RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer

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heartcream -> RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer (8/13/2010 11:27:05 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: sexyred1 Gender is defined as you what you were born with. However, if one feels they were born into the wrong gender, I respect that. I don't care what anyone identifies with as long as they are honest about who they are. My ex husband had a good childhood male friend who got botched surgery to become a woman. She has lied consistently to everyone she meets and still to this day wonders why they get angry when they attempt to become intimate and she makes this big announcement. She presents a lie and therefore by the time someone gets close enough to her that she trusts THEM, she proves untrustworthy because she allowed it to go that far without revealing who she is. I hate when others are so afraid of who they are that they remove the informed choice from someone who might want to get involved with them. The thing is though, I feel, with someone like that, I can understand not wanting to disclose that much information to someone one doesnt know well enough. It must be absolutely draining her adrenal glands to deal with this out in the world. People suck too much of the time. I think perhaps when she meets someone who really is a match for her they wont see her as untrustworthy but frazzled to bits with all she has gone through, get her and love her anyway. People who fit together can understand where the other is coming from. I wish her love in her life anyway, it must suck to be her on so many levels.

couldbemage -> RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer (8/13/2010 11:42:46 PM)
I wish I understood this. To me, gender roles don't mean much.... So I don't get TG people. What does living as the new gender really mean? It can't just be superficial appearance issues. ....but anything other than appearance... Just leaves behavior. Which means stereotypes. Which are supposed to be bad.

heartcream -> RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer (8/14/2010 12:15:38 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: couldbemage I wish I understood this. To me, gender roles don't mean much.... So I don't get TG people. What does living as the new gender really mean? It can't just be superficial appearance issues. ....but anything other than appearance... Just leaves behavior. Which means stereotypes. Which are supposed to be bad. I bless my stars I am not TG. I think it must be one of the most agonizing realities going. I dont think it is just about appearance, behavior or stereotypes, I think what is often the case the person feels like they are in the wrong body. The have a mind, heart and soul that says female, let us say, and they have a dick to say they are male. Kind of like a lost soul, a soul in the wrong body. I think in many cases it is super deep seated and not a mental decision. My opins.

nephandi -> RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer (8/14/2010 4:54:19 AM)
Greetings I think the question of gender is multi faceted. On one side you have a physical gender, we are made as man or female, some animals and plants if I do not remember wrong have more genders and perhaps there are species out there that has more to, but for human beings we are man or woman or if some natural mutations have happened someone can be between those two or not displaying any gender specifics at all. Now this is pure biology, and there it s male or female and everything else, like for example hermaphrodites is an abrasion, I am not saying that it is bad or wrong, but it is not part of standard human physiology. Now you also have the psychological side and here things get complicated. You can have a woman that mentally is a man, or a man that mentally is a woman, or a woman body with partly male and partly female personality and mentality and so on, almost any combination. What is natural here is anyone's guess. Now one point I want to make is that being homosexual, bisexual or lesbian do not mean that gender roles have to be blurred. This is a common myth, that homosexuals are more feminine than other men and lesbians are more masculine. One can certainly have men that are homosexual who are more feminine and women that are lesbian that are more masculine, but for many there are no blurring of what sexy they are, no blurring of gender roles, they just plainly are men or woman that have a sexual and romantic attraction to someone of the same sex. I am bisexual but I am 100 percent woman. Now another point is the Spiritual side of it. According to Ying and Yang theory both the feminine and the masculine is present in all pepole and in all things. I think that determining someone's physical gender is easy you are either a man or a woman, unless there are some birth abnormalities. But determining someone's Spiritual and mental sex that is allot harder and there I think one just have to listen to the person in question and accept their own definition for themselves. I wish you well.

LaTigresse -> RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer (8/14/2010 5:43:37 AM)
I am at the point in life where I see gender as a pretty fluid thing. That doesn't mean the person/s I am attracted to have changed. Sexually, and in a M/s, D/s relationship dynamic........what attracts me is a fairly narrow field. I will be blunt and say that dicks, the penis, repulse me. So the odds of me being sexually attracted to a person with a penis is pretty small. So remove that from the equasion of possibilities. Generally, I am attracted to petite, feminine women. So, no butch manly women. Next, they have to be attracted to me! I can be friends with a woman, love a woman, appreciate her beauty, but if she isn't attracted to me.......I am not going to have any lasting interest in her, other than being good friends. Much like the relationship I have with my sisters! There is a whole list of other qualities that will determine if a woman is attractive in a, potential relationship way. But they are not part of this discussion.

slavekal -> RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer (8/14/2010 6:00:58 AM)
I tend to shy away from the blurry areas. I am a heterosexual male. I only want erotic/sexual contact with biological females. Ovaries, vagina, estrogen...XX chromosomes, monthly visitor, the whole nine.

