Bi Gender?

[Guest katycat]

Can someone help me understand the idea of being bi gendered? I think I might have discovered this about myself many many years ago but it was only within the past couple days that I'd ever heard of this term. I'm 32, and was born and raised as a male but I've always had a very distinct and separate feminine side. It's almost like she's an entirely separate entity living within the same body and her and I can switch back and forth, it's almost like our body is a car and we're taking turns driving. I've equated it to being siamese twins that share a single body. We're aware of each other, it's like we can even converse between the two of us. I thought maybe it was borderline personality disorder, or multiple personalities, or some other psychological thing. but I don't know.

I'm an only child with a pretty "normal" mom and dad, still happily married. They did initially want to have a boy and a girl, but there were complications during my birth and they decided it would be too risky to have a second child. I always hung out with my dad and did "guy stuff" with him, like working in the garage and talking about old cars and stuff. When I hung out with my mom, we'd do more feminine things, like I'd go shopping with her and stuff like that. It's almost like I was fulfilling a daughterly role with her. Or maybe it's some other thing where I'm like my own twin sibling? I watched a documentary on Chimeras, which is an incredibly rare genetic anomaly in which a single individual is made up of a combination of 2 distinct DNA and thought maybe it was something like that. I don't know, I'm so confused!

[Guest Juniper Blue]

Hey KatyCat,

Your description of gender seems strikingly similar to mine.

I identify as Pangender or Androgyne. I describe the way it feels as driving an old reliable stick-shift truck

( consistently masculine on the outside) but switching easily into different gears as I go through my day. I feel that I was born with a naturally masculine disposition but this was strongly discouraged in my extremely gender-rigid family.

I grew up with one twin brother. He was unusually sensitive as a child and I was unusually strong. We were made to feel ashamed of our natural dispositions and were forced to hide our gender-variance. I learned to cultivate traditionally feminine qualities although I never was able to "pass" well as female, or as heterosexual despite desperate efforts in my youth and teen years. My brother learned to develop a hyper-masculine manner. Under it all ... He still cries easily and is a very troubled person.

An androgynous peer described me as a "masculine woman" and that description suits me fairly well as far as how I actually function in the world.

I personally, do not feel a connection with my physical gender .... I live in this body, I appreciate it for its amazing abilities ... but it is simply where I live and it is not who I am. I feel that I have no gender ... I move freely across the gender spectrum.

I find the concept of gender to be absolutely bizarre. It feels as odd to me to call the quality of nurturing a "feminine" characteristic as it is to speak Spanish and refer to the Police as Policia (feminine.) To me, there is no rhyme or reason to the way that society categorizes gender. Another example of this oddness is that I read once ( Sociology Studies Book?) that Italian men often go to the bakery after a sporting event and eat cream puffs with their buddies ... In contrast, I read (in Newsweek??) that traditional Japanese men are not supposed to eat custard( too feminine of an activity for men.)

I feel that much of what we think of as gender is a social construct and that the differences in the brain are over-rated and even possibly, to some extent, the result of "nurture" and not "nature". I am NOT saying that there are NO brain, hormonal or other physiological factors that influence gender behavior, I am simply expressing my suspicion that there may be a good dose of socialization to factor in. I feel that these social pressures shape the general gender-mold and influence each of us individually after we are born.

What are your thoughts?

Best,

- J

[Guest katycat]

I've always times said that I'm like a lipstick lesbian in a bear's body. I'd struggled with my sexuality for awhile, as I'm mostly attracted to feminine women, but I have been attracted to men in the past too. I've briefly seen men in the past, but all my serious relationships have been with women. Then I learned of the idea of pansexuality, so I now identify as a pansexual who prefers feminine or androgynous women. That eased my mind of a lot of stress the instant I realized that I didn't have to abide by the gender binary in terms of my sexuality, I was always stressed out because I didn't feel entirely straight or gay or bisexual.

I guess now I'm in a similar situation with figuring out my gender identity. It's so weird, as far as my cross dressing, a lot of the time I really like to put on a dress and heels and work on cars and stuff in my shop, you know, very "manly" things. I think my feminine persona is like a pretty tomboy. I usually look pretty manly, I'd had a full beard for 4 years prior to shaving it for my Halloween costume, and I really don't like the way I look without it. I was hoping I could go for some more androgynous looks being clean-shaven but I just don't think I have the built for it. Even in my costume, I'd shaved my arms, pits, legs, chest where it would show. I had fake breasts, tights, heels, dress, a wig, and tons of makeup, even false eyelashes! I felt so awesome but it was still obvious that I was a guy, I wasn't fooling anyone. my legs/butt and my ability to walk in heels got a lot of compliments though, I could pass as a woman from the waist down!

I'm sorry this is so rambley, it's turned into a stream of consciousness I guess. I'm so confused!

