What do you like about yourself and your gender?

[Trinity]

Its hard for many of us to answer this.

Like saying I Love You to yourself in the mirror.

Until I began transitioning, I was never able to do that.  I could repect myself but not love myself.

Now I can do that.  And because I can do that, I think its easier for me to love others with less fear.

I never understood friendship love.  I am still learning about it.

What do I like about myself and my gender?

I love my gender.  It's very cool, its attractive, it's kind and loving, that part of me really, its ferocious, its just me and its the best parts of me.

I used to hate it.

And what do I like about myself?

I care.  A lot.  And I act on that care.

So, what about you?  How is it for you?

What a shame that for so many of us, our self esteem got hammered so much we gave up on the good things about us, something that should never be taken away from anyone.   All that shaming and stuff, all that negativity, which is just the matrix and gender police trying to stuff us into a box.  Well, it's time to cut those chains off, and learn to say I Love You to what you see in the mirror and mean it.

I literally hated sh'e.  I despised h'er.  I could never escape seeing h'er in my eyes.   And it turns out that its the very best part of me, and I had betrayed h'er, but I never knew any better.  I was supposed to love h'er and defend h'er.  And now I do that.  Fiercely.

Can you see who you really are, the gift you can be to yourself and others?

Shine on, you crazy diamonds......

[kalima]

My discovery of my female soul was an ecstatic spiritual experience that led to my 2.5 year exploration of who I really am. I know that identifying as both female and male can seem like I am still on the gender binary, but it is my experience. I have found that my female self is a dancing, wisecracking love-generator. She is an extroverted, sensual truth-teller who uses humor and empathy to navigate every awkward situation. This is in contrast to my male part who is naturally introverted, cerebral and imaginative. I like my recently acknowledged female part. I want her to more at home in my body relating to people in my life. However, even with my hair long, I look more like my male part, and that is how people see me. But that said, getting to know my female part has been fulfilling and fun. It isn't really about my appearance, it is about being who I am in my heart.

[Ativan Prescribed]

I started out very much thinking that I had this female stuff and that male stuff, and it slowly became more and more that instead of this duality, which just made me feel split like left handed right handed, I let it gel into this much more ambidextrous self that is a whole.
While I still listen to the voice in my head as sort of like female and male, it is like always going off in about equal sounding, like the thoughts that seem female are just as much male and vs.
My point was that in order to feel on solid ground and not over there or over here, I am so much more a whole and hardly ever see myself as split into two halves, I'm much more at peace with myself this way.
And I use the term ambidextrous with intent, I no longer have this need to play one part of me against the other when all parts of me work in unison, pretty much like I have taught myself to be actually so much more ambidextrous in how it can use left side or right side equally well.
Which really isn't as hard as you might think, once you realize that throwing with your less dominant arm is all about using the elbow to snap a throw, like a baseball or the neighbors cat, it becomes just one more thing that you don't have to pick up something with say your left hand and then put it in your right hand to throw, you pick and throw with whatever side is easiest to reach, there is a thing where most of the time people will lead off there steps with either the left side or the right, when you realize you are doing this, it is almost automatic to be able to use either foot first.
You type on a keyboard using both hands, even if you use the couple fingers approach to typing, you still use both hands and its natural, do things like brushing teeth with the other hand, eat using the other hand, use that chef knife in the other hand.
Play a guitar the other way around, what this does to you mentally and spiritually is to be ambidextrous in self and self awareness, it is a easy way to become more like a whole than to be simply left handed or right handed, and gender follows this just as easily.
I'm not this part female and that part male, I'm both and everything I do is female and male if you want to see it like that, but I tend to just see it as me, so it isn't like a gender name to be NB, it is more like being one with yourself, regardless.
While initially it is difficult to break the societal habit of gnedring things as female or male, it gets easier all the time and instead of consciously thinking your way through it, you instinctively do it, gender is a construct of society, there are no rules only guidelines and you don't have to cater to either of those.
We all know its the fool who believes there are actual gender rules, which implies laws and that implies gender police, only republicans are that foolish.
It's been a long haul to get to this place I am at, but there is a backstory to it and its all about how the forest we live in came to be, and it started out with using the binary to see male as one citie and female as another city and a hwy between the two, eventually the concept of the forest came into play, and with it the paths in the forest and this became the paths we all take, all different, but in the forest, because the two cities are just paths that go in circles around each block, sorta defines that going in circles binary gender construct....

[Trinity]

Mar 1, 2021 12:33:55 GMT 8 kalima said:

My discovery of my female soul was an ecstatic spiritual experience that led to my 2.5 year exploration of who I really am. I know that identifying as both female and male can seem like I am still on the gender binary, but it is my experience. I have found that my female self is a dancing, wisecracking love-generator. She is an extroverted, sensual truth-teller who uses humor and empathy to navigate every awkward situation. This is in contrast to my male part who is naturally introverted, cerebral and imaginative. I like my recently acknowledged female part. I want her to more at home in my body relating to people in my life. However, even with my hair long, I look more like my male part, and that is how people see me. But that said, getting to know my female part has been fulfilling and fun. It isn't really about my appearance, it is about being who I am in my heart.

