The way I understand my feelings and experiences has changed so much pre vs post transition.
I wanted to see what other small misconceptions you all had from pre-transition that you see differently now, or that maybe you wish you had understood before.
There are so many to choose from, but I'll start:
Probably as a coping mechanism I never saw the gendered components to my self-loathing.
For example, I hated my breasts because they were malformed-looking, to me. I would sometimes think, if I were a woman it would be worse (like the same, but larger), but I never once thought having a flat chest would be better. Instead I seemed to need to feel having female breasts would be worse, so I could feel better about my situation.
Or how I always loved how little hair was on my body, but never thought that was abnormal. I never got back hair and only had thin hair on my belly and a small, thin strip on my sternum. I never thought of this in terms of gender, I never thought about how my body ideal was curvy and hairless, or feminine. It bothered me when I was compared to male beauty icons, but I never could quite be honest with myself as to why.
I ignored (or repressed) the gender in everything, but it was still there.
So my misconception was about gender itself, I thought of it as primarily social and malleable, and thus was some great social evil, gender was The Enemy or The Problem.
Now gender is extremely important to me, but before I would say being a man was irrelevant to me, or even obviously unwanted - it was a moral choice, to be a woman was to be a better person in my mind, to abandon a toxic social role in favor of an enlightened one.
Now I think you can't really choose, that we have these implicit gendered feelings that we can't really change, and so being a woman feels good to me because of what I am, and now being a woman is just a precious gift, rather than a moral imperative.
I totally botched this post, I wanted this to be succinct and lost my sense of purpose and have rambled along.
Looking forward to hearing from you all. đ
I started off pretransition believing that you can't choose your gender, and now I would say one can choose a gender. It reminds me of the free will vs predestination arguments from the churches I grew up in.
There's a lot that has changed about how I view the world. My transition was fairly easy, all things considered. I eventually settled on labeling my gender as dragon. I couldn't find a premade gender label that described how I understand myself so I made my own. Another label that I've taken to using for some forms and such is genderqueer. Mostly because I've realized there are different levels to how much of who I am I want to share. At a basic level, most people perceive me as a woman. It's an easy shorthand for many interactions but it's a perception, not who I am. I choose to play that role in certain situations because it's good enough for that.
So, in a certain sense, I choose my gender on a case by case basis. Choosing what and how much I share about myself.
In the same way, I have different names in different contexts. All of them are my true names, and all of them I chose.
There's probably a lot more I could go into but I'm kinda tired rn anyways.
Maybe you feel you chose your gender, but for me and many others we did not choose our gender, so I would be wary of making generalised statements about people in general.
it's an old debate in trans circles, and each side has it's arguments. There's lots of different ways to frame the concept but the one I find most compelling is the one that says an individual has the ability and right to choose the way of being that best suits them.
Feeling an innate sense of gender isn't incompatible with this model, as it makes no restrictions on how or why one chooses their way.
I think this topic would be better served, and I would be better edified, by you making your own top level comment talking about your beliefs and how you came to them rather than telling me to restrict what I say about mine.
Speak for yourself
That's what I was doing, yes.
No, you did not. You spoke for "many others"
Yes, I feel confident saying there are many others who share my view, but it is said for me first. As opposed to the person I was replying to (who I don't think is you) who made generalised statements that could be interpreted to apply to all people, if I had not stepped in to provide a counterpoint.
In the end, different people feel different ways and that was all I was intending to show, not to get into some leftist infighting about who is more trans or whatever, and especially not pedantic semantic debates about exactly how I made my point.