Not a threat.

Someone wrote…

My penis is not a threat to my femininity.

What’s your experience?

And what are you thinking about gender right now?

Posted by julian on October 9th, 2010 at 08:00 am

Category: your voice 13 comments »

13 Responses to “Not a threat.”

ElegantAndrogyne
October 9th, 2010 at 12:49 pm |
Neither is mine.

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Jessica
October 9th, 2010 at 1:26 pm |
My personality is not a function of my biology. I have been and will always be influenced by, but neither determined by nor constrained to what I am not.

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Aline
October 9th, 2010 at 5:34 pm |
A feel my penis as a threat to this binary world. We should not be ashamed because of this.

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Anonymous
October 10th, 2010 at 1:38 pm |
I agree with you, yet when I feel feminine its hard to avoid the sense that I’m just a boy in girls clothes. It feels like my penis is the thing that screams out most that I am just putting on a different costume; not necessarily any closer to my true expression.

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Jessica replied:
October 10th, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Gender expression and identity can the thought of as a spectrum. At one end are people who totally want to be the gender that matches their biology and want to make themselves as much that as possible. At the other are people who totally hate their birth gender and want to be as much the other as possible. Then there’s 90 % of us who are somewhere in between – usually lots of different places in between, depending on what day, what time, who we’re with and what we’re doing.

It is confusing. It is often scary. We make choices. We deal with consequences. We decide things and we change our minds. We make mistakes. We try again. We’re human.

I have hated parts of my body, and I don’t recommend it as a pastime. It interferes with your sense of direction and you can expend an awful lot of effort to get no place different. Lately I am working on accepting the canvas that I have as something to work with and make more of an expression of who I am.

Not being sure you are any closer to your true expression is a helpful sign. It usually means that you’re sneaking up on truth. It’s when you have that aha moment and everything falls into place and you feel like you finally have the answer that you should worry.

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Paige replied:
October 10th, 2010 at 6:33 pm
I have experienced this as well, although for me it is my rather large boobs that make it hard to appear masculine sometimes. My boobs are not a threat to my inner sense of masculinity, but that doesn’t stop me from being jealous of male-bodied people who don’t have to put any effort into looking masculine and still do it better than I will ever be able to.

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Jessica replied:
October 10th, 2010 at 8:58 pm
Yeah. Sometimes I feel the eyes of people coming to rest on my breasts and it makes me feel ill used. My breasts are not so large as to be a defining characteristic. Usually, if I wear a large man’s shirt, my chest is sufficiently ambiguous. However, I can’t ever be seen in a t-shirt without comment. I tend to be sensitive to heat (I like a nice 16 (60) degree room and most places I work like to be around 25 (77) degrees) and there’s no way I could bind myself and go to work without real discomfort and heat rashes.

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Ben replied:
October 11th, 2010 at 8:23 am
If I want to go to yoga, I am especially jealous of the beautiful female curves that all the girls in the class have. I’m jealous of their hips, shoulders, necks and the fact that they get to wear those pants that make their butts look so incredibly great. In that gender neutral setting of yoga, I can’t be ‘me’. I can’t express my curves or body in the way I’d like to do so, because I can’t get around the fact that my bulge screams that I’m just playing dress up.

I feel that to tuck it down in order to achieve a visual aesthetic betrays my body. I love my body; its just that I sometimes hate how entirely masculine it is. I find it incredibly difficult to achieve any ambiguity or femininity in my expression.

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Jessica replied:
October 11th, 2010 at 10:06 am
I get that feeling sometimes, too. If I’d been more aware and correctly focused earlier in my life, perhaps I could have achieved a body more physically beautiful. I am definitely an acquired taste == and I am always and eternally aware and grateful to have a partner who makes me feel beautiful.

The trouble is, I think, that we are bombarded with images of people who are the one in a million people who come close, or who can be made to appear close, to an artificial standard of beauty that is rarely attainable by real people. See: http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/home_films_evolution_v2.swf

From where a man began, even in his 20’s, the goal of achieving feminine beauty is incredibly difficult, even if it is an achievable goal. I understand the feeling and I know the deep heaviness that settles on your heart when you see those beautiful lithe forms in contrast to your own brutish hulk. Women feel the same way, comparing ourselves to the women we see in the media. It is a kind of mass psychosis.

Anonymous replied:
October 16th, 2010 at 5:28 am
Theres nothing wrong with feeling like a boy in girls clothes.

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Paige replied:
October 16th, 2010 at 5:44 am
Unless you wish you felt like a girl in girls’ clothes.

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Jessica replied:
October 16th, 2010 at 11:13 am
Or wish you felt like a boy in boy’s clothes.
Andrea
October 14th, 2010 at 8:44 pm |
you go!

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