Absolutely agree on much of what you've said...education and financial gain doesn't guarantee anything, but it does make a stronger position to work from. And globally....ugh....I did my MS at a university with a strong international community economic development program, and I was fortunate to be able to work with students from all over the world....from inner city organizaitons in the U.S. to students from Ghana and Sierra Leone. Coming from a global perspective we have very, very far to go.

One of my fellow students was from India, and worked with an organization providing capital to women to start small businesses. Even among lower caste women (and that's their reality, not a slam against them), having access to capital and the ability to create an income for themselves frequently (although not always) made a difference in their role and standing within their communities and families.

I come from a place that says we may not be able to change everything overnight, but education, employment, and access to capital is a darn good place to start.

Anyway...feel like I'm derailing now...apologies!

At this point, I would have to disagree with you.

A year or so ago, I probably would have agreed with you (to a point, because there just are biological differences). However, after having lived with both sets of hormones coursing thru my bloodstream I now wholeheartedly disagree with you. There are differences, and it's not all just socialized stuff (which obviously exists too).

*******
Medusa and getting he'd online:

I have a theory I've been working on/watching for years and years. Straight women and queer women tend to speak/act differently when in a public setting. I'm sure gay men and straight men do this too, but I've never bothered to notice, cuz I don't care so much.

Queer women tend to speak more assuredly and with more conviction. I rarely hear queer women using the 'straight girl lilt' when they're talking about something. That's one difference. I'm on my phone, so I don't have time to go into all the other differences I've noticed over the years, but I have more examples.

I think because of homophobia and sexism, if a person isn't acting in traditional 'catering to men' (read straight girl lilt, asking questions instead of just speaking plainly), people (online) are going to assume that means man (because naturally anyone who's not catering to a man, must be a het man, because queers aren't even thought of until someone points it out)


Gotta Get Back To Work,
Dylan

This has been my observation as well.

It's totally none of my business, but I would be interested to hear what differences you're talking about.

However, I still don't think that speaks to men and women being inherently different. I think it speaks to you being a different person on "t" (I presume that's what we're talking about here? we're not besties, so I don't know a whole lot about your life) than you were beforehand. But I'd be willing to bet that some of the things that have changed about you are not necessarily qualities that are inherent in all men. Likewise, I would be willing to bet that there are loads of women who possess these new qualities that you have.

It might be apples and oranges (but I don't think it is - hormones and chemicals hanging out around brain receptors aren't that far off from each other in terms of how they effect our emotional/mental/social make-up) but I'm a different person off of Welbutrin than I am on it. (I am a much better, more stable person OFF it - just for the record. Holy crap that shit did a number on me.)

HEY COOL I found a Canadian Smiley! :canada:

i think it's possible. i think a lot of people successfully do this. The problems come when you ASSUME others are or should be like you are.
It's not just an individual issue. It has social meaning when we default to "he." It defines the norm. Defining the norm as "he" is, for one thing, not statistically accurate. BY FAR, there are more butches who use female pronouns. It also is coercive in the context of right now -- our time, our place. It has cultural meaning.

And I would still disagree with you.

I used my own experience as one example of countless. I no longer share much of my personal business on these boards, but I wasn't talking 'oh, I feel different...like a whole new person' kind of thing.

I don't quite get your welbutrin analogy, because I'm reading as though it proves what I'm saying. There is plenty of science that backs up what I'm saying when it comes to how testoterone and estrogen affect one's brain/emotions/whatnot.


We Can Agree To Disagree If You Want Tho, Cuz I'm Definitely Not About To Share My Personal Business On These Sites Anymore,
Dylan

if there was indeed no difference, then why would anyone feel they were in the wrong body? because i don't think that is only related to biology, is it?

BOOBS FEED BABY HUMAN BEINGS..................they are wonderful on all who enjoy them - just not on me!

So I am one of those human beings who had baby humans, my boobs were not used for that purpose, for you see I am not some fucking cow.. I am not defined by the fact I got tits to feed some crumb cruncher.. Now, if anyone else wants to be defined by that, go for it, but not all humans with boobs were made to feed humans..

Do you see how you are defining someone by their breasts?

....Indeed you are not a f..ing cow and i dont define anyone by anything; of course it is a matter of choice whether someone feeds their young, but its an anatomical fact that breasts produce milk, whether in animals or humans for the purpose of feeding their young.

So we're back to it's just all about the anatomy? :|

Mine never did... The nurses were pretty fucking ugly to me, because I would not try, I know my body no milk was coming, just discomfort, someone got me a breast pump, so yes you did define by your statement.

Who the hell knows

breasts ARE part of the anatomy - females, whether animal or human have mamories which produce milk for feeding their young - i see nothing wrong with that, in fact its wonderful as babies benefit enormously from their mothers milk................

