{"id":2553,"date":"2014-06-05T08:15:00","date_gmt":"2014-06-05T12:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/2014\/06\/05\/my-experience-with-male-socialization\/"},"modified":"2014-06-05T08:15:00","modified_gmt":"2014-06-05T12:15:00","slug":"my-experience-with-male-socialization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/2014\/06\/05\/my-experience-with-male-socialization\/","title":{"rendered":"My experience with “Male Socialization”"},"content":{"rendered":"

CW: Abuse, Transmisogyny, Dysphoria
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There\u2019s this thing going around right now about Laverne Cox not being a \u201creal\u201d woman because of biological destiny and in a few places I frequent I\u2019ve seen people fighting others over their support of this article. This has blown over into a discussion about whether or not trans women can ever be \u201creal\u201d because they grew up socialized male. I just want to talk about this from my own personal perspective. The attempts of my family to raise me as male and be a socialized through masculinity were destructive to my younger years in life to the point where I\u2019ve blocked out almost everything that happened in my pre-teen and teen years. <\/span>I seriously cannot tell you how difficult it was knowing you were female and the entire world from parents, schooling, and churches telling you otherwise. I felt it from as young as four years of age and some of my very first memories are of dysphoria. I wanted to be like any other girl when I grew up and everyone was telling me I\u2019d be a man some day. That\u2019s an extremely traumatic thing to deal with at four years of age. I did everything I could to do things other girls around me were doing in secrecy but I knew if I did any of this in the comfort of my own home my father would beat me. He did that a lot whenever I did something he didn\u2019t want me to. I grew up knowing that if I ever did anything feminine I would be at the hands of abuse from my dad. I put on an act in front of him every day just so I wouldn\u2019t make him mad or upset him, but I knew that it was just that, an act. I never picked up on any of the things he was trying to indoctrinate me with because I knew I was a girl from my first memories. I just didn\u2019t know how to vocalize it and I didn\u2019t even know what transgender was at the time. It\u2019s not like transgender people were on television in 1995. <\/div>\n
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So all of this was weighing on me when I was a child.  <\/span>I\u2019d later go into school and I had a hard time making friends. I couldn\u2019t relate to guys and I knew my father didn\u2019t want me only hanging out with girls and becoming their girlfriend. All of my closest friends were girls, but I never had a best friend forever or anything like that. I went through my entire elementary school years being bullied for being \u201cgirly\u201d and not tough or liking stereotypical guy things. I faked it a lot of the time just to avoid being pushed or shoved, but I knew it was going to happen almost every single day even if I lied. All of this added up over time to the point where I couldn\u2019t deal with it anymore and I just broke. I was a broken person by the time I was 12 years old. Then puberty started to happen and my body started to mutate into something I found horrifying. They were the most difficult years of my life, and I honestly don\u2019t know how I got through them. <\/div>\n
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This all culminated with me dropping out of school when I was 13 years old, and finishing at home. I couldn\u2019t go anymore because I didn\u2019t have the strength to deal with the people bullying me for not acting like a guy, and my body was destroying me every single day with puberty. Every time I tried to go back to school I had panic attacks and intense vomiting. I was hospitalized for months at one point because doctors didn\u2019t know why I couldn\u2019t stop panicking every morning of every day and throwing up. I couldn\u2019t bear to tell them the truth and my story of why I was struggling with everything because it wasn\u2019t safe. I tried to be the person my family and society wanted me to be, but it was killing me. I was self destructing from the inside out and I couldn\u2019t do it. I was crumbling because of society\u2019s pressures to conform to gender roles and it\u2019s own insistence that who you were assigned at birth was locked into place. I never accepted maleness or learned from it and the men in my life were consistently physically abusive to me because I acted feminine. <\/div>\n
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So I don\u2019t get how I\u2019m \u201csocialized male\u201d and a Trans Woman. I don\u2019t think those things are necessarily connected. It certainly wasn\u2019t for me. Whenever I hear people saying Trans Women have been socialized male I get uncomfortable because it brings all this back up. I wasn\u2019t socialized as male. I knew that was never me, and I fought back against it the best I could. I wasn\u2019t given a typical girlhood either even though that\u2019s all I wanted when I was younger. I just grew up.  <\/span>That\u2019s all that happened, and I wish everything had been easier and less lonely. I always latched onto my mom. I just wanted her to think of me as her daughter, and at times it felt that way. Those are the only real memories I cherish from my childhood. Everything else is too hard to deal with, and I just wish I had more memories like that instead of everyone trying to sculpt me into a man. It ruined the first phase of my life. I knew I was a girl all my life, and I was punished for being feminine when I was younger every single time I was ever myself. There was never any part of me that wanted to be a guy. I prayed to an unanswering god and cried about this on so many nights. I just wanted to be myself and the only other option was an act. An act that I never believed in because I was always a girl, even when the men in my life were trying to shape me in their image. I am the person I always wanted to be now, but she wasn\u2019t socialized as a man, and if I or anyone else says that we weren\u2019t then that should be good enough. <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CW: Abuse, Transmisogyny, Dysphoria There\u2019s this thing going around right now about Laverne Cox not being a \u201creal\u201d woman because…<\/p>\n

Continue readingMy experience with “Male Socialization”<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[195,221],"class_list":["post-2553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-personal","tag-transgender","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2553\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curtsiesandhandgrenades.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}