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Missing Parts and Limitations

Discussion in 'Gender Identity and Expression' started by Amira, May 25, 2015.

  1. Amira

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    so i'm planning on getting srs one day and while i'd prefer a fake vagina to what's attached to me now, i'm finding things very depressing.

    it's not going to be the same as a real one. i won't ever have the reproductive parts so i'm biologically worthless. i'm disconnected from the cycle of life. that doesn't mean i'd save sperm to "father" a child, though. i don't want to reproduce at all if that's the only way i can do it because the mere idea that they are *my* sperm being used to get a biological woman pregnant horrifies and disgusts me. but that doesn't mean i'm happy to be infertile. i already feel like my body is empty and dead, not ever going to be biologically female or socially female because i've lived a life irreconcilable with femaleness. i've been presenting female since i was young but it doesn't mean people treated me like a woman. they still don't. it probably sounds stupid.

    it saddens me that i have to work so hard for this surgery and all it can give me is a life as second best. i'll still be incomprehensible to cis women, less desirable as a partner than the vast majority of them, and living on the margins of normal human society.

    i'm tired of being different, but there's no cure to that. the fact that this inferior copy is the best i can make of myself doesn't make me feel the least bit better about it. i'm sick of only being happy in my dreams and miserable when i wake up but when your life can never be even 10% of what you hoped for, how are you supposed to be happy with the major compromise? i don't see the point in getting out of bed most days. sleeping is the only thing that interrupts the misery, and none of the drugs my therapist has tried with me seems to help even a little bit. i want life to be short for me, since the only life i get is going to be a pale imitation of the billions of women i wish i was like instead of me.
     
  2. Awesome

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    As challenging as it is, you must will yourself think more positively. You cannot get pregnant but that is a great excuse to adopt an orphaned child. Also, you should remember that you don't need to be AFAB to validate yourself as a woman. If you want to feel like you are really a woman, then find that voice in your head that taunts you with doubt and murder it with your confidence in yourself and your identity.
     
  3. heandsheisme

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    On my days where I need to present female to the world but I can't (Which has sadly been every day my mind switches to female so far :tears:slight_smile:, I wear some panties and a padless bra. The bra can be hidden under a loose T shirt, and it is a constant reminder that I am a woman, even if I don't have the parts I should have.

    You are a woman, Amira. You are a woman, and you always will be. I do not doubt that this kind of stuff will get you down, I have had mornings where I have woken up and cried because I do not have the ability to show those around me that I am a woman. But you have to stay strong, for yourself, if no one else.

    Believe in the me that believes in you.
     
  4. Daydreamer1

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    I know how you feel in every sense of the word. It depresses me a lot to know I can't produce my own biological children on my own, and the idea of being pregnant is terrifying to me. I know I want bottom surgery one day, but if my dysphoria gets to me, I get like that too of feeling like it won't be good enough and I'll never have what cis men have and it's a blow to my self-esteem and ego. It's a shame that we need to go through these stages of coping and mourning these parts of ourselves we were supposed to have, but don't.

    You are a woman though, Amira. Don't let people (or your demons) break you down. I know mine have been loud and violent to the point where downing all my pills or throwing myself off a bridge or roof brought on feelings of euphoria and comfort. It's pretty scary when your dysphoria forces you to take the backseat of life while it drives.
     
  5. Amira

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    it's difficult when most women don't see me as one of them.

    i don't even have a name for my sexuality because the community that word is for doesn't want me in it and I'm sick of fighting with people i wished i would be a sister to whenever i use the word so i just stopped using it.

    i don't know what i am when the world doesn't reflect a woman back to me. i'm nothing. i've never been anything.
     
  6. Dark Hearts

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    This is something I've been dealing with myself. After around the year mark of hormones, it finally hit me that it'll be nearly impossible for me to have my own children in any form. Even if I stopped hormones, it would be highly unlikely to become fertile again, and by this point in time it'd be even more unlikely and not worth the cost of stopping hormones. I would've loved to become a mother some day, and it still hurts to think that I'll never be able to have my own children. I wish I could say anything that would make you feel at least a sliver better, but I'm still upset myself over it.
     
  7. Bastian

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    You don´t need the world to reflect you who you are. You know it already, you have won many inner fights and many more are to come, and you are something, just because you simply don´t give up. OK? Don´t give up. Don´t give a shit what people say. They don´t know you. And if they don´t want you? Screw them! The world is a bloody big place, and there must exist people just like you, who will accept just the way you are.

