Nature-Spirits wrote:Dumb Ideologies wrote:
It conflates identity and conformity with traditional gender stereotypes.
Indeed. I took it yesterday, and when one of the first questions was about how good at math you are, I was worried. Studies have long proven false the stereotype that girls are worse at math than boys.
Also, the test was hopelessly binarist. Some of the questions were really tricky for me to navigate around.
For the record, it told me that I was a "probable transsexual" in the end. I feel like it would tell the same thing to a lot of men, though, and the opposite to a lot of trans women, considering what the questions were like....
I got "androgynous", and that was actually something I could relate to, hence why I don't dislike the test that much. Also because it gave me a few triyng-to-be-helpful suggestions for that, which I hadn't seen before, which was nice, too. The other tests I had seen didn't account for that result at all and just suggested more or less that I'm probably a regular cissexual, which wasn't really a satisfying result. So while I disliked the test for including so many stereotypes, I just took it (upon realizing that) as a test which tells me which stereotypical gender role I would fit better, which was something I was interested in, too.
Nature-Spirits wrote:Jute wrote:Having male traits isn't something that would make anyone less of a woman, just as liking "girly" things doesn't make anyone less of a man. So you don't have to take it as an insult.
I do agree with this. There are femme men, tomboys, and people all along the spectrum. Gender identity doesn't have to be the same thing as gender expression -- and in many cases, it isn't. Just because we're trans doesn't mean that we should have to defend our genders by being super feminine/uber masculine (for women and men respectively), and that cis people expect us to is hypocritical. When a wee little cis girl wants to play with trucks and hang out with the boys, after all, no one assumes she's a boy -- why hold cis folk to different standards than trans folk? It's transmisogynistic to hold trans people to such high standards of femininity/masculinity.
This is exactly the reason why I always thought I could never be transsexual, because I thought it meant in my case being incredibly "femme", after reading about some reports where the portrayed where mostly very "femme" transwomen.
Nature-Spirits wrote:
When she said, "male homosexuality can be defined as a partial, incomplete, transsexualization of the brain", I stopped reading. It obviously reflects her own heteronormative outlook, since she obviously hasn't taken into account the numerous gay and lesbian trans people, nor the many masculine gay men (I'm not going to use a specific label here because there are too many) and the lipstick lesbians, who you would really never guess to be gay. And that's not to mention the bi/pan-erasure -- if being gay is somehow an "incomplete transsexualization", then what are bi/pansexuals? Bi- and pansexual people can be cis, binary trans, non-binary, etc., so what does that mean for them? Obviously their existence didn't even occur to her. And I can't take someone seriously when they pack so many logical fallacies into one sentence.
I only included that link for the sake of completion, didn't actually read it all, sorry.
Nature-Spirits wrote:Jute wrote:Obviously, I just am not sure what "thinking deeply" means here. How and what to think about, for example. Hence why I tried that test to give me suggestions which I could use as some sort of starting point.
Well, when I was contemplating my own gender identity, I mostly just took a long time to think about how I experience gender. I still do. I did some research, did some introspection, did some more research, did some more introspection, went out to meet some trans people in my community, did some more introspection, joined this thread, etc. I thought about my past -- remembering that one time in Grade 8 I told my friends (all girls) that I wished I were a girl (to which they said that no, I didn't, because periods were horrible), remembering how sometimes I would love my body and love being a boy, remembering how at other times I would feel indifferent about or dislike my body and not enjoy being a boy -- and my present -- every time I start shifting genders now, I notice, and though I don't put so much focus on labelling what I happen to be experiencing at the moment, I do recognise my different feelings of gender, take note of my dysphoria vs euphoria vs indifference, and learn from every experience I have. I think a lot about gender nowadays -- not to the point of obsessing over it, and certainly not all the time -- but over the past year I've probably thought about gender more than most cis people will in a decade. I've had to do that in order to figure myself out. And I'm glad for it, because despite the monster that is dysphoria, I'm happier with myself now that I have a better understanding of me.
Thanks
