LGBTAI+ #59: Will You Take This Woman To Be Your Galpal?

[Mystic Muse]

On the subject of epilation, I would definitely recommend buzzing whatever you intend to epilate fairly short before you start. 3-5mm is the usual recommended length, but definitely under a centimeter and more left than a clean shave. And, uh, brace yourself. It can hurt quite a bit the first time, depending on location, though gets much less painful on repeat application.

Excuse me while I scream, because this is legitimately one of the most physically painful things I've ever done to myself.

It will be worth it though. Beauty is pain.

[thirsting]

But hair is beautiful. I'd date a werewolf...

Also, another collection of tips pasted from elsewhere:

Spoiler

Show

- RAISING PITCH ISN'T AS IMPORTANT AS IT SEEMS. Feminizing your resonance and acoustic assumptions are far more effective in sounding femme.
- Singing helps
- Elevate don't constrict voice when raising pitch
- Smiling helps (accoustic assumptions - vowels)
- Touch don't Push with vocal tension (e.g. tongue on top of mouth for 'ng' sounds)
- Should always feel comfortable and maintainable
- Resonance: where does your voice 'go' when you say things -- chest (masculine), throat (neutral), teeth (feminine)
- Resonance: 'mmmmm' hum helps set (feel side of nose), this is why "Mmmm, meeeee, meeeeet meeee" exercise helps set both pitch and resonance.
- Take your time -- if you want to move pitch up it's better to do a comfortable raise and slowly increase range than go 'breathy' to force it (risks damaging throat, breathy also ****s up resonance bad)
- Practice regularly -- if you only do voice work for 10 minutes a day and use male voice everywhere else it's harder to teach your brain 'this is how we speak now'
- Even if it's just 25% of your practice time, try to move your standard voice in a feminine direction so that you learn "this is just how I speak now"
- It will take around 2-3 months of training for it to become "permeant", just don't give up. Work in small Htz increments.
- Pretend you're speaking to a child (not in what you say but how you say it)
-If you can: slow down. Take your time speaking. This lets you have spare brain power to check your voice
speaking quickly also 'constricts' your pitch variance a bit (only matters if you're a motormouth like me though)

Well this is weird. Definitely not transperson, but I've never really felt like a 'man' in any way (nor a woman, mostly barely even a human), but reading about those voice practises yesterday made me realize, maybe I should try this. Try to go for something more neutral. Just slight modifications to how to use my voice no one but me would likely notice.. I don't know where I'm going with this... just, thanks.

[Mystic Muse]

But hair is beautiful. I'd date a werewolf...

And to each their own, but my body hair has been the source of seversl dysphoric attacks, some of which were really intense. I'm not going through that again.

[BladeofObliviom]

Excuse me while I scream, because this is legitimately one of the most physically painful things I've ever done to myself.

It will be worth it though. Beauty is pain.

Oh dear. Yeah, it's rough the first time! I started with my face, and...yeah.

Well this is weird. Definitely not transperson, but I've never really felt like a 'man' in any way (nor a woman, mostly barely even a human), but reading about those voice practises yesterday made me realize, maybe I should try this. Try to go for something more neutral. Just slight modifications to how to use my voice no one but me would likely notice.. I don't know where I'm going with this... just, thanks.

For what it's worth I've been at this for 7 months and aside from the people I'm actually out to, among the people I interact with regularly, almost nobody has noticed anything different about my voice. Change blindness is a hell of a drug.

And...obviously self-identification is completely your own business but you may find it worthwhile to look into the nonbinary spectrum if you haven't? I know a few Agender people, it's a thing.

[Mystic Muse]

Oh dear. Yeah, it's rough the first time! I started with my face, and...yeah.

Yeah, doing it in sections spread apart time-wise because oof.

Also, I hope it's clear that these are my own standards specifically for how I want to look. They do not apply to anyone else, and I do not judge anyone for not feeling the same way.

Hell, I wouldn't judge anyone for saying "body hair sucks, but I'm not using an epilator because I don't feel like torturing myself to get rid of it."

This is just my lowest expense option for dealing with it.

[BladeofObliviom]

It does get better, at least. Using it on my face now hurts about as much as a brief pinch with fingernails (though not digging in). Which is to say not much.

[Lissou]

I'm cis so I don't know if it translates well, but when I did epilate I found strips less painful than an epilator for sensitive areas.

[JusticeZero]

@JusticeZero
I don't have any advice for you, but do you have any recommendations for how to start voice training?