[Guest Kaitlyn16]

I kinda feel like I have a split personality too in a way... I worked to keep my girl half supressed all these years, but no matter what I did, she always found a way into my conciousness somehow. I usually ended up stifling those thoughts as soon as they appeared, it was like I had been brainwashed into doing so. But now I have finally started to let her out again, and I feel much better ^-^ (I've only done a small bit of crossdressing, but it is soo fun! XD)

I don't know which persona was here first, or if maybe they were both here from the start, but I don't think that matters, either way they are both here now, and they are both going to need outlets to express themselves. I would prefer to live as a woman who crossdresses as a guy, but I could to the opposite if I absolutely needed to... I would really prefer to live as a girl for most of the time though

[Guest Juniper Blue]

It's okay to feel "confused" maybe that is the first step in seeing and embracing ALL of who you are.

[Guest katycat]

Kaitlyn,

I never felt a need to suppress my feminine persona, in fact as soon as I realized she was there I started to befriend her. It's really friggen weird how I can talk myself through things by running it by one another. My male and female sides regularly have conversations! I've always felt like if I tried to tell anyone about it they'd think I was crazy!

I've contacted a gender therapist and will hopefully going to talk to them soon. I think it will help me quite a bit. It's terrifying and exciting all at once.

[Guest Kaitlyn16]

I talk to myself too At least I thought I did... maybe this whole time I thought I was talking to myself, it was really just me conversing with my female half haha... I don't think I said what I meant correctly when I said that I 'supressed her'. What I meant was that I never really considered that those thoughts might be coming from a different me...

You're lucky, your two halves get along nicely, my female half usually wants to kill my male one... O.o Probably because she didn't get to express herself like he did. It isn't his fault though, he didn't force her to stay hidden, it was society with its freaking gender norms >.< I'm trying to get the two of them to get along, but its proving to be a little challenging... >.>

[Guest katycat]

yeah it took me a while to figure out what was really going on in my head, I'd noticed that there was something up but it wasn't until late in high school that I figured it out that it was a separate persona. that's when I really started building my relationship with her. I've always been a really introspective person anyway so I guess all that internal dialogue and sorting things out between us came naturally. We also get along really well, I guess because the male me is kind of effeminate, and the female me is pretty masculine. We seem to meet in the middle. We're also both primarily attracted to women and have similar tastes, so that works out well.

I don't know if this would help you or not, Kaitlyn, but for me I envision my body as a sort of space ship, with my head being the cockpit and I picture her and I sitting in our respective seats interacting with one another inside, and together we react to the outside world, which we are viewing through the "windshield" or eyes. sounds kinda cheesy but that setup has always worked in sci fi movies and cartoons, and it happens to work out well as my visual prototype.

[Guest Penelope]

Hi katycat,

I also believe that I encompass two genders. They too have an internal dialogue; luckily it's mostly amicable. Like Kaitlyn16 my female persona was unknown / suppressed for decades.

Please see my reply to to rehtnap in 'Where do I fall in'.

Best wishes,

Penny

[Guest The Cheshire Wolf]

I think I know exactly what this is like, because I've felt like this for most of my life, though only now am I acknowledging it as a different form of gender identity. I like the cockpit analogy, though I don't have an intercommunicating internal monologue between them--rather, the personas overlap, but I feel an increasing need to express the male half while in a female body every so often, and that's when the dysphoria-like feelings show up. Maybe because I tried stifling him by turning him into a character when I was younger, he does have a kind of "life" apart from the female half in which he has a wife. This isn't a problem until I start to become embarrassingly emotional while watching movies like Solaris in class (like I did two days ago...) and realize that I can't fall asleep unless I pretend that I have a phantom woman curled up with me. I also had a similar experience growing up wherein--being one of two female siblings--my dad would occasionally do "guy stuff" with me before my mom stopped him, and my mom once mentioned in passing that he wished that he had a son. This would (and still does) make me irrationally jealous when he has guy bonding time with my male cousins or calls one of the neighborhood boys over to help him with the yard or the car instead of me. In fact, I sometimes wonder if Logan (the male side) emerged partly from that jealousy, or if it's just a side effect of feeling like a man trapped in a woman's body while knowing that being a true son to him is beyond my reach. I dunno if this helps, as I'm still too young to truly know who I am and why yet, but it's nice to hear a story so similar!

[Guest stuart69427]

i feel like I am at about that same part of the journey that your at with very similar views of myself. im looking forward to learning how to express myself with this knowledge that I am learning here.

[Guest Maggie_O]

Hmmm ... I just posted an explanation that fits your question to an overlapping question in this same forum. I sincerely hope I'm not violating some sort of rule, but I thought my take on it might give you some insight. So, here's a repost:

How do you know? That's both simple and complex. Yours is a very familiar tale. Most of the people on this site have experienced variations of the things you describe at one time or the other; with MTF TG's having opposite feelings.

