"not only can live outside those systems, I can thrive as who I am."

[cosmolinguist]

I see so much of myself in this person's life! I knew they were my age before they said, just from their description of junior high.

And of course so much is different too. I wish I could write anything as good as this.

Comments

[arlie]

Thank you for posting this. I appreciated a chance to read the linked post.

And I absolutely get it with the wtf about how everyone has a sense of gender identity, rather than knowledge of the rules enforced on them because of the shape of their body.

I was told that I could determine the innately feminine (aka, the rules of my birth culture) through introspection. So females are good at math, prefer to spend time alone, prefer practical to attractive in their own clothes, tools, etc., and otherwise are just like me? Somehow when I drew conclusions like that I was getting the introspection wrong.

But in any case I knew that was bogus, having already been informed of my innate feminine desire to "catch a man" so I could be his servant, sex object and similar, until he tired of me and replaced me with a younger model. This of course required constant attention to my own attractiveness, including in matters of appearance, along with hiding my intelligence (he'll want someone less smart than him) etc etc etc. All of it naturally tending to twist my development so that I wouldn't be able to earn a decent living except as "wife", or perhaps call girl.

"Innate" attributes clearly aren't accessible to introspection, even while obvious to outsiders.

p.s. I'd be a bit older than the poster - no personal computers in my K12 schools.

[cosmolinguist]

It's really great to read your thoughts on this; thank you.

I had such a similar experience of mixed messages about my gender, complicated to some extent by disability and my parents' attitudes (my dad liked long hair on little girls and dresses, but also was clearly much more comfortable telling me to help him lift heavy things around the farm than in telling me that I shouldn't sit how I normally do when I was wearing a dress; my mom had some kind of paradigm shift from a terribly tomboyish childhood to being the fusspot about clothes, hair and makeup that I've always known her to be so I wonder if she expected I'd do similar and was disappointed when I never really outgrew my boyish habits).