled unless you deviate from the body, role, or sense of self that was assigned to you.