Gender/ID breakdown

[Melissa]

Originally Posted by JustJo

Hi Melissa

No snarkiness here, but a genuine question...why do you see your ID changing simply because your partner's ID changes? To me, that feels like the old Mrs. xyz...when a woman's identity, status, etc. was determined by her husband's.

I see the need for gender/ID, a way to describe ourselves...for expediency if nothing else. And let's face it...it's one of the first questions we ask when someone has a baby right? Oooooo....did they have a boy or a girl? It's one of the earliest ways we learn to identify the people in our world. I totally get that not everyone's gender/identity matches their genitals. I am all for everyone identifying themselves any way they feel best represents them.

I guess it just feels weird to me to identify who you are in relation to someone else. Can you talk more about this?

For me, I'm a woman first...lesbian femme second. That's who I am regardless of who I'm with....or if I'm single...or if I'm celibate.

I'd love to hear more about if this change was spurred by any changes within you...or if the changing ID (based on your partner's) inspired any changes in you...if you're willing to share, of course!

Justjo - A lot of what I said is tongue- in- cheek. I don't think any of these words/IDs can fully express who we are in terms of biology, gender and sexuality.

If I had to pick one, it would be lesbian. Nothing else. Even partnered to a transman I still think of myself as a lesbian. In fact, I laughingly said to Rufusboi, you will be a transman married to a lesbian.

I am really wondering why we have all these gender IDs and what purpose they serve for us as individuals or as a larger community? We seem to argue about them more than anything else and we do not have one way of defining any of them.

Rufusboi picked transman after a lot of thought about how T will change him physically, how he thinks of himself in terms of gender, and also how he defines the terms male and FTM. Other people on this site define transman, male, and FTM totally differently than he does. I actually think he could easily adopt any of these terms to represent who he will be on T. He does not, he has a more set way of viewing and defining these terms. So my post above is more about how really effective are these terms?

Melissa [the anti-stepford wife]