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Originally Posted by maleficent
This is gonna sound like a lame questions... but how does a person know they are biologically the wrong sex...
I was a total tomboy growing up.. .dolls didn't interest me, playing house didn't interest me, babies weren't cute... playing war and kamikaze bike riding down a hill were fun... boy stuff was just much more fun... When I was 9 I probably wanted to be a boy, but as an adult, I would only want to be female... so what clicks in their head that biology goofed and made them the wrong gender? Is this something that they knew from childhood? How's it different from a girl who's a tomboy or a boy who didn't like to get dirty and was a little prissy - just because it's part of their personality.
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The majority, regardless of when they transition, report lifelong feelings stemming from early childhood of being the wrong physical sex. Most repress these feelings until they become overwhelming later in life, usually as an adult, or simply accept what others are telling them and that their internal feeling of being the wrong sex is wrong. This does not make it go away, though, resulting in most transsexuals transitioning as adults, often in their 20's=40's, often after having married and had children.
The difference between this and the tomboy or the little boy who is a sissy who likes to do girl things is the self-identity. As you say, when you were nine you may have wished you were a boy, but did you ever actually believe that you
were a boy? That's the difference.
Gender identity is like sexual orientation in this way. It is related to, and highly correlated with, physical sex, but they are not the same thing. I'm a proud girly girl who absolutely loves wearing very feminine clothes and high heels and getting my hair and nails done and who hates getting dirty, with no interest in sports and so forth, but I'm also a lesbian. I'm also a nerd who loves science fiction and superhero comic books. Those things don't fit in with most people's image of a girly girl.
Likewise, we assume that if a peson is physically male, that person believes himself to be male. Gender identity dysphoria (the psychological term for transsexual) only occurs in 1 out of every 10,000 males and 1 out of every 30,000 females, so this is usually a safe assumption.
apolian gave the standard empathy story most transsexuals are taught to help others understand: Imagine you wake up tomorrow in the body of a man. You've covered with thick, course body hair, you have a penis and testicles, narrow hips, no breast development, a much larger, heavier skeleton and upper body musculature, a deeper voice. Your body is flooded with testosterone, resulting in your getting angry and aggressive more easily and more often. Would you simply accept the evidence of your body, or would you seek to correct the problem?
Some people say that would be fine, rather than subject myself to the problems caused by not fitting into the proper social gender dictated by my body, I'd accept my body as my true sex.
Here's another way of thinking about it. Some might say they don't have an internal sense of being male or female. My body is female so that's how I know I'm a woman; it has nothing to do with some separate internal gender identity. So I'd ask, How do your kidneys feel right now? How about your appendix? Is your spleen feeling good? How about your trachea? It's very likely you don't feel anything from any of those organs because when they are functioning properly you don't have feel them at all. This is how gender identity works for some. If it's healthy, ie, if it matches your anatomical sex, you don't notice it
because it's healthy. But a gender identity that doesn't match, one that tells you you're female when your body is male, is like an inflamed appendix; it stands out, it feels uncomfortable, painful even, and can be deadly if it isn't fixed.