I am still very early in this whole process, and there is still a lot of self doubt, so I am reading a lot of literature on “Am I trans” and dysphoria.
One concept that people often like to propose in these ressources is the button that makes you the opposite gender, and, crucially, also makes everyone else believe that you have been that way forever.
I don’t really like this, because my time as a boy/man is part of who I am. I would not be me without it, and despite all of the problems I had and have due to my gender, it is still part of who I am. I fought through all of this and worked to find out who I want to be by myself. I wouldn’t wanna be cis, and I also don’t want to cease being the me born out of this struggle.
No, those countries are still buying into the binary, strict idea of “gender actions”, not to mention viewing the entire process as mandatory. My point is that they are wrong, not because gender is some sort off dualistic thing that you have to be fated to be or biologically predestined, but because it’s a simplistic and binary perspective on gender.
I think you’re confusing what we’re saying for the concept of transmedicalism. I am staunchly anti-transmedicalist, and also saying that it is something you “do” would probably be a bad way of describe what I think. I think gender is more of an affinity than a dualistic essence, and as someone who has felt that affinity far stronger than any sort of internal essence, that’s why I care about it a lot. I think most sense of internal essence can probably be explained as a affinity for one’s own internal identity.
I’m not calling you (or anyone here) a transmedicalist.
I’m just saying that gender isn’t what you do and that this perspective does come from the more conservative side of this topic rather than the more radical, because what you do is irrelevant to your material experience of gender.
The material experience of gender is actually quite simple because it is based almost entirely in how other people treat you socially. We treat men we meet different to women, we treat women we meet different to men, and we treat non-binary people differently to both.
The material experience of gender is fundamentally social and lies in whether others accept or deny a person’s gender. This is why mental health outcomes are so heavily tied to the experience of acceptance in a teen’s social groups rather than to their physical biological appearance, genital expression, etc.
The material experience of gender isn’t in what the trans person does, but in what other people do socially. The perspective that some have that gender is what you do is an error derived from social outcomes improving when someone conforms to gender expression that causes others to more readily accept their gender.
Oh that makes sense