Where Is Sex?

[Ibby]

I'm so confused. I identify completely as gay, but I have a girlfriend. I've got a cock. Does that mean I identify as a woman? I don't think of myself as a guy. But I don't think of myself as a girl. I resign to being treated like and calling myself a guy. But I resent it. I hate everything that being masculine, that being a guy, stands for.

I'm so tired. I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Damnit, I hate being the typical whiny teenager.

[Griff]

Originally Posted by Ibram

I resign to being treated like and calling myself a guy. But I resent it. I hate everything that being masculine, that being a guy, stands for.

You may be a little close to the military to see this but on the outside people are defining themselves. For me, being a guy means being a good dad and a good husband and living my life my way, but thats my definition. You get to define being what a guy is. Its not all about macho bullshit.

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by Griff

You get to define being what a guy is.

You have more to say about it than you used to in decades past. But you certainly don't control it all...and if you're gender dysphoric you don't control enough of it. Not to mention that "being a guy" is more than social roles and expectations.

I giess I can speak from expereince on this...having lived in decades past and having been biologically a guy once, and biologically a woman now. The hormone balance makes a *huge* difference...and back before I transitioned I got to listen to the "you get to define your own gender role now" speech given to me more than once. Wasn't true then and I doubt it's much truer now.

Being bi is all well and good. I'm bi myself. But there's a big difference between issues dealing with "who you go to bed with" and issues dealing with "who you go to bed as".

[wolf]

Originally Posted by MaggieL

I giess I can speak from expereince on this...having lived in decades past and having been biologically a guy once, and biologically a woman now.

I may have missed a class ... but you are still biologically male, even if you are cosmetically and ideologically a female. You do not have the equipment to manufacture natural female hormones. If you were provided a screening test, you'd test as male, no matter what artificial hormones are in your system.

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by wolf

I may have missed a class ... but you are still biologically male, even if you are cosmetically and ideologically a female. You do not have the equipment to manufacture natural female hormones.

So, if you had an oophorectomy you would no longer be biologically female?

I'm in the same situation as a born woman post hysterectomy/oophoectomy. I suppose you could call my HRT 'mones "artificial", but they're definatey not synthetic; and it's the same Premarin millions of other women are taking. It's OK for me to take it without progesterone because cervical cancer isn't a factor.

A genotype "screening test" might show me as being XY. Or might not; It's never been done and I don't know. There's any number of other possibilities.

[wolf]

Originally Posted by MaggieL

So, if you had an oophorectomy you would no longer be biologically female?

Perhaps not the best analogy, but if you put a Toyota engine into a Ford, does that make it a Japanese car?

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by wolf

Perhaps not the best analogy, but if you put a Toyota engine into a Ford, does that make it a Japanese car?

You're evading my direct question by posing a bad analogy? :-)

My thoughts regarding the etiology of transsexuality are that even starting with a purely male genotype, exposure to environmental estrogens during fetal develoment can cause development of an essentially female brain. When my mom was carrying me the family lived in the shadow of the oil refineries in South Philly. Furthermore, while Mom denies it to my face, a doctor who treated her in those days told me she'd been getting hormone treatments of some kind, although he was vague about the details.


Zhou, Gooren and Swaab have done several studies on brain sex differences in transsexuals. These are still working with sparse data since the techniques require postmortem exminations of the brain, and identifying transsexual cohorts is a tricky business.

But to follow your flawed analogy, if you started building a car from scratch from Ford blueprints but switched over to Toyota plans while building the engine, would the car run more like a Japanese car? Even if it was "Body by Fisher"? :-)

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Ibram

snip~I hate everything that being masculine, that being a guy, stands for.~snip

If you hate these "things", you must know what they are, so what does being a guy stand for?
And where did you get this information? Media portrayal? Observations? Other peoples opinions?

I hesitate to bring up your age, because I'm sure you get that quite enough. But, that said, it's important in this discussion.

Up to now, to get by, all you had to do was what you were told (more or less) by your folks, teachers, etc. Now you've reached an age where you have to interact with the world, outside your family/friends/school, you want to know where you fit in. In order to find where you fit in, you want to be able to define yourself and that's hard.

I think the honest truth is you don't fit in....except with all the other teens that are wondering the same thing you are. Don't be fooled by your peers that think they've got it all together, they just think they do...some are in for big surprises.

You especially, being a military brat, have missed a continuity in your life that promotes some familiarity bred confidence. Maybe more so, because of your Dad's assignments aren't strictly military bases, but a lot of far flung civilian settings, so you don't have a lot of other military brats to commiserate with.

Maybe it would be better not to try to define yourself just yet. Not before you have to, anyway. Just take it as it comes..... do and act according to what you're comfortable with.... rather than what you think you must do to reaffirm some preconceived notion of who you are.

I know you are not stupid from your posts. But I am doing a lot of speculating and making judgments, about you and your life, that I have no evidence to back up.
So if I'm way off base, sorry, no offense intended, just forget it.

edit- While I was typing all that, griff slid in and nailed it with a lot less verbage.

[9th Engineer]

cutting past all the bullshit and boring science talk

<insert>rant about boring science talk comment</insert>

Ok then. I was really just throwing some information out there to clarify my comment about males being more susceptible to disorders which influence their sex phenotype, wasn't really applying it to the overarching question just yet.

Let me ask this. Do you guys think we need to separate our understanding of sex and gender into two catagories? Sort of a personal and public thing to over-simplify it. It struck me that most things that we find really personal or self-defining rarely exist in the exact same form in both our private and public identities. We're making the definition of 'sex' so broad that there's no way to pin it down to something everyone can see and understand from the same angle. There's a huge biological component, no denying that, but we also want to throw in the psychological, which is what Ibram mostly refers to. Are these the same thing? Are they equally as important? Who is each important to? These aren't easy questions that we've left lodged within the bigger one, so I think we've incorrectly defined our parameters here. Perhaps a detailed look at our own definitions would help clarify a few things.

[Rock Steady]

Originally Posted by Ibram

... I resign to being treated like and calling myself a guy. But I resent it. I hate everything that being masculine, that being a guy, stands for.
....

I completely identify with that and I am 51 yo. I hate the male-vs-male competitions.

Hang in there. You can recreate what it means to be a guy. Last year, for Halloween I went into work dressed up as one of my girlfriends there. She loved it and to this day talks about it and shows pix of me. I go on girls-nights-out to shows and concerts. I wear black capri pants, silver anklets, and ...

Still, when I am with a group of my girlfriends they still treat me like the guy of the group. So, you can't completely escape it. But, it's still lots of fun for all of us.

On one date a couple of months ago, this gal took me out to a show with a limo to the city and the works. She was completely in control and it was a gender swapping evening. At the end I told her I didn't know whether she wanted me to be her boyfriend or girlfriend. And she said, "yeah, and I kept switching that on you all evening."

It's great when you finally hook up with people that get you. Hang in there, Ibram.