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First off: gender is a continuum, not a dimorphism. It's very important to remember that, or you may and up vacillating wildly between two extremes unwilling to find a comfortable expression somewhere in the middle.

Beyond that though, I don't think anyone can tell you where you fall on the spectrum. Almost everyone's experiences, and ways of coping, differ.

My best advice is to really open your mind to the options you have to express and embody your own personal gender, and then read a lot. Read blogs, watch videos, get some good books (I recommend Hello Cruel World or Gender Outlaw, Whipping Girl (a big heavy, but hey, you're on reddit!), and most importantly force yourself to think about it. Really think about it, without shame or fear, and see what feels right.

Find people who you can talk to, in real life or online, about it. The experience of having to explain your feelings to someone who doesn't share them is a really effective way to figure it out for yourself. A therapist would obviously be great for this of course, but if you're not in a position to find one a close and non-judgmental friend is great too.

Also, consider writing a diary, journal, blog or letter to share how you feel with a theoretical friend/confidant. Again, the process is much more important than the result.

Experiment! Try presenting as female, in big ways or small. Try imagining how everyday life would feel different as a girl. Is it "more normal" or exciting and transgressive?

It's not an easy thing to figure out, and there really don't seem to be any shortcuts. But the comfort of understanding yourself is well worth it.

I knew as I wrote the post that my words would be unconvincing to someone who devotes a lot of energy to atheism. I would explain my appeal to popular opinion in the same terms: the original thesis is "whatever is popular must be correct", the antithesis is "that is a logical fallacy, many people believing a thing to be true has no bearing on whether or not it is true." The synthesis is this: after too much analysis, we no longer look at things with fresh eyes, and sometimes miss what is right in front of us, that every child sees. In this way, popular opinion can sometimes remind us of the plain experiences that we no longer return to look at.

Putting aside these ideas and methods that you surely disagree with, I presume you've read Whipping Girl? She arrives at the same conclusion about femininity that I present, and explains the need to go beyond on what I have here called the antithesis. A great deal of the book is devoted to this point: that some aspects of femininity are natural, and that women are more likely to be inclined to femininity.

What the heck are you talking about? How do you go from clothing to trans people?

You like books? Cool, me too. Read Leslie Feinberg's excellent book transgender warriors, as well as the ubiquitous and obligatory Whipping Girl by Julia Serano, and you'll be able to see pretty clearly that transphobia is rooted in oppositional sexism, which in turn supports the traditional Western patrikyriarchy.

Read Whipping Girl, it's an awesome book.

Regarding this, the author suggests that it's often used as a way to say that transgender feelings aren't legitimate, by classifying the trans-feminine impulses as either 1) repressed homoerotic urges (when it's a trans-feminine person who's attracted to guys), or 2) autogynephilia (when it's a trans-feminine person who's attracted to women). I think she even goes so far as to suggest that some outsiders use this as a way to say that no trans-feminine person is legitimately transgender.

I don't think it's quite that pernicious -- I know someone who openly identifies as autogynephiliac, and they have lots of experience exploring themselves. But it does seem to be an overly convoluted explanation, that you trick yourself into becoming what you're attracted to. Since there aren't a lot of people who, after a lot of contemplation, identify this way (and many end up deciding that's not the best explanation), it seems like Occam's Razor is enough to say that those urges aren't so convoluted, that you really just want to become the way you honestly see yourself.

Good question :)

I haven't read the book yet, but from an excerpt on Amazon it seems non-gender specific, also identifying transgender men in the opening questions.

If it isn't broad enough to include half the potential audience, i don't know how the publisher would have let that omission get through the process.

peace

Here is a link:

https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Wanted-about-Trans-Afraid-ebook/dp/B07JW51RXW/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Everything+You+Wanted+to+Know+About+Trans+*+But+Were+Afraid+to+Ask&qid=1567094189&s=gateway&sr=8-1#reader_B07JW51RXW

This comic is by Katie Diamond and Johnny Blazes, taken from the anthology Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation. I highly recommend the book to anybody who likes this piece - it is full of everything from prose to poetry to graphic art that captures a cross-section of trans/genderqueer identities from my generation.

This article is nice. It's very cursory and easy to understand. For some more extended reading on the subject

You've got me interested. But the article (and the other 2 I just looked at) don't seem to have a link to buy, download or read. They just talk about it more.

Edit: For those interested. I had to change my wording but I found it on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Pervert-Michelle-Perez/dp/1534307419

Ironically, trans men are often counted as women before trans women. Take, for example, Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, which will let people on the FtM spectrum attend, but not people on the MtF spectrum, because they "aren't womyn-born womyn" (trans men apparently are).

For those wondering: Yes, I did just finish reading Whipping Girl.

https://www.amazon.com/Zuni-Man-Woman-Will-Roscoe/dp/0826313701/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1522683320&sr=8-1&keywords=zuni+man+woman&dpID=41Qat%252BY5AbL&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch

Aw they didn't include my book... https://www.amazon.co.uk/Are-You-Boy-are-Girl/dp/0993192505

Cunt.

Dean Spade is one of -- if not the -- most genius person writing on trans issues. His new book will be a must-read.

I'm not a cultural anthropologist or gender studies scholar, I've got the same Google you do. If you're serious about finding well-sourced academic articles, starting with Susan Stryker's 2008 "Transgender History" and going from there would be what I'd suggest. Dr. Stryker is a gender studies prof at Arizona.