LaTigresse -> RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer (8/14/2010 6:12:14 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: slavekal I tend to shy away from the blurry areas. I am a heterosexual male. I only want erotic/sexual contact with biological females. Ovaries, vagina, estrogen...XX chromosomes, monthly visitor, the whole nine. Masochist!!![:D]

Jeffff -> RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer (8/14/2010 6:17:11 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: LaTigresse Sexually, and in a M/s, D/s relationship dynamic........what attracts me is a fairly narrow field. I will be blunt and say that dicks, the penis, repulse me. So the odds of me being sexually attracted to a person with a penis is pretty small. So remove that from the equasion of possibilities. It's lucky I don't give up easily huh? Ward

DesFIP -> RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer (8/14/2010 7:34:58 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: BambiBoi Lady Pact, How do you feel about men who are very slender but toned, shorter, with very little lightly coloured body hair - to the point where they don't seem to have much at all? What if they preferred romantic comedies to sports and giggled? I don't know about Lady Pact but I wouldn't be attracted to them. Very slender people make me afraid I would hurt them during sex. Plus I like having something to grab onto. I am not attracted to men under 6' no matter what. I prefer dark hair on men to blond but am okay with light brown, I find red haired men a turn off though. He reads romance novels, got hooked on them from me. He will watch the Series but doesn't follow a team. Giggling? Doesn't work for me. But these are personal preferences. As is the fact that if they're submissive I won't be turned on. You seem to be hinting that we are bigoted if we aren't attracted to certain people. We aren't. We just know what works for us and what doesn't. In the same way that age matters to some of us also. Or education. Or life stages. I'm a straight submissive female

xssve -> RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer (8/14/2010 8:14:08 AM)
Technically (and I just wrapped up a big dust up over this) males are simply modified females, the XY chromosome a replication error that provided the benefit of greater genetic diversity - hermaphroditism is fairly common among insects and reptiles, not as common among mammals, but then their selection processes are typically much more straightforward, they are not driven towards deception in this particular area, because they aren't typically under the same social selection stressors that humans are - i.e., the women who have expressed interest exclusively in straight males above, may just as easily be seduced by psychologically hermaphroditic male, he's just going to lie about it, happens quite frequently in fact, particularly with republican legislators apparently. Anyway, just as physical hermaphroditism, where the results are physically observable, occurs with a certain statistical frequency, it's not much of a stretch to predict that psychological, or rather neurological hermaphroditism is equally, or more common - what attracts men to women are typically biological characteristics: sillhouette (hip to waist ratio in particular), scent, vocal pitch, neoteney, etc. Same is true of feminine attraction to men, broad shoulders, etc., and this is pretty much biologically determined - in males, masculine characteristics and attraction to females is caused by the expression of androgen's during the fetal stage of development, which starts around 7 weeks and is substantially complete around 14 weeks - a lot can happen in that Two weeks however, and morphological and neurological development may follow divergent paths to some extent, due to various factors. One theory of autism, for example, which is a neurological condition that has no external morphological markers, is that it's more likely if the female is bi-hemispherically specialized - i.e., one significant difference between the male brain and the female brain is that males tend to be much more bi-hemispherical specialized: empiricical, abstract logic in the Left side of the cerebral cortex, emotional, "fuzzy" logic in the Right half, whereas these functions tend to be more evenly distributed in the female brain - thus autism is theorized to be essentially a pathology of bi-hemispheric specialization, with the two sides of the brain demonstrating a reduced ability to communicate and work together in concert - but simply being bi-hemispherically specialized doesn't' necessarily make a woman gay, otherwise, autism wouldn't be an issue, if in fact this theory turns out to be robust - biology can get very complicated on this level. This is all pretty simple (albeit, in a complicated way) from a biological perspective, but gender is also a social construct, much of human society is built on it for practical reasons: division of labor, social and economic spheres of influence, etc, and it's enforced in numerous ways ranging from fashion to outright violence - all of which merely makes deception all the more necessary and predictable - something to remember when discussing gender as a social construct, which is typically the direction such discussions will take.