I started doing my daily commute with a recorder in hand. I would run through all of the vowel-consonant and consonant-vowel sounds, then try adjusting my voice in different ways and saying a sentence, listening to it to examine what that did.
Drink lots of water. Do trills to loosen up, gargle your way through your entire comfortable vocal range.
Listen to how women talk. You can get away with a lot less actual range change if you nail the prosody; older cis women who smoke frequently have pitches well into the neutral-cismale range, but people hear them as feminine. Find a snippet of audio of a woman talking in a way that strikes you as feminine in ways you like, and work through it repeatedly just duplicating the rhythm, the way the pitch flows.
If your throat gets tired, stop, drink water.
Also, there should be a relaxed smile feel in your throat to avoid tension, I find.

[137beth]

Whelp, I saw my endo today and I can go up on estradiol

[Wizard_Lizard]

Whelp, I saw my endo today and I can go up on estradiol

Congratulations!

[Dire Moose]

It’s officially been three years since I began my transition.

[137beth]

It’s officially been three years since I began my transition.

Congratulations to you!

[GreenDM]

It’s officially been three years since I began my transition.

Hell yeah!

[BisectedBrioche]

You ever just stop and think about how some people (even well meaning allies) just see trans people as just "wanting" to be our gender or only think of us as the result of medical transitions, and just can't...

[Lissou]

Yeah, it's always very, very weird. Even Dan Shive who writes EGS, who is genderfluid, wrote a genderfluid character and used "gender I want to be at the time" instead of "gender I am at the time" and it felt really odd. I think the more awareness is raised, the more people realise that gender is something you are, but as you said even well-meaning people will sometimes make that mistake. I guess you have to start somewhere...

[me_ow]

It’s officially been three years since I began my transition.

congrats ! love the will power you have

[Dire Moose]

And as of today, it’s been three years since I started taking estrogen.

Looking at myself now, I can’t help but wonder if a lot of my old friends would even recognize me anymore.

[BisectedBrioche]

I unexpectedly got a phone call this morning. I've got a date for lower surgery at last (it's been over a year since I had my consultation). <3

[LaZodiac]

Congratulations!

I still need to wait to get my consultations and confirmations... the one doctor who could have been available to do the first of my two confirmations literally vanished off the face of the earth like a year ago so I'm probably going to be waiting another two years still...

[Talakeal]

Hello everyone!

I have a couple more questions about being transgender, and I am hoping someone here can help me understand. Again, I apologize in advance if I offend someone, but I am genuinely curious.


First, my understanding is that transgender people have a gender identity which differs from their biological sex. But I have heard a number of people claim that they or others were born transgender* or that gender is something that transcends biology or sociology. But, I also understand gender to be a social construct, something of which babies (or people living outside of society) should have no concept for, correct?

When I hear people say this, it sounds to me like they are being overly politically correct, or subscribing to some sort of new age mysticism. Am I missing something here?


On a related note, can someone explain to me what it actually means to be nonbinary? Every time I look it it up, all I find are platitudes or comparisons, which don't actually explain the issue to me. Is it just a rejection of the notion of gender? Is it a desire to be without biological sex?


Thanks!



*Obviously, people who are in some way biologically intersex could be an exception to this.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

But, I also understand gender to be a social construct, something of which babies (or people living outside of society) should have no concept for, correct?

"Gender is a social construct" is often misunderstood. People often assume that "social construct" means "arbitrarily made up," as if people just woke up one day, whipped up gender roles out of whole cloth, stuck everyone with one label or another, and the rest is history.

But a social construct is a conceptual framework built around something real that already exists. Money is a social construct, all ephemeral numbers and arbitrary currencies, but it represents a store of very real value attached to real things like resource scarcity and the value of time. Nations are a social construct, all imaginary lines on maps and arbitrary decisions in treaties, but every nation represents a very real common history and culture shared by a particular group of people.

Gender is the same way. The specific two (or three, or more) genders that exist in a given society are "merely" social constructs, but they have their basis in biological variation (e.g. differences in brain structure that correlate with different sexes), societal needs (e.g. necessary divisions of labor within society that appeal to different groups of people), and other factors.

It's interesting that you bring up babies and what they have concepts for, because studies show that they do, in fact, show an awareness of and preference for gendered things at a very young age. Studies like this one show that babies naturally gravitate to either "object-oriented" (and stereotypically-male) toys like trucks or "person-oriented" (and stereotypically-female) toys like dolls (or both, or neither) at a very young age, regardless of what their parents try to get them to play with because boys are "supposed" to play with trucks and girls are "supposed" to play with dolls.

These differences persist with age, where people show strong gender-based personality differences and differences in career preferences, largely independent of geography, social class, and similar factors. These are statistical trends, of course, so there are outliers in all directions, but the observations hold in general.

So basically, genders are conceptual "buckets" build around observed differences in different kinds of humans, and in the West where these are based solely on the two main biological sexes (though again, other cultures have more or different gender divisions), someone who is trans-gender is someone who fits into a different bucket they were assigned based on their sex. Transgender men have brain structures, personality traits, career preferences, and so forth characteristic of cisgender men, so because gender is about stuff like personality and societal roles, transgender men and cisgender men belong in the same "bucket," and the same goes for transgender women and cisgender women.

