Dear T, I don't get some of you...help me understand?

It's very hard to explain it to someone not going through with it. I'm just going to ramble so I apologize if this is unorganized.

If you woke up as the opposite sex tomorrow morning - for example, presuming you're male, if you woke up as a woman - and everyone addressed you as such even though you were the same person in your head, how would you feel? You KNOW you're male (or whichever you are) in your head, but you look like a girl, so that's what everyone's calling you. You look at your body in the mirror, and see something incongruent with who you know you are in your head. That's what it's like every day for us.

Yes, stereotypes are largely cultural, and many trans people reject them entirely. I've met several butchy/dykey MtFs and effeminate FtMs, but for many of us, it's more of a factor of just being comfortable in our own skin, regardless of social "norms." It's not really so much a feeling of "if I were a different gender," it tends to be more of, "my brain is wired as X, but I am physically Y."

I've always felt uncomfortable as a "man" in my head. Ever since I was little, I HATED having to follow the social stereotypes for boys, and my body completely disgusted me. I was told I was fairly attractive by a few other people, but all I saw was something that was incorrect, something that didn't match what I knew I should have been since I was little, and that made me absolutely sick, (quite literally,) to the point I got nearly suicidal for a few years. The thought of having to live as something I did not feel I was - a boy/man - felt meaningless to me, because that's not who I was in my mind.

Changing one's body to match their mental gender also affects how we're perceived by society. You say people are free to dress and act however they want, but, if I'm female-minded, but physically male, without any sort of treatments or anything, people are going to see a crossdressing boy. I can tell them otherwise, but it rarely makes a difference, since so many people focus just on what someone biologically is, just based off appearances. After being on hormones for several months, my body looks significantly more feminine, and people actually can see me as a girl, rather than just listen to me demand that they call me something else. Also, getting sexual reassignment surgery is the only way to legally change one's gender on legal documents, in many states. So, it's a mix of personal peace of mind, along with societal acceptance.

As I said, it's very hard to explain that sort of feeling to someone not going through it. Hopefully this might have helped a little. :<

It's extremely unlikely that a 14 year old was undergoing sexual reassignment surgery, by the way. Maybe the 14 year old was starting hormone blockers to delay puberty until they would be allowed to start cross-sex hormones.

So it confounds and confuses me that anyone might feel the desire or need to pursue the hiding, restructuring or removal of the physical form that they were born into.

Just to make it even more confusing for you, I'm transgender and have been living as female for 3 years but I don't especially care that I have a dick or about hiding the fact that I do. I transitioned because these days you still can't get away from gender segregation sadly and when it comes to situations where I have to be one or the other I just prefer to be on the F team :)

You might wanna try also asking the folks over at r/asktransgender.

Being trans isn't really a "culture." Subcultures develop around shared experience, but they're a response to an external situation and common social struggles resulting from it - kind of like Deaf culture, or queer culture in general.

It's very difficult to describe the experience of dysphoria to someone who hasn't been there. It's not about clothing, or culturally "masculine/feminine" interests. No one transitions to female so they can be a nurse or wear bright colors, or to male so they can drive a motorcycle or be a lumberjack. A Scottish trans woman probably won't wear a traditional kilt at her wedding; a Scottish trans man might. A trans woman in the US may wear a kilt-like skirt, since it's treated as women's clothing here. These are just a matter of fashion and gender expression - attempts to make one's identity visible in a specific cultural context.

Gender identity is much more basic. It's a fundamental understanding of who and what you are. If you've always had a firm gender identity corresponding well with your physical state, you'll never notice it at all any more than you notice it's right and appropriate to have two legs. Fish don't notice water & etc., it's only noticeable if it goes wrong.

Nobody alters their physical state so they can wear a dress/tux. People alter their physical state, because that physical state is wrong. The brain is wired to recognize the body, and when the body it's born into doesn't match the wiring, it's one hell of a mindfuck. The software works perfectly well, it's just put into incompatible hardware. The problem is almost invisible from the outside, but it's incredibly obvious from the inside.

And remember not all trans people end up straight and gender normative post-transition. Some trans women are butch lesbians who prefer work overalls to lipstick, some trans men are fairies who like sparkles and musical theater.

I'm a trans man and a gay nerd. One of the things I most appreciate about testosterone is that I can now wear, say and do absolutely anything I want, with no worry I'll mistaken for a woman. I'm planning a cyborg queen costume for next year's NYC Halloween Parade, and absolutely love that I can wear a cammo print miniskirt, ripped fishnets and lots of glitter, and still be obviously a man.

So you're speaking about those who transition medically, right?

We aren't looking to be the "other" gender. We are that gender (or closer to it on the spectrum than we are to our bodies). A common theory of how we got a mix up between our physical sex and our mental gender is while in utero the moments when hormones are released that imprint your gender on your mind didn't happen to be the same ones as those that decide if your body will be male or female (this has been proven to be two separate steps of development, I think the Swedish figured that out).

