IanRedpoint wrote:I hope you have support from your friends. I think it's always harder for family to embrace a change like this. Hopefully that will come with time. It really can work. Dawn's family, even her wife, have been onside throughout. Love can and should be stronger than gender.
Let us know that you're okay, post surgery. We'll be thinking of you.
I will!
And that's great to hear. It's always reassuring when someone's story ends happily, like that. I have really great support from the people in my life - my biological family has been rubbish, but they play less of a role in my day to day life now.
IanRedpoint wrote:Anyway, we need more women making electronic music.
Amen. Onwards!
Headphase wrote:I'm still in school and I swear this is how everyone judges you like this:
"If you are a girl who likes boys, that's okay
If you are a girl who likes girls. that's okay
If you are a boy who likes girls, that's okay
If you are a boy who liek's boys, THAT'S WRONG AND YOU SHOULD BE PUNISHED"
I completely disagree with the statement above, which someone ACTUALLY said to me. I don't care what sexuality you are:
As long as you are happy in life, then you are living life correctly
I take your point, although gender is not the same thing as sexual orientation. In fact, the two often operate completely independently from one another. Sexual orientation is what you find attractive in another person. Gender is what you feel you, yourself are, or ought to be.
For example, when people ask me about my orientation (and they have a minute or two to spare) I tell them I am polymorphously perverse and autoerotic. Meaning I take sexual arousal from MANY different situations, irrespective of gender and irrespective of if it's even a human or even an animal or even an organism - and autoeroticism means I prefer to physically arouse myself rather than have other people involved. That's MY orientation.
And when asked about my gender, I say this.... I think that, being a human with a full set of genes, the hard distinction between males and females does not exist in nature, only in the human mind. I feel that my mind, my personality, deep down in the core of it all, does not have a gender, and neither does anybody else's. If my personality were a planet, 99% of the inner layers are genderless, gender does not apply to them, it would be like saying a webcam or a pill bottle has a gender; it just doesn't. The OUTER layers, where I express myself, do have a gender, and it's a gender of my own choosing. EVERYONE is free to choose their gender, but most people are content to stick with the one that has been assumed for them. Got a penis at birth, they call you male, you get more testosterone than estrogen, you live the role... why change it, if it works for you? I think that's where most people are at.
(And while we're mentioning genes, arguing that genetics determine identity is horseshit. Having a Y chromosome /does not make you male/. It means you have a gene that /tends to cause male sexual traits/. TENDS. Notice the wording. That's how genes work. I have a gene that TENDS to cause cancer. I do not have cancer. I may never get cancer. Nobody tells me I have to act like a cancer patient because of my gene. Genes do not determine identity.)
In my view, all humans are gender-queer. In the womb, all human fetuses start off with a vagina. That's just a fact. In the womb, pre-hormones, we are all female. Female is the DEFAULT state. Then, if testosterone is present, your gonads descend from the body, your clitoris elongates, and your perineum heals shut. That's right, that line going up your scrotum and down to your butthole? That's a scar. From where your VAGINA used to be. Not even kidding.
All I'm doing is 're-setting' things back how they were. Back how they would've been, and continued to be, had testosterone not been introduced to my development.
Females are males and males are females. The only reason we think there's a huge difference is hormones. Particularly PUBERTY. Shit, children are all pretty androgynous unless they have a severe hormone imbalance. HUMANS are androgynous. Puberty takes whatever sexual hormones are present, and jams them up to 11. Humans, being /morons/, take this as a suggestion from nature that they can only move in one direction or have one identity or call themselves one or the other. There are no instructions written into the natural world that SAY this, it's just something humans decided on and then decided to viciously enforce as an idea. Like, oh, I don't know, monotheistic religion, patriarchal social structures, heterosexuality, and virtually everything else that's actually optional.
