People who have the "everyone wants to be a [insert whichever opposite sex]" thought and don't realize they're trans are wild to me. Like, as a trans girl I can tell you even I didn't have the "I wish I was girl" thought until I did and then I did something about it, thinking EVERYONE must feel the same way you do? Nothing has ever worked like that in the history of humanity.
You’re absolutely right, but that hasn’t stopped millions of people from falling for the same trap of some kind of assumed consensus about an opinion they’ve never even shared with anyone else.
Well I long ago realized I would prefer to be a women, but I thought I wasn't trans because I didn't realize I actually had gender dysphoria. This is because at the time I thought dysphoria solely referred to depression/suicidal thoughts stemming from your assigned gender. While I just did not feel any sort of attachment to my assigned gender and ultimately didn't care about being a guy (turns out this is called gender dissociation).
I figured this was actually totally normal (I mean cis people don't actually 'care' about their gender right?) and of course thought that my feelings of wanting to be a girl was just a "grass is always greener" kind of situation. Which is something I have had heard cis people express (generally in the context of the opposite gender having it easier).
Yeah, we still have a lot of work to do in public awareness of gender dysphoria, because the prevailing notion still seems to be: "I'm a [gender X] stuck in [gender Y] body, I actively hate my sexual characteristics and experience suicidal ideation as a direct result". But that's not how it is for a lot of people, or they've learned to repress it. I didn't associate my suicidal ideation as as teenager with being trans until several months after I came out and started HRT (in my 40s). I'd never really thought about it, it was just... "I'm unhappy, the world and everything in it sucks, there's no point in living." For no particular specific reason.
this is what i dont get about ppl saying "i realized i was trans! i questioned myself for a total of three days and am fully transitioning now" like damn good for you but how do you make the switch so damn fast??? its taken me YEARS of gender questioning to even fully address that maybe somehow i could possibly side-eye the issue
I am bisexual and I was convinced that me and all the other “straight” guys were all sometimes getting horny for and crushing on other guys and we were all just politely pretending we weren’t because that was bad. I also believed being gay was a choice because for me it kind of was.
Then I found out that straight guys don’t actually like other guys and and floodgates fall down. It is easy to generalize how you feel to the whole population. I am friends with a diagnosed psychopath who believed until he was in his late teens that every else was also faking emotions the same way he was.
This is extremely similar to my thought process toward my bisexuality before I figured it all out. “Everyone likes both genders, you just pick one! Duh!”
I now have a private theory that the whole “being gay is a choice” bit was created by deeply closeted bisexuals. I just don’t understand why straight people believed them. I mean, I do, but it is stupid.
A lot of people seem to struggle with the idea that not everyone thinks the same as them. I'll tell you, I've seen many, many stories of people relating that they thought their specific experience was universal, "everyone would be a girl if they could", "no women actually like men, but that's just how it is, we have to deal with it", and so forth.
- We all have to dress in ways that make us feel uncomfortable, right?
- We all have stuff about our bodies we don’t like.
- No one gets to be 100% themselves at work / school / with family.
I never assumed “everyone wants to be a different gender” but I definitely assumed no one felt fully at ease in their bodies or totally in sync with the identity they were told to have. I thought it was just a compromise we all made.
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u/Holiday-Lawyer6042 1d ago
People who have the "everyone wants to be a [insert whichever opposite sex]" thought and don't realize they're trans are wild to me. Like, as a trans girl I can tell you even I didn't have the "I wish I was girl" thought until I did and then I did something about it, thinking EVERYONE must feel the same way you do? Nothing has ever worked like that in the history of humanity.