stickygirl
All the witches
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2012
- Posts
- 23,365
More significantly is how you are treated by society as a hairy love-monkey... the ole male privilege thang, but to keep to the hairy stuff, you are identified and treated as male by those physical attributes. You're normal Brad - wonderfully normal of course!!I like my penis. I like my hairy chest. I like my beard. I do hate shaving, though, and wish I didn't have to. I like scratching my balls.My hairy back and ass? Not so much. I'm testosterone laden.

For sure - you can't escape your past and it's a mistake to hide from it. If anything I would say the stigma is not a residual maleness, but rather the trauma of being locked into the wrong gender role. That kind of long-term stress runs very deep and can manifest itself in a number of different pyschological problems from depression and self-harming to actual physical symptoms like psoriarsis, migraines etc. Compared to a little exposure to male privilege, I am clear as to what affected me more.The fact that one has lived as a different gender also can't help but have an impact. If having a memory of experiencing life as another gender is what you mean by a 'stigma', no trans person will NOT have it. How they act now will also probably be affected by that past to some degree. How they FEEL about themselves internally is probably also going to be affected by the struggles they encountered along the way.
Meh... sadly your cynicism bucket holds water in many cases. I think there could be another side to it in that people worry that the trans woman isn't convinced herself - that she could be faking it. It's difficult to put across to a cis-gender person how wrong that assumption is. It's as though they are taking a snapshot of the present without really thinking what she has been through to reach this point: of how many clinicians needed to be convinced, of how much bullying and abuse went on in school and beyond, and of how hard the individual wished it would all go away.Perhaps I'm a cynic, but when I hear someone say something like 'know they are a girl at heart' or 'is truly a woman' about a prospective partner, what I hear is 'I don't want to associate with someone who might threaten my view of myself as a heterosexual male' - that is, I read it as a sign that the inquirer is more concerned about their own psychosexual identity (or how they appear in public, which is pretty much the same thing) than how they relate to the other person. I think it therefore behooves the inquirer to inquire of themselves a little more about their reasons for asking in the first place.
But lets not be too hard on boyfriends and allies because it can be really tough on them when their friends and family get to hear the truth. They can walk away from it, but if they choose to stay, that makes them pretty awesome in my book.
My hairy back and ass? Not so much. I'm testosterone laden.
