lets talk about enbys

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je1 healthcare: Sep 29, 2015

les enfants Terrific! posted:

I don't understand it nor do I feel it ergo it does not exist thank you and goodnight

really though, do you think a cis man will just not care if people started treating him like he was a woman? Or a cis woman, if she was referred to as if she were a man? That's what I mean by "you don't feel it unless something's up," if your gender starts being undermined you're going to realize you're not comfortable with that, because you are/aren't a man/woman, drat it

I've been mistaken as a girl a few times back in middle-school when I had long hair. I found it to be more comical, rather than aggravating, because in each case they made a genuine mistake because I looked like a girl when turned away. But in each case they corrected themselves without me demanding it, because they were attempting to refer to my sex rather than my appearance or behavior. It'd be another thing if it was intended as an insult though

So, I assume that's what it means to live without gender dysphoria, the absence of trauma or stress when gendered or misgendered by others. The best way I can think to put myself in the shoes of someone with gender dysphoria is to imagine if the entire world magically expected me to wear a dress from now on. It would be a real shift, but I can't imagine being suicidal over it because my current wardrobe already exists to appease societal expectations rather than to serve as a form of self-expression.

But the types of cis men or women who were suicidal or self-harming over internalized fears of not living up to a gender role never struck me as examples of "normal" or healthy functioning.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2022 03:59

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 20:31

je1 healthcare: Sep 29, 2015

Ocean Book posted:

this is a really minimizing view of gender dysphoria. if you are cis it�s genuinely hard to get it.

being misgendered doesn�t just mean someone used a bad word and it made you sad. it means you were miscategorized. gendering pervades our social lives. a constant string of very small miscategorizations in every single social interaction you have, starting in childhood and compounding year over year. who approaches you to be friends? what do your parents teach you? what do your friends approve of you for? what do romantic partners expect from you? ultimately this means that if you just go along with it, you end up with a life you weren�t meant to live. every social interaction is just miscalibrated for who you are meant to be.

gender dysphoria is connected to suicide because people tend to commit suicide when they realize the life they were meant to live is impossible. this happens after divorce, job loss, going to prison, stuff like that. in the case of gender dysphoria, it means when you realize your supposed to live the life of a man or a woman, and yet it�s impossible.

if you haven�t experienced gender dysphoria or transitioned, you probably don�t know how existentially painful it is to be locked out of your gender. maybe you think �well can�t you just be a feminine man, or a butch woman?� but butch women live very different lives than men, and. feminine men live very different lives than women. just an unceasing string of small differences that have become, for a person with dysphoria, acutely painful. over and over and over and over.

interactions between men, between women, between men and women, are not identical. ive lived on both ends. the differences are extremely small but very perceptible. i can�t tell you why it�s better, why i�m meant to be one gender or the other. it�s just how it is. my friendships, at work, my romantic relationships, just being out and about, the world reacts to me intuitively now matches in a way it never did before. and i can�t tel you why that difference is so important, was worth time money, medical intervention, social upheaval. it just was. that�s dysphoria for you

Of course, my view is limited. And I'm trying my hardest to understand, so I appreciate your input. My description of misgendering was based on what other people had told me about their experiences of going into a multi-day spiral of depression or mental health crisis in response to being misgendered to deadnamed in public, but I suppose not everyone reacts that way.

I have my own clinical experiences with body dysphoria that's also linked to ASD, which I think might overlap with gender dysphoric experiences, but I'm not sure. This thread isn't about me anyway

# ¿ Feb 5, 2022 20:55

je1 healthcare: Sep 29, 2015

roomtone posted:

what situations are you describing? because this is alien to me

The media and entertainment industry portrays men as horny idiots because it's comical, and also because they want to sell them sex (or use sex to sell other products). Teenage and college-aged males do the same thing by encouraging each other to view women as sex objects as a form of machismo. So in past decades, you could be called inadequate, impotent, or "gay" if you prioritized any sort of romantic relationship that didn't immediately involve sex. Even close relationships between heterosexual men became somewhat stigmatized in western cultures, as the word "love" came to refer almost exclusively to romance or sex

So, it's pretty easy to either be bullied into thinking that you're less of a man for not wanting to gently caress 24/7. Even without bullying, one could establish a rigid definition of gender in one's own head by recognizing patterns and taking lessons from the media, or by relying on comedians for tips on how society works, or by being overly-sensitive to perceived criticism or rejection while writing off every male in your community that doesn't fit that definition.

At least, this was the case for me, as I felt the same way up until I was about 16. I can't speak for Outrail

# ¿ Feb 7, 2022 20:29

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