Recommendation: Laura’s Playground
Jamie Sue recommends…
Laura’s Playground
Website
Website
There’s a lot of good information, plus a good self test, if you will be honest… It can give you a good idea of where you may be at in your life.
Posted by xMech on October 2nd, 2011 at 04:00 pm
Category: recommendations, websites 12 comments »
October 2nd, 2011 at 5:05 pm |
Nice! I’m surprised Laura’s Playground wasn’t up here sooner. They’re wonderful and have been around for a very long time. Great support community, a lot of my friends have gotten advice from people there.
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October 2nd, 2011 at 6:18 pm |
Bahaha, took the test and came up as a 15. Definitely in the middle…although it is a test geared largely for biological men, so the answers were a little bit difficult sometimes…
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October 2nd, 2011 at 7:06 pm |
Would that be the “COGIATI?”
I took that test about a dozen years ago, then again in the last couple years. Both times, I came-out on the border between “Probable Transsexual” and “Transsexual.” Which is pretty much where I expected to be: I would much prefer to be expressed in female form.
BUT, I’ve chosen to remain in (nominally) male form for my wife’s sake, and she has given me the grace to I live as an openly transgender person, expressing myself on the feminine-side of androgynous.
So, I am a *blended* person: a woman inside, expressing myself in the context of a male form. From the feedback I get, I’m deeply and naturally feminine without being effeminate. It’s not the affect of being a man-with-a-feminine-side, not a “feminine guy,” nor being a metrosexual, nor even gay-camp. It’s somehow different; it’s demurely feminine, gentle and gracious, graceful…I’ve received some wonderful validation recently to indicate that I am meeting my expressive goal: I am getting better and better as “passing” as myself!
Yet there are aspects of me that are masculine, whether those are innate or I’ve simply learned to be good at being a husband, father and brother. Hmmm, no…most of that seems learned because I’ve never considered myself to be a man (or even a boy), nor really a woman (it wasn’t *safe* for me to do that until recent years)…I just thought of myself as a person.
I cannot be a ‘man’ with integrity.
I could be a ‘woman’ with integrity.
I am trying to be myself with integrity.
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October 3rd, 2011 at 4:15 am |
I found the gender test offensive because it assumes so much about what it means to be a woman. For example, it assumes that woman are terrible at parallel parking and math while I’m sure there are trans women who are just fine at them . . .
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tigr replied:
October 3rd, 2011 at 5:36 am
…or cis women who are just fine at them…
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Alex replied:
October 3rd, 2011 at 5:55 am
I found it pretty offensive too, to be honest. Not only because of what it means to be a woman, but what it means to be a man as well. All women are bad at math and parking and directions! All men hate hugging and sitting close to other men and spelling! There are these broad generalizations and it just feels as though it’s saying “if you don’t fit the stereotypes then your identity is not real”.
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Sier replied:
October 3rd, 2011 at 7:37 am
Yeah, the COGIATI is fundamentally deeply sexist, and reinforces sexist tropes and gender essentialism.
I can understand that us trans people tend to adopt certain traits stereotypically ascribed to our identified sex/gender (be it conscious or unconscious) due to, well, identifying with them, but the extents to which the COGIATI depends on these stereotypes to ascertain someone’s transsexualism would be hilarious if it weren’t so destructively misleading.
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Anonymous replied:
October 5th, 2011 at 6:26 pm
Yeah, I personally find the COGIATI to be repulsive. There are so many trans and cis women I know who fucking love science and math and are good at driving.
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October 3rd, 2011 at 5:27 pm |
Yeah, I had a good laugh going over the COGIATI when my therapist gave it me to look at last month (which reminds me she never actually reviewed my answers…) but a lot of the questions are pretty obvious what they’re trying to “determine” and in many ways it’s no better than any of those online quizzes that claim to be able to tell if you’re trans.
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October 3rd, 2011 at 6:07 pm |
Has anyone seen a better instrument than the COGIATI? I’m impressed that Jennifer Reitz did as well as she did in creating it. She does warn people of its limitations, and she created the instrument in good faith, genuinely trying to help people. In these regards, Jennifer is a bit like Sandra Bem who made her famous “Sex Role Inventory:” neither are perfect, both could be said to be “sexist” and based on “stereotypes,” yet both are recognized to be useful.
“Sexism” and “stereotypes” aside, I found COGIATI and her “Informal Gender Identity Self Discovery Provocateur” to be incredibly useful in helping me to clarify my thinking as I started to face my gender issues. Looking back on my responses to both of these things a dozen years later, I still see important and relevant things. AND they have helped me to explain myself to others more coherently.
When we present ourselves before therapists with gender identity issues, we are basically diagnosing ourselves because they don’t know what’s in us. If they are competent, they will help us to recognize whether our gender stuff is coming from something else or whether it really is what it seems to be. BUT *we* will be making that discovery *ourselves*. And in this process, even “sexist” and “stereotypical” things can be useful. (Stereotypes wouldn’t exist if there weren’t at least a kernel of truth to them!)
I’m sorry so many here have found the COGIATI less than useful.
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October 21st, 2011 at 5:43 am |
I’m a trans male, what am I supposed to do with the COGIATI? It does nothing useful for me.
I remember being all excited when I discovered that website and that test.
Then the delusion when I found out that, yet again, it was Not For Me.
Even a place where I should have been welcome had automatically excluded me right from the start :(
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April 7th, 2012 at 3:42 pm |
It’s another crossdresser site for men who don’t know they aren’t really women.
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