On a related note, can someone explain to me what it actually means to be nonbinary? Every time I look it it up, all I find are platitudes or comparisons, which don't actually explain the issue to me. Is it just a rejection of the notion of gender? Is it a desire to be without biological sex?

Coming up with a discrete categorization scheme for continuous data is easy when you're working with one variable; if you try to categorize people on "likes wearing pink" vs. "doesn't like wearing pink" vs. "doesn't know or doesn't care about wearing pink" for instance, every person fits in exactly one category. When you try to do that for lots of different variables at once, however, it gets more and more difficult to categorize things, the specific categories necessarily shrink, and you have more and more outliers that don't fit in any category.

Most people in Western society fit in either a "male/masculine" gender bucket or a "female/feminine" gender bucket, either because they fit in one naturally (they've thought about it and are comfortable with one of the two, they were assigned one at birth and don't really think about it after that, etc.) or have had to pick one (they don't really feel like they feel fit one or the other but they fit mostly in one so sticking with that is good enough).

"Nonbinary" is somewhat of an umbrella term--someone who is agender feels and expresses their (lack of) gender identity differently from someone who's bigender, for instance--but in general someone who is nonbinary is someone who looks at both gender buckets and feels that they don't fit in either one of them well enough to pick one and so take a third option. This variation means that what it "means" to be nonbinary will vary as well, which makes sense because it's defined by what it's not rather than by what it is and so covers a lot of conceptual ground.

[BisectedBrioche]

Hello everyone!

I have a couple more questions about being transgender, and I am hoping someone here can help me understand. Again, I apologize in advance if I offend someone, but I am genuinely curious.


First, my understanding is that transgender people have a gender identity which differs from their biological sex. But I have heard a number of people claim that they or others were born transgender* or that gender is something that transcends biology or sociology. But, I also understand gender to be a social construct, something of which babies (or people living outside of society) should have no concept for, correct?

When I hear people say this, it sounds to me like they are being overly politically correct, or subscribing to some sort of new age mysticism. Am I missing something here?


On a related note, can someone explain to me what it actually means to be nonbinary? Every time I look it it up, all I find are platitudes or comparisons, which don't actually explain the issue to me. Is it just a rejection of the notion of gender? Is it a desire to be without biological sex?


Thanks!



*Obviously, people who are in some way biologically intersex could be an exception to this.

Something to remember is that the definition of transgender is "a gender identity which differs from the gender they were assigned at birth". That is to say it's less a factor of a person's anatomy and more that their Assigned Gender At Birth (AGAB) isn't one that fits them. Sex doesn't come into it so much ("biological sex" even less so, since it's not a scientific term; depending on how "biological" is defined, it's either redundant or nonsensical).

I find a lot of people who are less informed on trans issues start to understand them better when it's explained that way. For further reading, I'd suggest looking up the medical definition of "sex" (which involves 5 factors, only one of which is used to define someone's AGAB).

[Chen]

It's interesting that you bring up babies and what they have concepts for, because studies show that they do, in fact, show an awareness of and preference for gendered things at a very young age. Studies like this one show that babies naturally gravitate to either "object-oriented" (and stereotypically-male) toys like trucks or "person-oriented" (and stereotypically-female) toys like dolls (or both, or neither) at a very young age, regardless of what their parents try to get them to play with because boys are "supposed" to play with trucks and girls are "supposed" to play with dolls.

I’m not sure there’s a good conclusion to draw from this study. The last paragraph is:

“There were no differences in preferences at four months, but by 12 months there were. At 12 months, female babies had no preference between dolls and trucks, but male babies preferred trucks. These preferences were correlated with the types of toys in the home,” Woods said. “Given that parents select their child’s toys, it is possible that parents influence their babies’ toy preferences through exposure to toys more so than overt encouragement to play with the toys.”

The bolded part seems to imply it has nothing to do with “innate” gender but still environmental factors.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I’m not sure there’s a good conclusion to draw from this study. The last paragraph is:

“There were no differences in preferences at four months, but by 12 months there were. At 12 months, female babies had no preference between dolls and trucks, but male babies preferred trucks. These preferences were correlated with the types of toys in the home,” Woods said. “Given that parents select their child’s toys, it is possible that parents influence their babies’ toy preferences through exposure to toys more so than overt encouragement to play with the toys.”

The bolded part seems to imply it has nothing to do with “innate” gender but still environmental factors.