So what you're really talking about is a sort of invisible condition at birth, that has social consequences later on. Statistically speaking, there are as many people who transition in life as there are children born with cleft pallets. Society doesn't go nuts over those children getting reconstructive surgeries, but also bear in mind at 14 years old a child is not likely undergoing the full surgeries and if they are that's an extremely rare situation.

I can get why people freak out of the medical stuff. It's really scary when you look at it from the outside or for the first time. I was 14 when I found surgical photos. I cried my goddamn eyes out all alone in my room. I didn't want to be carved up and mutilated just because I wasn't born with the standard anatomy of a guy. It wasn't until I was a bit older I understood that I got to decide how far my medical transition was to go.

I've taken my body from being something I fought, hated, and just would rather not exist in to being not something I'm detached from. It's not a shell. It's not a curse. It's me. I'm not angry or hurt at my situation anymore. I'm a happy function and pretty awesome person thanks to a needle I stick myself with about every two weeks and a surgeon who took a pair of tumors from my chest.

How did I know this was right for me? How do you know it's not what you need to do? Same coin, different sides. I thought for a long while I wouldn't need to do any of this, and I just got more and more ... unhuman. This was something I needed to be the man I was meant to be.

What gender are you?

It's simply beyond me.

Ding. Sometimes you just have to go way out on a limb and not understand everything in the universe and take someone at their word. I don't have some gut, intuitive, mental simulation of wanting to feel like a different gender either, but I certainly believe Trans people when they say that they do, and that has to be good enough.

To address your question about the 14-year-old changing their body at such a young age: consider this. The kid had the decision already made for zir at conception. Zhe had no choice in becoming a male or female, it was a biological decision made without consent or thought. A decision about biology has already been made. It's not like this kid is starting with a blank canvass and deciding to write on it with ink. The ink was already put there, without any consent.

Another way to look at it is this way, let's go with the trolly cart problem. You have a trolly cart hurtling down some tracks, and at the end of it is one person tied to the rails. You can press a switch, and make the cart change to tracks. But that 2nd set of tracks also has one person tied to it. Is there any moral difference between pressing the switch or leaving it be? Either way one person dies. Instead, imagine that tied to the tracks are a female and male version of the decider. Saving one means killing the other, no matter if the switch is pressed or not.

This kid is already being forced down one path by biology. By flipping the switch, zhe is making a decision to simply go down a different path. Either way the kid grows up as a specific gender. This way the kid gets to be the gender zhe wants.

(Admittance of simplifications: I refer to "biology" meaning external genitals / hormones, but really the brain configuration of gender is just as biological as the goods. I simplify gender into 2 binaries, but there is a spectrum including but not limited to genderqueer.)

Also, about the 14 year old - do you have a link or anything?

There's a small but growing number of kids going through transition as teens or pre-adolescents, but transition /= surgery. Between the legal and medical hurdles to jump through, the incredible cost, and the need for a body to be pretty much full grown for best results, it's nearly impossible for minors to get genital reconstructive surgery. The youngest I've ever heard is Kim Petras, who was 16 at the time.

Transition for minors almost always means a combination of social transition (changing one's life to live as the correct gender), wardrobe and hair changes, and at onset of adolescence the use of puberty-blocking drugs. These don't cause permanent changes in and of themselves, they just put puberty on hold so it doesn't cause permanent changes. If these blockers are stopped, puberty picks up where it left off.

In most cases, the child then has to be 15-16 before they can even hope to start real hormonal therapy - estrogen for trans girls, testosterone for trans boys. This treatment then allows them to go through an appropriate puberty, only slightly delayed. Surgery costs tens of thousands of dollars, and normally has to wait for quite a while.

This is all done with intense medical, social and psychological supervision. It can't be done casually or on a whim, it's only available to children who have expressed a strong gender identity other than the one typically associated with their biological sex, and intense long-running distress at being identified with their biological sex. And it's only available to children who are able to express this distress in words adults can understand, who have families willing to listen, and who have access to treatment and are able to afford it. Even most children who would desperately benefit from this treatment don't have any way to get it.

• Transsexual gene link identified
• Male-to-Female Transsexuals Have Female Neuron Numbers in a Limbic Nucleus
• Male-to-Female Transsexuals Show Sex-Atypical Hypothalamus Activation When Smelling Odorous Steroids
• Regional Grey Matter Variation in Male-to-Female Transsexuality
• A sex difference in the hypothalamic uncinate nucleus: relationship to gender identity.
• White matter microstructure in female to male transsexuals before cross-sex hormonal treatment. A diffusion tensor imaging study.
• A Sex Difference in the Human Brain and its Relation to Transsexuality
• Gender Identity and phantom genitalia
• Typical female 2nd–4th finger length (2D:4D) ratios in male-to-female transsexuals—possible implications for prenatal androgen exposure