So.... I am open to this and this is an ongoing discussion I'm down to have. My question here, basically, is "are people just not introspecting hard enough to see there is no felt sense of gender?" I don't now if this is the case or if their brains are actually-
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wildly different from mine. Both have been the case in regards to other ways I've been confused about things - for example I was very doubtful aphantasia was real for a while, but now believe it's a thing, whereas processing of trauma went the "actually yeah people aren't-
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-introspecting hard enough" route.
I don't know which one this is. I suspect people aren't introspecting hard enough, or just that frameworks are kinda weird/unclear/unprecise and ironing them out would end up with all of us agreeing.
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There have been studies done of the brains of transgender people that show that, for example, a trans woman's brain is more similar to a cis woman's brain than a cis man's, and vice-versa. So there's science to back it up.
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Yeah I'm down with that! I do think there's definitely something going on in some people's brains that make them feel like they need to change their body. I believe this is true and believe they should be able to change their body.
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That something is probably what makes them feel like the gender they are.
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but we're back to the thing i don't get. I understand wanting to change your body. I understand wanting people to treat you differently. I understand having nonstandard expression preferences. I'm down with all that. But what does this have to do with gender?
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It's not just about wanting people to treat you differently.
It's about wanting to be who *you* are.
A trans woman is a woman whose body is wrong (I apologize to anyone I offend for using inaccurate terminology here, I don't quite know the right words to use). She was always-
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a woman - her gender was always female - but her body didn't match that. For many (but not all) this causes a lot of distress (dysphoria).
Yes, being recognized properly as who you are is huge. But being able to see *yourself* outwardly reflected as you are on the inside is-
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more important, to my admittedly limited understanding.
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Thanks for engaging with me on this so far.
My confusion here is now something like... what 'is' a woman? If you feel like a woman... how do you know? What's that like? What constitutes the 'woman' that you feel like?
I'm *extremely* confused when I get to this question when trying to understand the enby/trans/pronoun framework. This is close to the core of why none of this makes sense and why I'm using my own system.
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