Iâm a cis-gender man which basically means that, when I was born, the doctor went âItâs a boy!â and when I was old enough to understand I agreed with him.
The thing is, I donât know why I feel like a man. I was teased and bullied for it a lot when I was little. Iâve never had stereotypically American male interests. I never cared about sports or cars or guns. I was more interested in music and cooking and the arts. Iâve always been emotionally in tune and sensitive, even when I did my best to suppress my emotions to survive a childhood of abuse from other children.
Itâs not physical either. I donât feel like a man because I have a penis or a beard. If you put my brain in a robot body or any other body, my essence would still feel male (I assume). I literally canât imagine what being any other gender would feel like, since I feel so acutely male.
I think thatâs why the concept of being transgender always made sense to me. Iâm a man. I donât have any bloody clue why I feel like a man, but I donât feel that itâs tied to my body or my interests or the way that Iâve been treated. I feel like a man because of something beyond that. Something ephemeral. So, why couldnât others feel the same? Why couldnât a person whoâs been misidentified as a girl feel like a boy for the exact same nebulous reasons that I do?
And, since gender really doesnât make any sense to me anyway, why couldnât there also be people who feel as if they donât have one? Or who flow across genders like a ship on a map?
Are there people out there whose sense of their own gender is inseparable from their physical form? If you put those people into robot bodies or, simply, other physically different bodies, would their gender identity also swap? If so, why? Are they actually more lost in their gender identity than I am and they need to hone in on the physical in order to anchor themselves?
Why do people feel like they are the gender that they are?
amandla
theartofmadeline
germansingergirl