Elisabella -> RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer (8/14/2010 8:23:43 AM)
-FR- I tend to go with the default biology = gender view, I consider transgendered people to simply be transgendered, not their birth sex or the gender they identify as. To me a stereotypically feminine guy who identifies as a guy is a guy. It doesn't matter if he wears skirts or makeup or has long hair or wears panties or whatever, a guy in girl's clothes is still a guy. If she identifies as female I'd just consider her to be transgender and I'd use the feminine pronouns instead of the masculine pronouns if she prefers it because I wouldn't consider "he" or "she" to be exclusively correct for a transgendered person.

leadership527 -> RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer (8/14/2010 8:24:24 AM)
I'm a straight male. The biological sex and associated sex organs always matter to me. I can care deeply about men and women both. But that caring will only transcend to love for biological females. I only experience sexual attraction towards people I love (eg, females). Sexual attraction and love are wound up together in my psyche. If we're not requiring that I love and/or have sex with the person, then my gender boundaries are a LOT loser.

xssve -> RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer (8/14/2010 8:38:19 AM)
The social construct is pretty self serving is another thing to remember: ambition for abstract wealth or other form of technical specialization can be likened to a form of Left hemispheric dominant autism, and these people don't always make the best parents, and are often emotionally dysfunctional, sometimes pathologically - homosexuals of either sex, by contrast, don't appear to suffer from that particular side effect in general - but we disapprove of the latter, while explicitly approving of the former, because we derive tangible group benefits from it (most of the time...), while benefits of the latter are less immediately discernible - "money talks, bullshit walks", etc. So much for "family values". i.e., being gay makes you much more flexible in terms of gender role, without in any way compromising your ability to engage in reproductive activity - the easy part, after all - or provide subsequent childcare - the hard part. Anyway it's here to stay, centuries of bitching about it hasn't affected it one way or another, it appears to be a random thing, a side effect of out rapid evolution and overall generalism, and overall, probably more of a strength than a weakness, expanding the range of potential social adaptations under both stable and unstable conditions - those passages in the Bible are pretty much the first mention of it at all, and even those imply it was nothing out the ordinary, else why bother to proscribe it?

AQuietSimpleMan -> RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer (8/14/2010 8:56:06 AM)
To answer the question of why I felt betrayed. Part of the Bonding I did with Hir was due to shared experiences from our childhood. We talked about having "Small Dicks" watching Porn and assuming eventually we would have the same size cocks. When I found out it was all a lie, it was like finding out that your wife had once had sex with your dad, it just seems like the kinda thing you should have known before you started forging this relationship because that may have been something that would have stopped it from the beginning at least knowing up front I get to decide before there is a History. To the idea of what makes a Male and a Female, The Testes and Ovaries. I agree but lets stop skiping around the issue, If you are DIFFERENT, and you know you are, I think you should have the human decency not to spring this on a person after they have generated feelings and started to nurture a trust because that will damage the trust. People talk about how some people would not accept them if they knew up front, but after they got to know them telling them didn't matter because they loved the person and the genitalia didn't matter. And for every story like that I hear I hear 6 more about how the Transvestite was beaten so bad that they ended up in the ICU because the Homophobic Man realized he had been kissing someone with a Penis. The point to me is that Lying, even if you are doing it for what you think is a good reason is STILL A LIE, and some people like myself do not appreciate being lied to. If you have a Penis, but you live your life as a woman, I will call you She, Her, Lady, but I would perfer that you inform me that you have a Penis, I may have some questions that are uncomfortable to answer, but they help me to understand the person better and help me to make up my mind if I am okay standing by them as a friend. I choose not to befriend Liars and Theives. This is a Personal choice, I would not want to be friends with someone who lied about who they were. QSM

xssve -> RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer (8/14/2010 10:01:24 AM)
Nobody likes rejection, and almost everybody lies for that reason - I can usually appreciate the distinction between a lie to avoid rejection and a lying for the motive of deliberately taking advantage of someone - the former is usually forgivable even if it may often be harmful - people lie most often for this reason because of the lies we're told about who we "ought" to be - a lie born of a lie.

CallaFirestormBW -> RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer (8/14/2010 10:22:39 AM)
Honestly, I'm one of the "true neutrals" on this ground. I've worked for years with the TG/TS/TV communities, the L/G community, the bi community -- even went so far as to create and make regular use of 3rd gender pronouns (xhe, hir, xer, xem), first in my fiction writing, and later in pretty much all of my writing where gender was non-specific, or where all genders could (should?) be represented. I really -do- fall in love with -people- first. My long-term relationships have been a mix of male, and female, and masculine and feminine... and not only mixed with masculine males and feminine females, but with masculine females and feminine males. It isn't that body doesn't attract me... while it's taken me a while to figure out what I really like, it turns out that what really attracts me are people who really care about their bodies and who fit into them well, and that trips my trigger every time, regardless of what gender they identify as, or what primary sexual characteristics they were born with or had shaped-to-fit. People who don't give a damn about themselves, and who, within a few hours of conversation, you can tell don't care and never will -- regardless of how tasty they may have initially appeared, that brief conversation is enough to make them completely unappealing to me, and that is -regardless- of how masculine, feminine they are, whether they're male, female, intersexual or transsexual, or whether they dress as the gender that they claim (ie., TV or not) Calla