There are a lot of studies on the issue that had similar outcomes, that one was just the first article I found where the conclusion wasn't paywalled. Here's a meta-analysis showing that, while babies choosing gendered toys happened more when parents or researchers forced a choice or had some influence in toy selection, the effect was still present and statistically significant even without that. Here's a study where young children were studied in their actual preschool, where the "pre-existing set of toys they're familiar with" issue was similar between the school and their home, and strong gender differences were observed. And here's a study about how infant play styles by gender strongly correlate with measured testosterone levels and with the play styles of monkeys of the same gender, despite a possible confounding factor of boys being stigmatized for playing with "girl toys" and so expressing a preference for male-gendered toys and against female-gendered toys noticeably more than girls did for female-gendered toys and against male-gendered toys.

[Rydiro]

Could you elaborate on your idea of social constructs?
It sounds like you describe them as not entirely being real and instead social agreements about real things.
Your money example was especially confusing, because I think money itself has a very real value. And not just a societally agreed upon one.
Or your example that nations are social constructs while cultures are not.

[Talakeal]

Gender roles develop over time in response to biological differences between the sexes. But they change over time and from culture to culture, and there are so many individual exceptions that it is impossible for me to buy that any specific expression of gender is biologically hardwired into our biology.

But, the whole issue of whether gender is a social construct kind of sidesteps the issue, unless the argument is being made that being biologically intersex, having gender nonconforming interests, and being trans are all the same thing, which I dont think anyone is saying (but please correct me if i am wrong).

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Your money example was especially confusing, because I think money itself has a very real value. And not just a societally agreed upon one.

Money doesn't have any intrinsic value. The US has, as a society, decided that if you put a sticker on a box of cereal that says "$5" I can hand you five little pieces of green cloth or one piece of green cloth with different drawings on it or a big bag full of metal discs and you'll give me that box of cereal because you think that the green cloth pieces are worth the same as that box of cereal, and you think that because you can turn around and hand those green cloth pieces to someone else to receive a different thing labeled with a squiggly S and some numbers, and so on and so forth until something called an "economy" spontaneously develops.

There's nothing natural or universal about the US dollar; we didn't find it anywhere, we made it up out of, if you'll pardon the pun, whole cloth. There's nothing inherently special about the dollar; there are dozens of other currencies in the world and the reason why one uses a dollar instead of a franc or a ruble are entirely cultural, regional, and historical and have nothing to do with the physical dollar itself. There's no intrinsic value to the dollar; something can be worth $4 today and $5 tomorrow and $2 the day afterwards, and if the US government declared that they're changing their currency to giant stone wheels tomorrow the little pieces of green cloth would lose all their perceived value.

What money is is a representation of value, something that lets you exchange one kind and quantity of value for another kind and quantity of value in a manner that everyone agrees upon--and yet there are still kinds and quantities of value that cannot be exchanged in that way, as there are things in the world that cannot be purchased or sold for any amount of money.

Or your example that nations are social constructs while cultures are not.

A culture is a set of shared values, stories, languages, and so forth (and in smaller cultures also things like family ties), and is something that arises more or less naturally when you put any group of humans together. Stick a bunch of people of any ages and backgrounds by themselves in a room for a year and when you check in on them at the end of that year you'll find that they've developed their own idiosyncratic methods of communication, their own references and in-jokes, their own set of values regarding who's allowed to work the food dispenser or change the channel on the TV, and so on, and that culture will be different than it would be if you repeat the experiment with a different group of people.

The modern conception of the nation-state, meanwhile, didn't show up until the 1400s at the earliest and didn't show up everywhere in the same form or at the same time. Further, nationhood can be externally granted or revoked by an external party without affecting a culture at all (e.g. Poland being divided between Germany and the Soviet Union during World War 2 didn't suddenly make the people in the German portion either not-Polish or suddenly German) and a culture can exist (or cease to exist) without respect to the nation in which it exists (e.g. a French family moving to Spain doesn't suddenly become culturally Spanish or cease to be culturally French).


In the same way, gender is a socially-constructed representation and approximation of underlying biological, psychological, etc. trends and realities, and genders are socially-constructed categories that do not always map one-to-one to specific sets of underlying biological, psychological, etc. facts and traits.

[Hish]

Gender as a term describing people was popularized by second wave feminists in the 1970s. It was adopted to disitinguish between biological differences between males (called sex), and differences in behavior, roles, etc. (called gender). These feminists then argued that "Gender is a social construct" - that is to say, the behaviors, expectations, and so forth of men and women (gender) are based on society, not any deep biological differences.

[Talakeal]

Gender as a term describing people was popularized by second wave feminists in the 1970s. It was adopted to disitinguish between biological differences between males (called sex), and differences in behavior, roles, etc. (called gender). These feminists then argued that "Gender is a social construct" - that is to say, the behaviors, expectations, and so forth of men and women (gender) are based on society, not any deep biological differences.

Agreed.

Which is why the notion of someone being born transgender is so confusing to me.

[LaZodiac]

Agreed.

Which is why the notion of someone being born transgender is so confusing to me.

Here's the most basic explanation I can give for this.

The trans person in question always knew that they were trans. So they were born trans.