The journey is different for all of us.

In the beginning, I felt split, and my gender was at war with itself.  It was very painful.

I can still have moments like that, expecially if I am threatened or attacked, yesterday was a day like that with acute dysphoria, do to the rejection of my gender and the insistance that I had to be healed of being who I am. Yesterday was a very bad day emotionally for me.

But as time goes on, anything can happen, for me there became total integration and I became sh'e, they if you want but sh'e captures it pretty well for me, there just isn't a great way to explain it with me or capture it.

What I do know is that all of what you describe is you, and is important to you, and I can identify with it, it sounds somewhat like the beginning of my own journey, which as time has gone on, became much healthier and much different, and that happened through healing and nurtuting the whole of me, and forgiving the part of me that let the other part get hurt.  I will never allow that again.

Hugs.

[Leena]

I mainly see what I used to call my masculine side as things I did to fit in cishet society. How much of that was the real me is hard to tell. I tried to live the best life I could while being in the closet. It became a dual life at some point and while that sort of worked, it is mentally exhausting doing that. It doesn't even seem possible to do that now, even if I wanted to. It is easier in some ways, but it has a tendency to make me start questioning again.

I really was going in circles for quite awhile, and I don't really want to do that again. Where I am and want to stay is at the edge of town, but where I can still see the forest.

[Trinity]

The breakthrough for me was dropping the act.

Male, was an act. Female could be an act, but it's not female, and its not an act, because I dropped that act too. One of the reasons I don't voice mod. For me, it just doesn't feel right. It takes effort. It takes consciously modding how I talk.

Being me, is not an act. Being me in public, now that I don't care about the matrix and what normies think, is no longer an act. I can relax, cross my legs, be graceful, drop all the attempts at male body language, be loving and kind, do all the things that make me Trinity, and not care about what those imprisoned in the Matrix think about that.

They used to say it was shameful. Well, too bad. Because it just isn't and they will never convince me otherwise. But there was a time when I thought it was.

So, I got set free, and I can express either way, and generally get gendered that way.

The two year old was calling me Grandma the other day. I don't dress Grandma around him, I usually look like the rocker, I usually or always am carrying and the kids know it, but I loved that TJ called me Grandma, because he wanted to show me the moon at the funeral. Bundle of love, that boy is.

Not having to defend myself from the Matrix has freed me in big ways. I play the game in presentation, binary sh'e in some places, binary he in others, but its all the same me and I don't change how I act or talk or anything. And I am accepted usually as one of the binaries depending on clothes or if I shaved or not, when I was at the funeral it was with 6 days growth, its just easier dealing with the matrix that way because my hair is longer again, thank God.

I like the freedom of being nonbinary. I love not being "fake". Not in my eyes anyway. I don't crossdress, because my gender is what it is, there is no crossdress, I am not of the binary. I am trans, sure, very trans, but I am not confined by the Matrix, I am me, I am not living a lie, others tell me I must live a lie, but then I would be worshipping the father of lies, wouldn't I? And that would be betrayal on my part, betrayal of me, of the forum, of trans, and of God who made me this way, for His own pleasure and reasons.

Yeah I spiritualize everything but I would have been dead long ago if it wasn't for my relationship to my God.

But that is drifting a little, the question was what do I like about my gender?

I like that its real. It's who I really am. And I am not the shameful thing that others said I was, not even close, far from it. They are blind, they are trapped in the Matrix, they cannot see with the eyes of love and compassion for others as they are. It is very, very sad. But so are many things in this world.

It is indeed mentally exhausting to lead a dual life. But if we are who we are at the core, and drop whatever act we think is necessary to appease the matrix, not necessarily in appearance but in trying to live up to an appearence or expectation that is forced on us by the matrix, if we are simply ourselves at core, then it can be much easier, provided that we do not empower the disapproval of others, but instead, in spite of the pain of it, rise above it. Our approval does not come from others. It comes from within, and from above.

[Leena]

I guess I didn't really answer the question either. The dual life I was living is what led me to identifying as genderfluid, which falls under the nonbinary umbrella. I don't really feel all that comfortable being too far from either binary though.

I'm not sure that I like myself or my gender, much less what I like about it. I really didn't like living as a guy full time, and living as a guy only part time was only slightly better. The dual life was a lot less freeing than I thought it would be, because it makes me have to keep a secret and I've always hated doing that.

What may be freeing would be if I were totally out though there will be a lot of fallout from that.

[Droomvlucht]

Mar 1, 2021 12:59:54 GMT 8 Ativan Prescribed said:

I started out very much thinking that I had this female stuff and that male stuff, and it slowly became more and more that instead of this duality, which just made me feel split like left handed right handed, I let it gel into this much more ambidextrous self that is a whole.

Nice analogy. For me, there's not a female part and a male part. There's just me and my non-binary gender.