No one in this thread is questioning breasts as anatomy. I haven't seen a soul question whether breasts are "good" or "bad". I haven't seen discussion of breastfeeding, milk production or any other issues around the anatomical function of breasts. Which leads me to ask...have you read the thread?

If your answer is "yes" then can you explain your original post in greater detail because I must be missing something in context.

If your answer is "no" then, well, yeah..go boobs. :|

I AM a mother, who had NO milk,that did not make me less than, nor was I made to be someone's food supply.. I am a mother, woman regardless of my breasts..

[QUOTE=June;105411]Except when they don't. There are a lot of Breast Cancer survivors out there who are no less women because they have had mastectomies.

....you are right, and what i said has nothing to do with whether a woman is a still a woman without breasts............of course she is - i was in spain a while back on a naturist beach and this elderly couple came along where i was sitting with my partner, they were naked, she had only one breast and they looked very happy together. A woman is who she is, breasts or no!

What i was saying was that its an anatomocal fact that breasts are designed for feeding young. If a person choses not to or cannot do that, it doesnt mean theyre not womanly.

ABSOLETELY......................men can have it too...............in fact, though i have had a double mastectomy, being TG, i had a lump which had to be investigated, turned out to be i'd caused a bruise due to some heavy physical work i'd done, and not noticed it...........luckily!

Can we get back on topic? Seriously?
This is not a thread about breasts and what they can or cannot do.
You are taking away from a great conversation with this ridiculousness.

....i wouldnt say breast cancer was ridiculous...............anyhow its l.20 am in england and im off to bed...nitey nite!:cowboy:

p.s. love the baby!!!

I hate to encourage ridiculous behavior, and I promise this is all I'll say on this most ludacrous of sexist derails, but your logic fails jacques in the fact that men have breasts too... a condition known as gynoplasia


Seriously This Is A Useless Derail,
Dylan

Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew, Jr.

What about breast cancer? It is no longer just a women's cancer.


ABSOLETELY......................men can have it too...............in fact, though i have had a double mastectomy, being TG, i had a lump which had to be investigated, turned out to be i'd caused a bruise due to some heavy physical work i'd done, and not noticed it...........luckily!

I like when things make sense


I Think Somebodddddddddy's Tiiiiiiiiiirrrrred,
Dylan

Here is a prime example of what irritates me. We as LGBT and others...label ourselves and put ourselves in boxes of some sort all the time but the moment someone uses a label that they don't deem appropriate a finger is always pointed.

If she wants to call her butch a short man than boobs then so be it. Like others have stated perhaps this is how the butch identifies. So the real question....so lets assume for a moment this is how this particular butch/woman identifies, does that make it wrong? Why, because it isn't in our usual boxes of labels hmmm.

I think sometimes we can get a little carried away with the whole feminist movement issues. I am willing to bet money that when she called her butch a short man with boobs it didn't cause any damage to the progressive movement

how much money?

LOL.....name your price this could get fun

that's not a fair bet.

Because this right here, the online butch/femme community, is the one place in the world where it's safe to say "he" about a person who is living in a female body; more than that, it's immediately understood with little or no explanation. *shrugs*

It is not okay, accepted, understood, or in many cases safe to say "he" in any other community, except for the butch/femme community.

Also, sometimes it's the Butch's choice, not the partner's; so in that case, a person would not be flipping back and forth depending on the audience, but out of respect for the personal preference of the Butch.

Back in the day, when many of us were first talking about Butch as a third (independent) gender, we used to be really careful to always remember to include "BOTH female AND male; and/or neither one" as part of the description of Butch energy. Down the road it became more common in the community to say "female masculinity" as a description of Butch energy and we stopped using the "both female and male" descriptor--but many Butches still think of themselves as "both female and male." For some Butches, that means they really don't care what pronouns anyone uses about them.

For some Butches, it means they DO care, but they bow to the reality of living in a mostly heterosexual world--and that means this, this community right here, is the only place where they can be validated for the male side of their being.

It seems like a really crucial point to me. I think we as a community need to remember that for some Butches, what is invalidated and devalued out in the world is not their "womanness" but their masculinity; for some Butches, this is the place they come to find validation of themselves as whole people, as "both female and male."

As for partners using different pronouns at different times? For many people, it's easy to write one way and speak another--"he" online, "she" verbally--and very difficult to navigate speaking in two different ways about the same person. I never used to have any problems with that, but lately I find that I've been slipping; at first I was accidentally saying "he," but lately the overwhelming pressure the rest of the world puts on me to ONLY speak about Gryph as "she" means that I sometimes find myself saying or writing "she" when I would ordinarily use "he."