    About the "missing parts"... yeah, I guess for you girls and ladies here who want a child this must be hard. I am lucky enough I never really wanted to flood the world with little Bastians, and I am fine with being the one and only forever and die alone :icon_bigg What I do hate is the impossibility of ever having a proper sex life. Well.. yeah... whatever. Maybe I´ll be more lucky in the next life? Hell, I´m gonna be born again in a body of a male supermodel, and then - fear me! :grin:

    Ok, I´m trying to be positive about it. Sometimes it´s hard, but still better than drowning my sorrow in whiskey and gin. (*hug*)
     
  8. Lazuri

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    It is difficult. In February last year, my ex told me she was pregnant and it was very tough for me because during her entire pregnancy and the birth of my son, I felt it should have been me. I suffered immensely and I still suffer every day knowing I'm not the mother he deserves and I never can be.

    But you know what? I'd do it all again just to see him smile. Because when all is said and done, I don't see him as "the product of my sperm", I see him as my son.

    As for your other problem, you need to stop letting other people define who you are. This world is full of people who are dumb--not mean or evil, just dumb. You can't take their word on anything. Remember, in the darkest times, hope is something you give yourself. That is the meaning of inner strength.

    And finally, try to be positive. When you look for the light you can often find it, but if you look for the dark then darkness is all you will ever see.
     
  9. Amira

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    it just feels like, who am i to call myself female if most women don't see me that way? what do i have to back up that claim besides a desperate desire to alter my body and presentation to be seen that way and to be accepted among women and a stupid magical thinking kind of wish to be cis female instead of what i am? it seems like every meaningful definition of "woman" and especially "female" excludes me in some way and my wish that it weren't so can make me real?

    it's just that the stuff with my body makes me feel the difference the hardest. it's where i most observably diverge from the rest of womankind. it's what makes me unattractive to people seeking women as romantic partners, separates me from many feminist issues such as the experiences of a female childhood and reproductive issues, and among other things it's what makes me unwelcome in the lesbian community because of course someone seeking women who's been suffering under compulsory heterosexuality her whole life doesn't want the baggage that comes with sharing a space dedicated to her sexuality with someone permanently inhabiting a male body who spent even half her childhood as a boy (and i took until age 14 to even come out). living this life in this body, i feel like my only claim to womanhood is the assent of other women and with all these missing parts and irreconcilable life experiences, that's not likely to ever happen. i feel like i have to apologize for "pretending" all the time, acknowledge that my "wishing" doesn't matter when my life is so drastically different, even if i desperately want to be like them and suffer deeply because i'm not.

    i know that my "soul," if such a thing exists, is female, and that i want to live in the world as a woman does, and i'm limited to doing so by as much as my misshapen, hollow body can approximate that. the opinions of others shut me out of spaces i desperately wish to belong to, bar me from using the word "lesbian" for my sexuality without it being taken as an appropriation or even an insult by most lesbians to the point that the palpable exclusion from the social aspect of every identity i have is so painful that i don't even use the words for what i am. and if i'm vehemently unwanted within a group and i bear many visible and invisible differences from virtually all of that group's members, do the slight similarities make me part of it? or am i a nothing with a gross baboon body like it feels like when i look in the mirror.

    i don't want to intrude in women's spaces and make them feel unsafe with my permanently deformed and unfemale body even though as someone with a female soul i desperately wish i belonged in those spaces.

    i don't know what to do with myself anymore. where to go. how to stop spending life in mourning. if it's worth continuing through life as a hideous, empty corpse.
     
  10. BluhImCourtney

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    Yo. :3

    This is something I've hated for a long while, too. Yeah, it sucks, I know.

    But guess what.

    Did you guess?

    There was actually a baby born from a uterine transplant in Sweden maybe a year ago. :grin:

    Or something like a year ago, I don't know, I don't have the article on me. ._.

    But it was a biological female just without a uterus (I think? Something like that.).

    But still! Medical technology is moving ahead pretty fast, y'know. Maybe in the near future full-on reassignment surgery can be a reality.

    But until then, just hang on, kay? <3

    Also, kudos to that one EC member that posted a thread about the uterus transplant thing. Can't remember your name, though. >.<

    Also, reading on to the last post of the OP, yeah, felt that too. :\

    I'm lucky enough to be in a high school where I met some really nice people before I came out to them. Both of which are biological females, and accept me as female as well, so... y'know, it gets better and all that jazz? ._.

