The whole point is that nobody is "born female", they are "born as themselves", and sometimes that means "born with an incompatibility between their gonads and brain".
What if they had no genetic abnormalities (related to gender, etc) and it said "female" on their birth certificate?
And as we keep saying, it's not that simple. Even lacking any genetic "abnormality",
which is itself a problematic term, the brain will end up however it ends up.
The whole point here is that it's just not all that healthy to make some absolute declaration about
categorical attraction.
I am not Chris. I do not generally speculate wildly about how others handle things.
All I know is that I have an adverse reaction to testosterone; this indicates that others may have an adverse reaction to estrogen.
I can only imagine of
@Loren Pechtel were put on an estrogen regimen, Loren would not appreciate the effects much.
I can only imagine that if
@Toni were put on testosterone, she, too would be very unhappy with the result.
I cannot communicate to someone who does not have any experience or memory of their life before hormones or the self-awareness to differentiate the signals that come from the hormones, what that difference is. It varies a lot from person to person.
Why do some people like chocolate ice cream and some people hate it?
Sometimes that's just who we are.
Post menopausal. I'm not that thrilled with the testosterone I have on board now.
I will say that years ago, when I was on birth control pills, that was really a great balance, hormonally speaking. I also liked HRT.
Which is quite my point. Sorry about pinging you for an example. You just strike me as someone willing to listen to others and their own bodies and be honest about what they hear and how they relate to it.
I appreciate that.
I will admit that I have some slight misgivings where (some) children are involved only because I know of how intense the pressure I felt to conform to what much of society insisted was feminine but was decidedly not me and I do worry that some kids are teased or pressured into asserting something that isn't true about themselves, whether it is that they are trans or not trans or gay or not gay or bi or not bi or whatever I don't have the time to think of and type out because I am somewhat sleep deprived and hungry at the moment. I think that people are who they are and that the best thing is to let them be who they are, assuming they are not psychopathic sociopaths like Donald Trump and most or all of his administration.
Let's put it this way: even if I thought you were a trans man/boy (you are/we were not), I would not push that on you, either. It's a shame they did.
Nobody should 'conform' purely to conformity sake.
I think that truly hosting an understanding of each other in society involves supporting everyone
as if it was a decision and as if it was a sacred rite of passage; I'm happy that you are yourself.
I am not happy that Chris is himself. Chris has brought this new thread yet again debating my existence and experience through it's generalizations. Chris clearly thinks about this too often because if he thought about it the correct amount, he would think about it not-at-all except when there was a trans person right there and the trans person actually brought it up as a conversation topic.
They certainly wouldn't think themselves into knots of hate and denial.
I wish that Chris could work through it so that I, as a trans person, can think about my own trans-ness as little as possible without having people in my community making me think about it more than I want to.
I can't imagine how bad it is for most black people, when white ass motherfuckers start talking about racism and American race relations whenever they walk into the room like "bitch, that's my life, and maybe when I'm with my friends I wanna take a break from that shit. Maybe that's why I HAVE friends, and other hobbies."
Seriously, I just want people to be less "confused", but I despise the inconvenience of being one of very few representatives to a class that can resolve any of that confusion.
From the POV of much of the US general public, ‘trans’ is a new concept especially as something other than extremely fringe and outside of the scope of most people’s experience or need to know or understand. Now as trans individuals are more visible ( yay! People should be able to be and show who they are!) unfortunately, they are more —-much more—politicized from something that a lot of people might give not another thought about to a hot button issue almost on par with abortion rights —just as unnecessarily and just as unjustly.
I agree that we should all be up to date with the basic knowledge that trans people exist and have a right to exist and are entitled to full civil rights and the right to exist and the right to privacy and to be treated like every other person.
Some people process new information differently, with fear and suspicion being one of the first stages. Some people never move past the fear and suspicion stage. No one should have to live their life differently because some people cannot let go of fear and suspicion and therefore make life unpleasant or even deadly dangerous for others.
But like... "Eunuchs" have been a thing that society understood for a very long time, and then that awareness died.
Trans people have been fighting for acceptance and the right to normalization within society for millennia, for over 2000 years.
The only time it ever happens is just before the decline of a major civilization where trans people are used as a wedge issue.
The information isn't new. People have been removing their own testicles for at least as long as the technologies of recording and retaining history have existed.
It is one of the most studied and well understood conditions through history, and one of the oldest surgical interventions.
People were going to be doing and surviving castrations long before they were doing and surviving amputation injuries (and we have prehistoric evidence of well healed amputation injuries).
Nonhuman Apes know what castration is and does.
This is just the next step, of "castration", either
temporary hormonal or permanent surgical castration, with provision of different hormones.
It shouldn't be hard to understand.
We should have centuries of culture around this.
In India there are literally centuries of culture surrounding the Hijra!
You, by all rights, deserve as much as I do the power to pick up a book whose title would be a proper noun for a a subculture populated by eunuchs/trans people of a western tradition.,
Instead, the Catholics used sexual purity crusades to execute every monastery of eunuchs that came about through the middle ages, and pursued them as "deviants", because of how the Catholic Church and it's predecessors twisted those very bible verses that said to accept eunuchs!
This is what I am lamenting, the fact that there is no book, no culture, no advocacy, no community for me to direct you to a better representative other than the trans community which has entirely forgotten what we were throughout history, before HRT was an option, except to point to the Hijra of India.
We were destroyed by time and again by the Church, and I cannot really pretend that was accidental, because true eunuchs put the lie to the Catholic dogma about them surrounding their priesthood, as much as they invalidate the pro-natalism of the "every sperm is sacred" doctrines.
