The Social End of Things

Someone once suggested to me that nudist colonies and nude beaches are at least partly rooted in the fact that so many people don't know how to dress themselves such that they are both physically and psychologically comfortable in their clothes. Having gotten fed up and having no other answer, they have decided they would just like to skip the WHOLE thing ENTIRELY.

I was introduced to the idea that "gender is a social construct" well before I was introduced to the idea of transsexuals, so I had some opportunity to think about that as a separate issue from the idea of "Some people want sex change operations."

The above is a snippet from a somewhat long comment by me talking about some of my struggles to sort out things like "If having an opinion is something women aren't supposed to do, does it make me masculine to be opinionated??" I made my peace with some things when someone online talked about having beard envy because that's a big fat NOPE for me.

I don't want to be a guy. I'm not transsexual. I'm just a woman who is not comfortable with the social construct end of things for how society tries to define gender roles and tries to make people dress a certain way and act a certain way, etc. because of the bits between their legs.

I once wrote a blog post eons ago FOR Genevieve titled Comfortable in your clothes where I tried to talk to her about the fact that women's clothing is often basically a torture device. I was trying to encourage her to try something less obviously girly than wearing a bra to support her budding breasts, like a snug tank top. I felt she might be both physically more comfortable and less in danger of having someone react with violence to her transition.

She wasn't interested. She really, really wanted a BRA in specific and it wasn't something we argued about or anything like that. Just from the perspective of a cis female, I know how much I hate bras and see them as torture devices and I am absolutely not the only woman who feels that way.

So I wanted to tell her that the answers we currently have for how to dress female bodies make a LOT of women really MISERABLE and you have my permission to try to find answers you are both psychologically and physically comfortable with instead of rushing headlong into embracing these torture devices that so many cis women view as the bane of their existence and CANNOT wait to get out of the minute they get home.

This is a more recent comment by me:

I can't help but wonder how much the explosion in Trans stuff is related to changing gender roles generally. We used to have fairly clearly separated roles, clothing styles, etc and I wonder if we just lack an adequate framework for sorting that out properly and it helps nudge some vulnerable individuals down odd pathways in unfortunate ways.

That comment is on an article titled I thought I was saving Trans kids. Now I'm blowing the whistle.

I do not actually really understand the whole trans thing. I don't really get "I feel sincerely that I was born with a body of the wrong physical sex."

I have a genetic disorder that was diagnosed late in life. I TOTALLY get "Something is WRONG with my body and my life and no one seems to see it and it is RUINING MY LIFE. Something has GOT to be done about this."

So I was very supportive of Genevieve and if you sincerely want to transition, I support that.

But with this idea spreading and all, I am concerned about some people pursuing hormone intervention and surgical intervention when maybe they just HATE their clothes or something and haven't yet gotten it straight in their mind that hating your clothes (or whatever their issue is) doesn't mean you aren't the gender that matches your physical sex.

Some women are raised with the idea that you can wear pants and have short hair (or whatever) and that's fine. I was raised with an expectation that I needed to be a very girly girl and didn't own a pair of pants until age seven.

So I am someone who has had to wonder what it means if I don't like x, y or z aspects of the social construct end of things of being a girl. Does that say I'm not really a girl? Or does that say I'm not really heterosexual? Etc.

After a lot of years of trying to sort such questions, I'm confident I am about 98 percent heterosexual, I LIKE being a girly girl in many ways and I just hate feeling like I can't have a full life because I was born with the wrong bits between my legs. I hate a lot of the societal expectations of how I am supposed to dress, behave, etc. based entirely on the bits between my legs.

So this is me saying "It's okay for you to separate those things out and not feel like you can either embrace all the expected stereotypes for the gender you were born with or you can get a sex change operation if you don't like the WHOLE package and then embrace that entire package."

It's FINE if more people in the world start saying "I like SOME parts of this package deal but not OTHERS. I would like to cut my hair and wear pants (or whatever) without the ENTIRE world having a cow about that and asking if I'm gay. Please and thank you."