(https://www.amazon.com/Transgender-History-second-Todays-Revolution/dp/158005689X)

>Can you cite anything here? I have never heard of any of this, and evolutionary psychology was the focus of my major (anthropology, with a minor in psych (not that our psych department got anywhere near evolutionary psychology, mind you)).

There is a pretty big split in evolutionary psychology at the moment, and it's been this way for at least 10 years now. I'm not sure when you were studying, but if it was recently then it might not have focused on the divide.

Some good resources:

Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour - Laland and Brown.

From Mating to Mentality: Evaluating Evolutionary Psychology - in particular, this section: Evolutionary Psychology and the challenge of adaptive explanation where the authors discuss the difference between Evolutionary Psychology and evolutionary psychology.

>I.. don't agree?

The idea that the popular evo psychologists (Tooby, Cosmides, Pinker, etc) were promoting cartoon Darwinism, and fatally misunderstanding evolutionary biology, is a well-known problem in EP. This is the only explanation for why they cling to naive adaptationism, and fail to demonstrate the evolutionary pathway of any behavior.

Even assuming that all evolved behaviors/traits are adaptations, they still don't meet the criteria laid out by Williams (1966). They come up with the believable story for it providing an advantage, and then (if they're lucky) they find that it's a cultural universal. But then they stop there. They don't check to see whether the cultural universal is a result of some genetic or evolutionary mechanism, or whether it's a product of learning (remembering that cultural universals can come about through species-specific constraints).

I get the feeling that some people identify with gender more than others.

For many transgender people, there isn't as much of a feeling of dysphoria, so much as a feeling of improvement and wellness in their lives. Such as the case of Zinnia Jones, who, if I'm not mistaken, didn't have much of any experience with gender dysphoria, despite being transgender. And some transwomen may feel even less of a difference than her.

Just the same, I'm sure many cisgender people, don't feel particularly comfortable being male or female or any gender, while not being dysphoria, only socially alienated by their gender roles(or in this case, their bodies in relation to their gender roles, or perhaps some of the downsides of having a certain body, like periods or breasts). And it isn't simply their cisprivilege making them finding difficulty to relate to transgender people, and they don't see being cisgender as any more valid or normal than being transgender. And see themselves as individuals, rather than genders. And don't see their gender as any more a part of who they are than their ethnicity.

I personally don't identify as cisgender. I also don't actually identify as a transman or transwoman most of the time, either. I've always felt rather gender confused, most days I feel genderqueer or androgynous or genderfluid, but sometimes I can identify as a man, and sometimes I can identify as a woman. But I can definitely understand how she feels, especially about the breasts and hips and getting periods and having the overwhelming, horrifying feelings of social expectations weighing upon me heavily and feeling anxious. Furthermore, I don't actually know why she's cisgendered, and I'm not. I don't know where it comes from.

For other people, they may be certain they were "born that way", but I've never been certain of where either my sexuality or gender identity feelings come from. And I definitely know that social alienation with gender roles are something that I associate with both of them. I think this may help me in understanding where anti-gender-identity radical feminists are coming from, perhaps? Having any kind of gender identity to me almost feels like some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder, at times. Maybe I'm agender? Maybe my gender fluctuates? I don't know.

I have noticed many radical feminists who not only think that being transgender is invalid, but also being cisgender. And that having a gender identity, cisgender, or transgender, is a social construct that would disappear if patriarchy went away. And that there would be no cisgender or transgender people if sexism went away. I can at least empathize with this, as they find being cisgender equally meaningless and undesirable and aren't singling out transgender people. And neurosexism is still a horrible and promiment cultural force to reinforce gender roles and stereotypes. And many neurosexists try to use transgender people as evidence that gender stereotypes are biological in origin.

What I don't like is when some of these radical feminists see transwomen as a patriarchal invasionary force in women's spaces. And that a vagina is required to be a feminist. No matter whether feminism will decrease instances of gender identity in all human beings or not, the fact of the matter is that many are purposely misgendering and invaliditing the very real experiences of trans-individuals of dysphoria, that isn't going to be quelled by being told a bit of "gender identity is a social construct". Transgender people know how they feel, and being told that gender identity is a social construct isn't going to change that. And the behavior of some radical feminists, rather than being anti-gender, is actually just anti-transgender. Misgendering people, and actively working against their rights. Treating transwomen with distrust and disdain. It is unjustified, cruel, bigoted, and privileged. By treating feminism as a club for people with vaginas, they're propagating separatism, essentially, and the gender roles and identity some of them supposedly seek to abolish. As well as, refusing and doing harm to fellow women, just because they were born with different genitalia. This "women-born-women" thing is horribly toxic.

Also, whether you're a cisgender or transgender radical feminist who believes that gender identity is a social construct that should be eliminated. Or are a transgender activist who is very much against this idea. Both groups can and should agree, that gender roles, absolutely must be destroyed. And are extremely harmful and toxic to all human cultures.

But misgendering and refusing people's gender identities isn't going to cause anything but harm. And some radical feminists really need to stop their toxic transphobic behavior. As well, I would like to see a lot of the animosity on both sides of this extremely sensitive biological gender debate subside. No one should tell radical feminists they need to die, and they have no need to have a gender identity if they don't want to have one. It's very clear that many radical feminists are uncomfortable with the very concept of having a gender identity. And they shouldn't be expected to have one if they don't want one. But just the same, they shouldn't forcefully push this on transgender people like many are.

A higher degree of tolerance and empathy on both sides would be very nice.