    EDIT: I also came out to both as Bi/Pan, and they're fine with that, too. Hope you can find people who accept you for who you are, I'm rooting for you. ;3
     
    #10 BluhImCourtney, May 28, 2015
    Last edited: May 28, 2015
  11. Amira

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    i came out when i was 14 but i didn't start on hormones until i was 21 so my body's pretty wrecked, actually. the only reason i can maintain stealth is my face, height, and carefully selected wardrobe. i think even after srs my body will never look close to the range of biological female bodies so i'm not sure how much better it gets for me.
     
  12. Lazuri

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    'Twas around August, around the same time my son was born. Ironically, this miracle baby and my own son share a name.


    How exactly is your body so wrecked? The only real difference one can do nothing about is skeletal differences and even there, the similarities outnumber the differences by so much and are so subtle that it is nigh negligible. Especially at age 21.
     
  13. Amira

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    i don't know. i changed a lot between 18 and 21. my shoulders are about 1 1/2 times the width of my hips and i have a big barrel chest and even though i'm 130 lbs (thanks anorexia and self-medicating) i still can't wear anything that isn't form-fitting without looking like a man. my bra size is 40A for god's sake and all i am is bones and skin. i'm kind of a monster. i was an androgynous little kid so i passed a lot easier until about age 19 but then everything went to hell and it's never coming back and i have to live with this until i die and that makes me very sad to think about.

    ---------- Post added 29th May 2015 at 12:59 AM ----------

    my father's a huge, burly guy and extremely high testosterone in the late teens runs in his family (he and his brother were bald by age 22 and i started balding before hrt) so that might explain the not so subtle differences i have.

    ---------- Post added 29th May 2015 at 01:01 AM ----------

    i've been putting off tonight's shower for hours because i have to be naked and that upsets me a great deal
     
  14. Synthetik

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    Here's what I want to know. What the hell women are you talking to, darlin'? I have never in my life met a group of women who would be so cruel, so utterly unforgiving, so dismissive and disdainful of another person-- except for highschool cheerleaders, but they're too stupid to even understand why, and tumblr radscum, but who gives a shit what they think? Maybe what you really need to do is move.

    Move to a new place, a progressive city, a place with a compassionate environment and intelligent free-thinking people who can embrace you.

    Alternatively, because fuck random strangers from the internet delivering relatively implausible pseudo-solutions for tangentially-related problems you mostly just want to express, know this: there is more to this life than the living it. Being trapped in a physical body at all, regardless of how unsuitable it may be for your mind, can be hell on earth. I know what it's like when the flesh you inhabit burns like hot tar strung up on brittle bones that fail to support the truth of you. I know what it's like when every day is a bitter, faded-out nightmare from which you know there's only one way to awaken. I know what it's like to kill yourself for living and start thinking you might as well just get it done quicker.

    I know what it's like to be hopeless.

    To be weary and broken before you even get out of bed, to not even bother with the getting out part. To carry that crushing weight around inside your ribs, that clenching and aching person-sized black hole; to be angry at your ribs for holding it. For holding you.

    But there is more to this life than living it. There is a place you can access in your own mind where the real you lives, and that place doesn't need a body to believe in, and there are other people who know how to believe in it.
     
  15. Just Jess

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    You mean gay? I use it. I know, you meant lesbian. I use that too. I guess I've been luckier with the people I associate with. But I have found even hostile people don't really push things too much when I say gay. Maybe they'll ask or make the wrong assumption, but even if the reply is "so you're straight", that argument can be headed off with "whatever you want, it works with women and not men is all I know, and believe me I'd know", past that they look bad for pressing the issue. It never gets that far though. The fact is, the way I'm living life is pretty "gay" the way they mean it if they mean male anyway. If they refuse to let me be a woman, they at least have to acknowledge the simple and obvious fact that if I'm a guy to them, I am a flamingly queer one. As a lesbian, I don't see any real benefit to a different gay word for girls, and I feel like I am showing more solidarity with gay men with "gay" than with "lesbian". If they think gay means something other than how I mean it that works to my benefit anyway, people that pigheaded always have a hard time separating identity and orientation in their heads, so I get treated more like a woman.

    You have all the cards here. Anyone who would continue to give you crap after saying "look I am gay" is NOT a romantic prospect, and since they are definitely not worth my time and affection, why am I talking to them about who I knock boots with anyway?

