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Almost all transsexuals whom I have talked with state that they do not feel that they are only feminine men or masculine women, but that they really and truly are the opposite sex inside.
Why do they feel this way? They have associations with the human body. The penis is a perfect example of this. Through our culture, we have defined a penis as a total representative of our sexual personality: It is powerful, hard, aggressive. It is in control. It is the penetrater, the dominator, the sledgehammer.
WRONG!
When you read those words, you felt the familiar associations that our culture has worked so hard to engrain into your brains. People used to work hard to say that blacks were good for nothing but property, that non-Christians actively conducted business with Satan himself, that the Earth was flat. In fact, in Saudi Arabia, the penalty for believing the Earth was round was death.
I know how you feel. I know the feeling of looking at your body and feeling that it is somehow wrong. "This can't be my body. I want a body that looks more masculine/more feminine. That's who I really am." But, I realized that my body was NOT who I was, and that the feelings I had about my body were engineered by society.
How can something as deep as gender identity become engrained merely through social conditioning?
People can feel like they've been in the wrong body since birth because they've been treated according to their sex from birth. Male babies are treated more rough and bounced more vigorously, and female babies are treated gentler and with more cuddling. A study in the book The Myth of Male Power reveals that male babies receive less comforting attention when they cry, and later many boys are told not to cry at all. Girls are also told to act in their traditional female role, sometimes even by feminist mothers. You treated one way from birth on, depending on your sex. And this may not be the way that you need. But this doesn't mean you are actually the other sex. Just because you are a boy who needs to be treated gentler and more delicately or a girl who needs to be more rough and tough and does not necessarily mean you are the opposite sex inside.
Childhood peers can be extremely influential as well, as the following passage illustrates:
"One child, who had made a career of torturing me from my first day, was finally sat down and asked why, in my presence, he had such an obsession with my destruction. He simply was unable to answer. He fumblingly tried to express that there was something about me that made me different, something that made him feel funny when he saw that difference. He hated that feeling, so he had to hurt me. This little session did not stop my persecution, of course, but it did let me have an insight into the reasons for my endangerment." ( A childhood memory of a MTF).
This experience illustrates just how painful it is to be different. My experience was very similar to this one. Yours may have been as well. Yet, we fail to appreciate the significance of events like this. You aren't different because you don't fit in, you don't fit in because you are different. They don't have ANY right to treat you wrong, but people have always been mean to those who are different. It's not your fault. You aren't wrong for being who you are, others are wrong for not accepting you.
In fact, there is nothing about the penis whatsoever that makes it any more masculine or dominating than a vagina. A penis does penetrate, but male genitals are also more delicate and exposed because they are on the outside of the body. People need to start letting go of these imposed beliefs about our bodies in order to accept their bodies. To do this, you must do the following:
QUESTION YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT YOUR BODY
To further this goal, I have provided a "association debunker" to help males or females get a better idea of their body
Myths of the Male Body for Males and Male to Female transsexuals.
Myths of the Female Body for Females and Female to Male transsexuals.
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