I sometimes have a gendered “feeling” about myself that sorta shapes what I expect myself to sound like or be like behaviorally - there is a kind of “being a man” in my own head that can sorta come up more, and then other times I can feel more like a woman - do you have any gendered qualities to those things related to your self concept?

even without an image, are there other ways of thinking about yourself, i.e. a “self concept”?

the comparison to age is perfect, actually - in your head you can feel like a different age than you actually are; this can be a bit like the disconnect between how your internal sense of gender is and how you are perceived in your gender, etc.

hardly surprising, but still 🤢

EDIT: seems like the site is pretty dead, looks like 4 years ago a bunch of people moved there, but more recently I don’t see much activity (probably for the best, considering the content seems to be pretty far-right).

It’s not odd, I think after my egg-cracking but before I transitioned I had a big crisis about “who am I really” - I wanted reassurance that transition was the right thing to do, and in my fear I built up all these ways I wanted certainty before I committed to something as drastic as transitioning.

I remember going through a phase similar to what you are describing, where I had socially transitioned and felt increased directness and honesty - an ability to be myself more then opened the door to being more authentic and transparent in other ways, too. I became more emotionally vulnerable and sensitive (even before estrogen).

All I can say is the second-guessing hasn’t gone away for me, nor did I have it resolved before I made major decisions - instead, as I move forward based on the information I have (e.g. that transitioning is the only way to treat dysphoria), while it feels like a leap of faith it’s built on a significant body of evidence, and while I feel surprised when the outcomes are exactly as predicted (i.e. each transition step makes me feel happier and healthier), the self-doubt remains. I think it quiets over time, esp. as decisions are made and moved past - but I think the transphobia and fear around transitioning is so great that most of us go through pretty intense denial, doubt, and imposter syndrome.

I highly suggest educating yourself on this topic more, the more I learned the more it became clear to me how important transitioning was - you may or may not have the same experience, but the education is helpful regardless.

Common beginner recommendations are the Gender Dysphoria Bible, and Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl. If curious about what hormone therapy might look like, transfem science’s intro article is another essential read for newcomers.

If you have any questions feel free to ask, too. I transitioned later in life well into a marriage, so I understand a lot of how you might feel 😅

seems like a right-wing echo chamber, similar to Voat.

Möth craves your lööps

To be fair, the door removal punishment would have been considered authoritarian / strict / extreme, it was chosen by a step-parent, my birth parents would never have punished me that way (even though they did use corporal punishment on me when I was young, they in general weren’t that “strict” or authoritarian as parents).

if there has ever been a purpose of the internet, it is to make cats famous

can confirm, isn’t true 😭

this is like the right’s attempt to eliminate trans and gay people

im confused, how is this not loss?

in order of masculine, feminine, neuter, plural

• nominative: der, die, das, die
• accusative: den, die, das, die
• dative: dem, der, dem, den
• genititive: des, der, des, der

which becomes:

• RESE
• NESE
• MRMN
• SRSR

in high school I pronounced this mnemonic as:

• resee
• nesee
• Mormon
• sir sir

My teacher didn’t like the “Mormon” bit, he wanted me to say “merman” but I found it easier to remember “Mormon” and his discomfort only made it stick better, lol.

are you thinking about whether to transition or take HRT? I’m here if you want to chat …

Earthlings

a window was open in the house and I accidentally shut the door too loudly one time and my door was removed for weeks months (there was no history of me slamming doors, I think punishment for the sake of punishment was the point)

no privacy for changing, sleeping, etc. - it was stressful

EDIT: I just remembered it was more than weeks, it was months - I had journal entries about wondering when I would ever get my door back.

that’s so sweet of you- I have so much more to say about this topic, and what I wrote was an embarrassing mind dump rather than an organized piece of prose.

I actually have poetry I wrote I could share, sometimes I feel they say more for me than my prose can.

If you have any questions anytime my inbox is open, btw - I’m a pretty open book and like thinking things through, so ask me anything, really.

EDIT: here is some of my shitty poetry, it’s meant to convey the idea, it’s meant to be practical that way rather than primarily good poetry.

I am some kind of woman
the aspirational kind

How does estrogen feel
like a crackling TV fuzz bubble wrap 
circling your breasts and hips 
more a kind of awareness 
than a sensation 
a spotlight
an irrational happiness 
a full-body smile

“Gender identity”

Hidden from the senses
Inferred shadows 
Constraining, defining, shaping
Without a trace
Like water wondering about the shape of a bowl

Gender

A story of you
Told by others
Repeated and retold to yourself 
Weaving fact and fiction 
Ever changing and immutable 

Womanhood

A lie concealing 
The sublime

Trans woman
A disciple of womanhood 

Woman in their eyes
Why not mine
Gender outside me
Trying to find the door
To let it inside

There is a lot to say on this, I think the psychology is complicated and I should start by saying the more I think about this, the more I feel I don’t really understand myself or how my “identity” works really.

I think for years I have habituated a way of thinking of myself as a boy and man, and along with that I have learned to perform that masculinity in addition to a tendency to rationalize or find ways to think about myself as a man, even when in retrospect the way I think doesn’t really match being a man.

For example, I was very interested in learning to cook, bake, sew, and iron (traditionally female coded activities), but I thought about this as something I did to redeem myself as a man to be attractive to a female partner, and as a way of being a “good man” - i.e. it was my “masculine” identity that drove those things, even when I simultaneously promoted being thought of as a “wife” when taking on those roles. The intensity with which I clung to home cooking as an identity was at odds with the gendered narrative and my rationalizations.