Here's the reason I accept that pressure: my allowing myself to be in the habit of saying "he" (in other words, saying "he" at home) could cause serious problems for Gryph--his co-workers, for instance, have sometimes been brutal about his identity--and his old friends, his family, my family, the local community, our neighbors, none of them would get it if I said "he." It would make life immensely more difficult for us both, and would not bring any benefits to either of us; it's better that I just say "she" when I'm speaking (verbally) to other people about Gryph.

Going back and forth between facebook (she) and BFP (he) sometimes trips me up; facebook is one of those places where the communities collide. A significant number of our facebook friends would be baffled by having to deal with Butch gender identification. (Our friends are certainly baffled by having to deal with my Femme gender identification--baffled to the point that I gave up trying to explain it long ago.) In that case, we figure our friends who are from the butch/femme community will get it about why we have to use the female pronouns for someone who has always been known in this community as "he," especially as it seems to be a pretty common occurrence among the Butches we're friended with.

Gryph, being a Two-Spirit, honestly does not care what other people call him, but I think if *I* stopped calling him "Daddy" and "he" it would puzzle and hurt him very much. I am the one person in his day-to-day life who sees him as he actually is, both female and male. We both need me to say "he," whenever and wherever it is safe to do so, and we both know that in order to avoid making mistakes, I have to be pretty consistent about where I say "she" and where I say "he."

Just to be utterly clear, I don't mean "when," I mean "where"--the actual physical places determine what pronouns I use, because my main concern with pronouns is avoiding jeopardizing his safety (both physical and emotional).

Those are the reasons I say "she" at home.

Also to be clear, saying that Gryph doesn't care about pronouns is not the same as saying that he doesn't care what people call him. It makes us both wince and grumble when people refer to us as "ladies," and this morning someone actually had the gall to call him "beautiful" as in, "good morning, beautiful." I have no idea what he would have said to her had she said it to his face, but he was at work and she said it to me, then specified she meant Gryph also.

I didn't say anything about it (although I was flabbergasted; "beautiful"? Has she never paid attention to his pictures, to his wonderful craggy face?) because I don't know what he would want, and that's what's most important in a situation like this: how Gryph wants to respond. The person is someone he cares for, someone he's shepherding through a rough time; he very well might have decided either to speak or to let that go, and I have no right to decide for him. (But it was damned hard to hold my tongue!)

I am finding that most of the people who pay these well-meaning but vastly inappropriate compliments (one of his friends is more and more speaking to him as if he were speaking to a "girly girl," and it's making me crazy) are people he cares for. They are all trying to compliment him by shoehorning him into the box marked Femininity, which once again devalues (erases, even) his masculine identity. Added to the force with which the rest of his world tries to insist that his femaleness cannot possibly contain maleness, it becomes overwhelming and leaves only one refuge for bringing his female-AND-male self back into balance: the online butch/femme community.

And that's the reason I say "he" here.

incongruency may not be a word, I dunno.
 

Well, I wouldn't know since I've never felt that I am in the wrong body (aside from that month in 4th grade where I started putting my hair up in baseball caps and introducing myself to people as Brandon - no idea what that was about for me...aside from the fact that my friends were all boys and I liked to do "boy things" so it probably seemed perfectly sensible to me at the time).

But it seems to be that there's an incongruency between how one looks and how they would like to look, and how one is perceived in / treated by society and how they want to be perceived / treated - neither of those things have anything to do with changing who you are on the inside, rather they're both about changing physically.

I've never had even -one- friend, during or "after" (is there really an after?) transitioning, who has said "oh yippie! now my instincts, emotions, habits, and personality match how I always wanted them to be!" I've only ever heard variations of "Now my outsides match my insides" and "Now people treat me / see me the way that I wish to be treated / seen."

Wow. When did this become the "function of breasts" and/or "some people enjoy having them, others do not" thread? My breasts also function as a vehicle/excuse to wear pretty bras. Gooooo boobs? What is going on here?

I am really just trying to make sense of it. Cal thinks it is a *chemical* difference in the way hy thinks and processes things. I dunno. But Cal just told me you are always right. So there I have it. (f)

I think we also need to remember to value the woman-ness of female id'd butches and not let the valuing of male in others overshadow that.

I'm trying to make sense of it, too. :)

I recognise that my assertion that men and women are essentially the same and that there is no such thing as a female character trait v a male character trait is gonna make me pretty unpopular. That's cool, I'll live.

I'm still waiting for someone to be all like "omg, if men and women are the same then why are there gay people and/or then why aren't we all bisexual?"

p/s - Cal is so smart. :chaplin:

I really can NOT assign sex to TRAITS. It's making me a little crazy for some reason.

OMG. We're all bisexual....

I know, right?

Nothing to see here!