Tranny in the workshop:
A friend said on Facebook:
A Thought on Being Transgendered: So, when your body reacts in a good way to hormones from the other side of the gender binary, you should probably consider, that even thought you think you are male or female something is telling you otherwise. It’s not about what parts you have. It’s about what makes you happy and sane.
That’s my bottom line on the tranny situation; I will admit that I consider it way odd, but that I do so also from my own odd male perspective. More below.
I’ve never been a ’standard’ model guy, and I’ve had very few real girly-girl frills and calico sorts as girlfriends. Susan isn’t one.
In some cases, I’ve dated or pashed over women who turned out over the long run to either be gay or bi. My ex-wife has lived for years with a tranny m->f person, and the next person I was with after we fell apart was an old female friend who was bi (and I knew it at the time) who is now married to a guy.
But I’m very straight, very vanilla, always have been. That’s my basic personality. I didn’t go for those women because they were oriented that way; that isn’t something that interests me at all.
As well, I’m not the typical har-har-sports-and-cigars sort of guy. Not into heavy outdoorsy or hunting stuff - not against it, just doesn’t do much for *me*. Don’t care much for sports, except for the aesthetic stuff and University of Dayton basketball. I’m not a maaaaaaanly man according to some, and I don’t feel bad about it. My dad was big into some of that, and I just considered it oafish the way he went about it.
I have very close gay friends, but I don’t grok gay preference, because I’d no sooner want to have sex with guys than I’d want to go out and throw that football around and smoke a cigar. Totally no interest.
I similarly am perfectly happy with my gender as such, and settled as such. I don’t grok gender dysphoria; apples are apples and pears are pears and all that. Seems simple to me.
But I can deeply understand the idea of being torn to pieces by being forced into a role that does not fit you. I can understand the idea of being desperately unhappy being squished into a specific gender when it’s not the one that you’re comfortable with. And I can easily sympathize, especially when someone says ‘ this is something that has bothered me my whole life, and I can’t live a lie’.
I don’t want people to live a lie. If God made ‘em gay, or needing to be the other gender, I can’t see any sense of stuffing them back into a closet of self-negation, pain and woe. If the people who have gender dysphoria can step forward into the gender-changing machine without any reservations and walk out again as the gender that they ID as, and not look back, then I say, God bless and go with it. That’s about as evil as getting something about yourself surgically corrected that you don’t want - like a harelip, or a kink in your vas deferens. Much more major, I’ll grant you.
Does it all wig me out? Sure, a little, because my basic reaction is the apples-is-apples one, and there are cases that people have been so obviously, screamingly gender A and done an imperfect enough job of going to gender B that my internal WTF meters are all going AOOOOGAH AOOOGAH in trying to avoid the gender A obviousnesses still there.
(I do the same over all sorts of stuff; never give me your manuscript to look over unless you want the unvarnished truth and can deal with it given in a kind and helpful way, because I won’t read it and lie about how wonderful it is. It’s a black-and-white sort of thing in me that makes me a defender of truth and justice and a heck of a picky snot at the same time. I call spades shovels and efforts to call them daffodils drive me nuts.)
(I do, at the same time, respect my friends and acquaintances who are going from A to B and try to put a damper on the klaxon going AOOOOGAH as much as possible. As in try very hard because I care for them and don’t want to make them feel uncomfortable.)
That’s my honest appraisal. I choose my friends by the issues of who they are in the big picture and how interesting they are, and to me, some issues are right up there with their hair length and color as to importance. And if your entire personality is wrapped up with teh ghey and nothing else, or teh tranny, and you can’t talk about much of anything else ever, you will end up boring the crud out of me as much as someone would that talks about their favorite varmint guns for blowing away woodchucks nonstop all the time.
Besides, To Kill A Woodchuck is a sin. Everyone knows that.