Melanie McGreevey said:
Relish in Chaos said:
Melanie McGreevey said:
FFS (Facial Feminization Surgery) is insanely invasive, and takes a LONG time to heal from..it's also VERY expensive (haven't looked lately, but a few years i did out of curiosity, and it was). That aside, it does work wonders.
I feel i am too old for FFS at this point. I seem to pass just fine as i am. I'd rather have the GRS and some voice training instead.
Yeah, I don't know that much about FFS, but I've just heard it being mentioned occasionally.
no, ya... I wouldn't mind a little, but frankly i have known girls that got it, and on occasion can still be read.
But presumably, somewhat less than a trans woman without FFS.
Even still, as I aforementioned, there are loads of trans women, with or without FFS, that mostly can't be read. Besides, I guess there are loads of "natural" women that look masculine. I didn't know what gender this girl at my school was until my friend told me she was his sister. Admittedly, she's about 12, but still.
And there are two twin teenage sisters at my school who sound quite deep, although that could be because they smoke. These are probably in the minority, but they exist nonetheless. I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that a woman must have a penis just because she's got a few angular facial features or a lump in her trouser pocket, unless it was
really obvious.
orangeban said:
It's difficult to explain gender dysphoria to someone who hasn't experienced it, it'd be like explaining pain to someone who hasn't experienced it, you really do need to feel it to understand. But I'll try.
Our brains are set to a gender (this can be anything from the conventional male and female, to both genders, gender fluid, androgynous, etc.), and in most people, the gender our brain is set to matches the sex characteristics you have been provided with. These people (the correct term is cispeople) generally don't appreciate or understand the difference between gender and sex without education about it, because they can't distinguish between them, since they match up inside them. In transpeople, the gender the brain is set to does not match the sex characteristics provided, causing the dysphoria.
Now to explain what exactly I mean when I say our brains are set to a gender. First, it's important to realise the difference between gender and expression. Having a female gender doesn't mean that you love ponies, pink, housework and other stereotypically female things. Neither does having a male gender mean you enjoy drinking beer with your bros over a sports game every Sunday.
It simply means that your brain expects you to have certain sex characteristics. Gender dysphoria comes from when your brain finds your sex characteristics do not match your gender, and generally freaks out about it.
Note: I'm in no way, at all, an expert or even particularly well-informed about this stuff. This is really just dumbed-down speculation on my part.
Yeah, that's probably one of the best explanations of gender dysphoria I've seen.
Another, less scientific but perhaps more social, explanation is this analogy I thought up, applicable to trans men. If you were a man and you knew you were a man, but for some reason, you had a vagina and you had to experience both the physical and mental pain of menstruation that wasn't meant to even happen, and everyone you knew referred to you with female pronouns, how would you feel? You wouldn't feel like you were you, as if you'd literally been body-swapped.
You know one or two of those comedy films where a guy and girl get body-swapped, and at first, the guy is freakin' ecstatic because his guy brain loves the fact that he can fondle himself all day. Yeah, imagine being like that for
years, for what'd seem like
the rest of your life. You wouldn't even know what the fuck to do with yourself, and then all that suppression would eventually come to the fore and you wouldn't be able to keep it to yourself anymore.
Beckygrrl said:
Even if a trans woman still has her penis, she very often has no interest in using it in a sexual way because it conflicts with her self-image.
Maybe this is a bad example, but there's a reason that the transsexual porn industry is so large. And they aren't "pretending" or anything either (although I'm not implying that you implied they were). Aren't many trans women simply happy with having the breasts, or just being generally perceived in society as a woman? Some don't recoil in horror when they have to look down at their penis in the shower, some even like it as it gives them that different edge, and some don't think that your outward genitalia determines their gender (identity) or even makes a difference to them.
Plus, there have been cases where people have gone into the surgery and their genitalia has been, for lack of a better word...unresponsive. As in, they
can't use it sexually, even if they wanted to. Although I'd heard that this
might be more of a problem with autogynephiles that merely want to change sex for the kink of it, which makes you wonder...how did they even meet the necessary psychological evaluations? I'm not entirely sure on that you really get such dedicated autogynephiles that can get accepted for surgery willy-nilly (pardon the pun) like that, much less those that even
want to go as far as that just for a paraphilia.
CrazyCapnMorgan said:
Grey Day for Elcia said:
Humans are tricky creatures, aren't we, lol.
Here's an idea I've been wrestling with - humans are
unnatural. If we were natural, would we have over-populated and over built nearly everything on this planet?
As for the whole sexuality issue, I say this - to each their own. We're different in the sense that we have preferences for our sexual urges, but we're the same in that we
all have sexual urges. I look at this way, the way I judge people is the sum of their dreams, their beliefs and their actions. If they aren't infringing on another person's freedoms...who the fuck am I to argue what they do with their lives, sexually or otherwise?
Yes, I think that too. To the homophobes that claim that homosexuality is ?against nature?, I just refer to all the highly unnatural technology and money that we?ve invented over the years and rely on to this day (just because you don?t watch ?what those Satanists call television? doesn?t mean that you aren?t required to use the computer or the toaster, which they didn?t use however many years ago when your shitty propaganda book was written, for your day-to-day lives), and ask them when they have sex, do they do it for pleasure or procreation? Unsurprisingly, many of them choose the former. I mean, how could you
not have sex for pleasure? Even the hardcore Catholics can?t deny basic human biology, unless they want to chemically castrate themselves or something, which would directly go against procreation if they can?t even use the damn thing. Or maybe they want to all be like animals, but it simply doesn?t work like that. They?d just get so sexually repressed that they?d end up?I dunno, becoming a priest and molesting a prepubescent boy.
Sorry, sorry, that was out of order; we shouldn?t give in to stereotypes like that. Huh, that sounds ironic, doesn?t it? The same priests that blacklist all homosexuals as being sex-addicted child-molesters are now being stereotyped themselves for being repressed child-molesters. I?m
almost inclined to believe in karma.