OttersSwim -> RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer (8/14/2010 10:51:48 AM)
I am a non-op MtF transsexual. In the past two years since "coming out", my perception of the world I live in has drastically changed. There is a very clear and defined social stigma surrounding being transgendered. A portion (sometimes larger, sometimes smaller) of that stigma is carried in just about everyone I meet, see, encounter, and it is also carried inside me. The stigma of being transgendered is something I am actively fighting in myself. But there is something inside that drives trans-folk - a need for authenticity and self. It is a hard thing to do when you realize that suddenly just walking out your door has become a dangerous thing to do. In 2009, there were 95 transgendered persons murdered - specifically because they were trans. An average of 19 per month...just in the United States alone. In 2008 there were 47...a dramatic increase, yes? Attacks and beatings of trans folk every year are almost too numerous to count. A lot of discussion about disclosure in this thread. How important is it that the person that you are encountering know that there is a penis under your skirt. Concepts of deception - implications that trans-folk are deceivers, lairs, in this thread I find very disturbing. Understand that disclosure is a hard subject when you realize that by just being transgendered, you subject yourself to clear and present danger. And yet, humans are gregarious creatures. We long for companionship, friendships, and love. If you look at the cases, prior disclosure does not ensure any safety. Trans folk who have disclosed have still been harmed, attacked, and even murdered. There are people out there who will target you specifically because you are transgendered. Disclosure can actually get you killed. The issue becomes even more complex when you are interacting with kinky folk because most of us are all about the concept of "informed consent". And if that moment of "informed consent" only comes when you are both all hot and bothered, and hearts potentially have been engaged, well that feels pretty squicky. To my mind, while I see the danger of disclosure up front, I see more danger in a dramatic reveal in a private place with someone whom you probably don't know so terribly well that you can always count on a non-violent reaction. Even so, disclosure is never an easy subject. By disclosing upfront, you are exposing yourself to reaction, potential rejection, and possibly even worse. For me, that would be the price I pay for being my authentic self because I value informed consent. But the answer is not always so black and white for others and I think it important that we recognize that and not bunch all trans-folk into a box of labels. It ain't easy being green...

leadership527 -> RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer (8/14/2010 12:51:06 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: OttersSwim I am a non-op MtF transsexual. In the past two years since "coming out", my perception of the world I live in has drastically changed. There is a very clear and defined social stigma surrounding being transgendered. A portion (sometimes larger, sometimes smaller) of that stigma is carried in just about everyone I meet, see, encounter, and it is also carried inside me. The stigma of being transgendered is something I am actively fighting in myself. And I'll admit to carrying that same stigma inside of me. But there is something inside that drives trans-folk - a need for authenticity and self. And I fight it for exactly for this reason.... I believe people should be able to authentically be themselves so long as that's not causing direct harm to others. It ain't easy being green... I don't think it's easy being authentic in general... some versions of authentic are even harder than others. But whether or not it's personally appealing to me, I support green-ness in general. This is akin to the conversations that always happen on CM where people say, "Don't force your kink on the public" and I say, "Why not?" Tattoo'd, pierced, transgendered, bi, gay, sub, dom, whatever. I value diversity whether or not I partake in it.

RumpusParable -> RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer (8/14/2010 12:56:19 PM)
I'm a non-gender female, and am pansexual... I'm one of those that falls for the person with no real care for the body.

OttersSwim -> RE: Defining Gender: No Wrong Answer (8/14/2010 1:09:17 PM)
My Lady and I had a discussion about this topic and my post this morning. She pointed out, quite rightly that I am pretty much surrounded by people who are very supportive of me and my authentic self and that much of that stigma that I perceive is really mostly in me. And for this I am so very thankful. So my statement about nearly everyone I encounter carrying an amount of the stigma, was overstated. Encountering people whom you don't know out in the world...Someone stares a bit at you in the grocery store, you really don't know what they are thinking. Nor any reactions they might display unless you have words with them...maybe it's not because I am trans, but because I look like their ex-wife! A lot of trans folk sort of disassociate themselves with people when they are out and about - they cease to notice those around them because they no longer want to deal with the stares or the constant reality of being different. Anyhoo...my original point was that it starts with a perception or a reality of stigma against who you are at your core. And, because of some the clear and present dangers that can present themselves to a trans person, disclosure is not always such a black and white issue as I saw it presented here. :) It's a crazy mixed up thing and it can become pretty consuming at times...

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