I could give you a simple, personal, opinion that from my box seat you definitely appear to be an Female-to-male transsexual. But wait! It's not that simple! Huh?

To better understand, listen carefully:

On a huge sheet of paper (real or virtual), take a Sharpie and draw a straight horizontal line three feet long. This is your base line.

On the extreme ends of the line, draw a solid circle a half inch in diameter. Those circles represent the gender identity(Gdent) extremes, one end female, the other end male.

Now, draw a one inch long line at the very center of your three foot line, perpendicular to the base line with about a half inch of this On each side of the base line. That hash mark represents a perfectly androgynous Gdent.

Now make more hash marks along the base line dividing each half into a thousand segments.

That line, with all of those marks, represents the degrees of tras Gdent one can halve. A continuum of nearly infinite degrees of male or femaleness.

You, and everyone else on earth, fits somewhere on one of those two thousand and three marks. In all likelihood your mark is past center towards the male end of the line, but not at the extreme end.

You are the only one who can ultimately decide exactly where you fit on that line. A really good therapist can help you to figure out where you'll fit.

To complicate things further, make a second base line below the first one and put similar marks all along this second line. Label this line "sexual preference". I'm sure you can calculate the purpose for that line.

All of our problems stem from almost no one on earth understanding those two simple concepts. Almost no one is at the extreme ends of either of those two lines. Most of us fall somewhere along the continuum. If you believe in statistical variation, which I do, then the majority of people are in the center third. I spent a great many years studying human behavior and that became more and more apparent as time went on.

The idea of being at the extreme ends of those lines is burned into our brains at a very early age. The inculcation continues throughout life, reinforced daily by the hoards that surround us. But the truth is that heterosexuality and monogamy are largely cultural constructs.

For me, one of the funniest things in the various treatments offered to us is the comical "real life test". That, itself, is an attempt to force us into the corners of the hetero cookie cutters and outfit us in hetero uniforms, the point of which is actually the establishment types using us as a tool to prove to themselves that the "real" world is entirely hetero just as they wish to believe. If they ever failed to prove that it would rock the underpinnings of their world. Make no mistake, we are waging war; a war for mental and emotional freedom.

Welcome to the trenches. Equip yourself with the therapist of your choice and join us in battle.

?

[Guest Meri]

Maggie_O

I like your metaphor, but I feel it's even more complicated than that. Iterate each possible behavior a human can engage in that is considered masculine or feminine by this culture and draw a line for each one of those as you described. You will end up with a series of parallel lines lying side-by-side, each line representing a behavior. Then, plot an individual's engagement in the specific behavior on each specific line.

For instance, "shopping". The extreme feminine end might be a person who simply loves to shop and browse and check out all of the possibilities. The extreme masculine end of shopping is someone who simply can't stand to go shopping and when the are forced to shop, they pick the first thing that fits the bill, then exits the store pronto. So, choose an individual and rank them somewhere between these two extremes.

Then pick another behavior like "decorating yourself". In women, one often sees pretty nails, plucked eyebrows, carefully groomed hair, lots of pretty bling, etc. In males who are into decorating themselves, you would see the masculine equivalent; manicure with clear polish, gold earring studs, male groomed eyebrows, tailored clothing, etc. All of that, in my opinion, fits the feminine site of the scale. The masculine side of the scale would be represented by the guy who just doesn't give a damn, he throws on the first clothing he can find and heads out the door. The clothing was probably wrinkled and lying on the floor for a few days, at most, he smells it to see if it is still fit -- in other words, the typical male college student! Thus, rank someone on their interest in "decorating" themselves for lack of a better word.

There are countless other behaviors that are commonly regarded as masculine v. feminine in our culture, so, chart at least some of those as well.

Then, stand back and look at the scatter chart that has been created, dots to the left, dots to the right -- huge amounts of data for each person...

Now, one could average everything together and make a judgement, relative to our culture as to whether that person is engaging in mostly feminine or masculine behavior. However, if you were to run this same chart by a different (non-western) culture, you might get a different outcome and judgement.

The more I engage in this kind of thought, the more I realize that what we call masculine and feminine is simply a judgement based on the way we were raised, in other words, it's relative.

Therefore, I claim that there is no absolute standard anywhere and gender is simply an illusion we created as a society for the purpose of creating differences between us. It is possible it was perpetuated by the masculine side of the house to help prop up their dominance in the culture, but that's not what this is about.

As individuals, we have behaviors and interests that vary all over the map. The problem comes when you try to force a multifaceted individual into a mold and call them female or male. It's pretty easy for most of us to look down and quickly determine the gender of our bodies, in my case, clearly male.

However, to take a deeper look and determine the gender of my mind is a different matter altogether and any single judgement as "masculine" or "feminine" will always be wrong. The more you beat yourself up over this trying to fit the mold, the more you will hurt.

There is no right answer with respect to gender, it's the wrong question. A better question is who are you, the right answer is "I am".

-Meri