Growing up my family noticed I had an usual eye for fashion and creativity as a kid, but I didn’t have any way to make that a safe activity, at the time that kind of thing was too gender non-conforming and would raise eyebrows, even though I started wearing female clothes that were handed down to me by women in my life. Again, rationalized in some way as masculine.

So it’s important to note that the way I think of myself as “male” has often been the very same things that might make me appear feminine to others, at least behaviorally.

Transitioning medically by taking hormones resulted in suddenly being viewed as a woman by others, but that change surpassed my own perspective changing - I’m stuck behind in the pre-transition way of thinking while others see a woman and thus treat me as one.

And yes, transition does impact self-concept, at least it has for me - for example, when I spend a day passing as a woman and existing as a woman in social situations, there is a kind of self-concept that arises from those situations that is female, i.e. I start to think of myself as a woman as there are more and more situations where I am treated and seen as a woman.

At first this is a bit of a “fake it 'til you make it” situation - I try really hard to pass, and then pass or fail in various situations (or often, I just never know how I am perceived), but as the hormones changed my body and my work on voice therapy resulted in changes to my voice, I eventually started to pass more and more “effortlessly” and there was a kind of social momentum that developed where I started to pass more and more, and eventually I couldn’t not pass, nobody sees me as a man and I don’t think I could go back to being seen as a man anymore.

When I was more visibly trans and people weren’t sure what my gender was, I would say my self-concept was fully male, but once I passed all the time, I found myself starting to be able to see myself the way others see me a little more - cracks in the masculine self-concept.

This was a big part of voice training, since that requires basically habituating a new way of speaking it also means habituating a new way of thinking - when I felt I wasn’t passing, it was much harder for me to change my voice as my confidence was undercut by my self-consciousness and sense of being a fake. As I started to pass visually to people, it made it easier to hold my voice in a feminine configuration because it would be weird to sound more masculine and I felt I had permission - they are the ones gendering me as a woman, so my voice is just conforming to their expectations of me.

So I might have days where I go about and run errands and I’m 100% a woman in the world - I’m a woman because other people see me as a woman and treat me as a woman. When I get home the momentum carries me and I still see and think of myself as a woman - in the mirror I’m more likely to see a woman in a moment of momentum like this, for example. But usually when I go to bed, in my dreams my habituated male-self reasserts and all those years of living as a man and those memories take over. I wake up from dreams of myself as a man, and I wake up usually “feeling like a man” - which is not really the same as actually feeling like a man, I should clarify. I now see that a lot of the ways I think of myself as a male is not particularly consistent with the way men actually are, for example.

If there are some days I don’t leave my house, don’t put on makeup, don’t put on a cute outfit - those are days I notice my self-concept is much more masculine, my voice is harder to keep feminine, and in general my gender “rots” back to a habituated male baseline.

I should also say, the way I think about myself is entirely separate from what I consider my gender identity, which I think is entirely unconscious / implicit, not something I have direct access to, it’s more like the invisible space that shapes or informs my cognition but which I don’t actually have any direct awareness of. For example, when I was 15 and I looked at the dark hairs covering my legs, I felt sick and hated the hair - I shaved it, and I did this despite feeling insecure in my masculinity and feeling like my puberty was delayed and I was afraid of being bullied for being too feminine. Despite all those feelings, I still shaved my legs, why? I don’t know, I don’t know why I felt that way. That’s probably that unconscious drive kicking in, that’s probably my gender identity finding expression.

Why did I love wearing women’s clothes my entire life? Why does a skirt just feel right? I have no explanation, it just does. When I wear women’s clothes I sometimes think of myself as a man - I rationalized skirt wearing as the reasonable choice for a man, after all historically men wore skirts before women (supposedly), and skirts just give more space for movement and is cooler, and it makes using the bathroom easier, and so on and so on - skirts are just rationally superior and consistent with my male gender, there is no conflict here, no gender conflict here. So when I wear a skirt, I can sometimes actually not feel gender-affirmed as a woman, because I wore skirts as a man, and I think of myself as a “man” when wearing a skirt.

(Turns out, other men don’t do this so much, they aren’t feeling more happy and comfortable in dresses and skirts and then generalizing this by telling themselves this is the rational choice for men everywhere.)

So I have an implicit “gender identity” that is like an engine fueling my gendered preferences, and I separately have a “gendered self-concept” (how I think of myself in a gendered way), and then separate from that I have a “social gender” that is basically the way others see and treat me in a gendered way.

So, by transitioning medically I managed to look like a woman (and by voice training, sound like a woman) and that allowed me to become a woman as a social gender, which then helped align with my subconscious gender identity (which reading between the lines, my gender identity seems female), but what is taking the longest time to change is my “gendered self-concept”, which has so much history and momentum it’s hard to change, like a deep habit.

So I think this will just change over time, gradually - that’s my experience. As I become more aware of the way people see me, the more I can see myself that way, and the more I do that the more entrenched it becomes. Sometimes in dreams I’m a woman, I even have dreams where my gendered self concept is fluctuating based on the social situation I’m in.

yes, this bothers me a lot - would love to hear others experiences, and I’m enticed to come back and write a wall of text about this as I’ve gone through social transition then medical transition and the changes I’ve noticed.