    The lesbians I meet from everywhere are way cooler than the ones who have made you feel that way. So it might be time to find a different scene.
     
  16. Amira

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    when i was a street kid, the cis lesbians were a lot nicer to girls like me than the gay guys were, at least around here. i feel like the gay guys thought we were somehow making them look less masculine and/or like perverts even though being trans and gay is totally different. the lesbians on the other hand didn't have that same baggage, but i think it was because they didn't see us as connected to them in any way, even though we were women and some of us (me, for example) liked women. but when it came to lesbian spaces, i've been getting the ayn al-hasud in lesbian bars and clubs since i was 18, and there's this relatively recent upswing in the number of younger lesbians who see us as threats to their female-only space because they don't see us as female. the result? i can't be part of the community. i might be tolerated in a place but use the word "lesbian" for myself and the best i can expect is a condescending head-pat or a chuckle.

    i know a few lesbians who see my femaleness and sexuality as legitimately the same as theirs but most of them don't make too much of a stir about it in the scene, probably because they'd be exiles like me if they did so.

    still, it's kind of a huge blow to my self-esteem when a large and vocal portion of a group i identify with doesn't want to associate with me and in fact would rather i never existed, and goes about justifying this by calling girls like me perverts and rapists and patriarchal colonizers and i'm like, a very staunch and unyielding feminist but none of that matters to these people and the rest of the community hasn't really taken a stand against them in any meaningful way to indicate that they don't agree with their views, or at best, that whether they agree with them or not they don't care enough about us to challenge them on our behalf.

    and there's only so long i can defend myself against them on my own. they say things that strike at my core, fling accusations of horrible things that i can only deny because proving a negative is really hard to do. and it especially hurts as a survivor of sexual violence that a long time of trying to fight that rhetoric has led to me seeing features of my rapists in my own reflection.

    so if i had to tl;dr everything i've written in this thread, i'm alone, i'm scared, i have no self-esteem and no community, and i really really hate myself and especially my body for making me so vulnerable to this in the first place.
     
    #16 Amira, May 29, 2015
    Last edited: May 29, 2015
  17. Synthetik

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    Would you be willing to explain what you hope to get out of this thread? Is this simply a safe space for you to express your most painful feelings, and the act of writing them out/sharing them with others is cathartic for you? Do you want to hear the voices of others who specifically experience similar feelings, or do you want to receive emotional support from them, or from anyone else who might relate? Or are you interested in considering possible solutions and discussing what you've already tried?

    I can see you basically screaming in agony and I want desperately to help but don't know how. At least know that even someone who isn't trans, and hasn't personally suffered through this exact experience, believes in you. I was drawn to your thread because of who you are, not because I have any legitimate suggestions for reconciling these issues with a community I don't belong to in any way, and there are other people out there who will accept you the way you want to be accepted, no questions asked. This isn't a sentence to permanent exile; you do not have to be alone. I wish there were some way we could talk about trying to separate your sense of self-esteem from how you are perceived and treated by others.

    Edit:
    If you don't want me to keep posting here, feel free to tell me to fuck off. I just didn't want to let this thread sink quietly into oblivion without you getting to feel some kind of relief.
     
  18. Amira

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    i think i'm more screaming than anything at this point. my ideas when it comes to trans stuff tend to devolve into that. but even if they don't seem to help right away, having contrary voices or even simple understanding is helpful in combating the voices in my own head and outside who tell me i'm worthless and unwanted and don't belong among women or lesbians or humans generally.
     
  19. Synthetik

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    Then I will gladly scream back: You're not unwanted. You're not worthless. When people, even in the lesbian community, treat you poorly, they're the ones who are wrong, not you. And there are people even outside the supposedly 'safe' spaces of these communities who will not only respect your existence, we will also appreciate it. It's obvious to me even just from reading this one thread that you have a hell of a lot to give, not just as a woman but as a person, and no matter how successful you may consider your transition to be, your worth will always be present.
     
  20. Amira

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    thank you. it helps quell the cacophony of self-loathing and isolation to hear that, even if i'm not sure i'll ever feel good about my life or myself and especially the way the DMAB thing affects them but even a moment of hearing someone say different of me helps tone down the suicidal urges and the rampant thanatos.

    sorry i'm such a fuckup that i overshare in giving gratitude but really thank you <3