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Comments
I just finished Madoka.
I'll be in the corner, crying, if anyone wants me.
One thing I'm trying to understand about male-to-female transgendered people:
How can you tell the difference between a biological male with a female gender and a biological male who simply acts as a caricature of the female gender? The fact that transgenderism is primarily dominated by male-to-female rather than the other way around is what brings up this suspicion.
It is currently 7:24 PM
I am still tired
And they're more expensive. Why don't I just get myself a compact and save a bunch more money for other stuff? Or maybe a slightly-larger-than-compact, whatever that's called.
For the price of an SUV, I might as well buy myself a really comfy and nice car, or I might as well buy myself one of those plug-in hybrids so I don't have to pay as much through the nose for gas. If I want easy-access storage space, I'll get a station wagon. The ONLY thing that I can't get from a car is having a higher view of the road, which I would otherwise only get from a truck or minivan. And I don't think that justifies the cost.
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re MTF transgenders: I've noticed this too, that transgenders (at least the ones I've come to know through the extended TV Tropes community) are overwhelmingly biologically male.
I think people are claiming transgenderedness for the purpose of making caricatures is less of an issue than these two following factors:
* people trying to deceive other people. Not necessarily for the purpose of playing pranks, but more often for the purpose of social posturing, such as to get attention, to look different, to elicit sympathy, etc..
* people trying out nonstandard gender roles, be it consciously or subconsciously, as part of an experimenting phase in their life and in the process of defining their identities. Notably, most people who claim to be transgendered are also teens or young adults.
Note that these factors may also be relevant in the cases of people claiming to be asexual.
I don't mean to trivialize those people who genuinely feel uncomfortable with their biological gender or feel that their true identity includes a gender property opposite to the one their body displays. The big question in my mind, though, is this: Is gender identity an innate or inherent property to people, or is it a result of their context and experiences, such as cultural traditions and values and social settings.
(By "gender identity" I am excluding basic biological drives and understandings, such as a man being aware of how a penis works and wanting to have sex with women. I am talking about the mental understanding of one's gender.)
One possible proxy of this is whether and how people in previous eras, when transgenderness was pretty much not accepted at all, showed indications of transgenderness. Assuming that transgenderedness occurs in people throughout history in about the same proportions as it does today, then theoretically, I would expect that if gender identity is an innate trait, people would have found socially acceptable ways to express dissatisfaction with their gender identity, and so those who have expressed such dissatisfaction may be transgendered individuals before our era. Then again, it might be that people who expressed such dissatisfaction might be dissatisfied instead with gender roles, and not gender identity, so in practice this may be hard to distinguish. The alternate hypothesis is that recent liberalization of notions of gender and sexuality have given rise to transgenderism because people are starting to think about mental and/or spiritual gender identity as a separate thing from biological gender, and beginning to consider the possibility that the two might be different, assuming that the former can be defined. One would be pressed to find an objective way of defining mental gender, though, in order to study this phenomenon rigorously.
As for my current belief: My hypothesis is that what transgendered people call gender identity is a product of our understanding of gender roles and expectations, and thus an artifact created by social and cultural contexts and experiences.
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re depressing animé
Kowarekake no Orgel has a sad ending. I guess. It's bittersweet, more like.
Uta~Kata has a very uncomfortable ending. I remember that after finishing the show, I just had a sort of emptiness-like feeling. I felt like I worried about the characters, and something wasn't resolved--not in the sense of a criticism of the plot, but in the sense of wondering what it all meant...a sort of "fridge discomfort" if you will. The ending theme doesn't help at all, since it also ends with an aura of unsettledness, tinged with sadness. And the extra OVA doesn't really match up with the show very well so I just consider it non-canon anyway.
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I just added a second (or possibly third) series that I plan to watch only because the theme song sounded cool. I just added Railgun. The other was Elemental Gelade. The possible first one is Stratos 4; to this day I still don't remember whether how I discovered that series. Maybe it was through MAL, in which case it's likely not the theme song that got me hooked, but I do remember that the first time I heard the theme song, I was in love with it. The song, that is; "First Priority" is a really pretty song.
"My hypothesis is that what transgendered people call gender identity is a product of our understanding of gender roles and expectations, and thus an artifact created by social and cultural contexts and experiences."
That's why I have some trouble understanding the transgendered experience. Since my account of gender is almost entirely learned and I have no innate sense of gender, I tend to believe gender is purely an artificial construct. And yet, I know that transgenders don't consciously choose to be that way. As for the caricature thing, I meant along the lines of guys pretending that they know just what being a girl is like even though their experience is entirely secondary. Major gender differences have been shown as bullshit, yet people still cling to stereotyped notions of the opposite sex.
Of course, in real life, it's much less likely for people to fake it due to the social stigma, but on the Internet, where you don't actually see the physical body, it draws more suspicion. Most of my prejudice stems from the Guy In Real Life phenomenon, which I find distateful, but I recognize it's unfair to place true transgenders in the same category.
@AHR I've identified with both male and female fictional characters. What does that say about me?
Hopefully nobody would think that.
The only thing it really says about you is that you're exposed to fiction containing male characters and fiction containing female characters, and that you aren't deliberately avoiding identifying with characters of a particular gender.
...as I kind of am doing... >.>
Well now.
It actually is.