Is there a difference between men and women?

[Genersis]

Not enough to deny adoption rights IMO.

Sure, it's nice to poke fun at or think men being lazy, emotionally challenged and can't care for kids adequately; and that women can't shut up, love shoes and can't discipline kids; but I can't help but feel all these things are just stereotypes perpetuated as social norms.

[megumidesu]

Not enough to deny adoption rights IMO.

Sure, it's nice to poke fun at or think men being lazy, emotionally challenged and can't care for kids adequately; and that women can't shut up, love shoes and can't discipline kids; but I can't help but feel all these things are just stereotypes perpetuated as social norms.

a friend of mine (my housemate's boss. he's lovely) has been a single dad and taken care of his daughter pretty much on his own for the last five years . people tell him all the time that it's so awesome that he's doing that , but he's like "...why ? why wouldn't i ?"
but because of stereotypes , a guy doing what any reasonably responsible man would do is considered "the most amazing thing ever in the world omg"

i do love shoes , so i kinda fail at breaking that stereotype ...lol

[unkown21]

A little while ago i was getting bloodwork done, they looked at my hormone levels, and i was told i have an abnormally high estrogen level. i have always felt feminine since i can remember, and i have opted not to go on testosterone therapy, because i feel that i was meant to be this way. So to answer your question, i personally don't think being a women, or a man is really restrictive to what you have between your legs, but more of what gender a person feels. I honestly have always felt that i should have been born a girl, but as i have the wrong parts between my legs, i have to just play the cards i have been dealt.

[Nick9]

Thank you all for your thoughts

[Pix]

I believe there is at a fundamental level, but I have a hard time putting my finger on it as well as seeing what differences are more inspired by biology and which by society. And I understand that men & women who show the mental traits of the other are supposed to have an unusual hormone surge on them while in the womb which could help explain at least some of the exceptions to the rule.

That said, it's just easiest for me to reject binary gender for myself, I just transcend feminine/masculine in many ways.

But then even society seems a little confused. For example, is a chef feminine for spending so much time in the kitchen? Is Lady Sovereign masculine for how she dresses as well as cursing, belching, and spitting on stage? It depends entirely on whom you ask. Women aren't supposed to be bold, yet women have led social movements (some have even led armies of men but art still portrays them as feminine), hen pecked husbands (including in dragging philandering husbands home by the ear in public, and a guy I know said his mom did exactly that multiple times), or been spoiled, headstrong princesses who demanded to have their way. Men aren't supposed to cry but I don't recall anyone questioning the masculinity of characters like Captain Picard, Xander Harris (and sidekick to a girl, too), Ron Stoppable (another sidekick to a girl), or even Jesus.

[Bowyn Aerrow]

It boils down to left/right brain thinking.

Women are always RIGHT and men are always LEFT confused.


Actually there is a preference in which hemisphere is used more based on Gender.

Men tend toward more logic based skills, women tend toward more emotion based skills.

Its part of that Men are from Mars Women are from Venus. And all of that plays into the physical differences, chemistry, hormones.

TG folk who undergo the change have been found to switch which part of the brain they analyze and problem solve in.

Society and the way we identify genders, making gender roles also has a good deal to push this on people.

Boys don't cry, girls can cry - it leads to how much we think and deal with emotions.

Besides the obvious is really a big deal. A woman can never understand a penis - never. Men are attached to their penis. Thus a woman may know she can destroy a man simply by pointing between his legs and chuckling, she can never fully understand the why.

I assume women have similar attachments to body parts that men can't ever understand, perhaps the womb is the most powerful one, knowing you can carry life inside of you has to have an impact. Actually doing it is a thing a man can never know.

These sorts of outwardly, fundamental, obvious differences is what pushes many TG to go full op, they yearn for the whole experience of being who they feel they are inside.

So those obvious things are virtually the most important and defining.

[Pix]

I assume women have similar attachments to body parts that men can't ever understand, perhaps the womb is the most powerful one, knowing you can carry life inside of you has to have an impact. Actually doing it is a thing a man can never know.

Back when I shared with someone who studied psychology on how I often felt bored or whatever playing gun games with little boys (a little was fine, but I didn't get their obsession with it), I was told that boys wonder if they'll be brave enough to stand and face the beast or the enemy that threatens their family & tribe, which translates into war games of little boys today (such as "The Russians Are Coming" that boys loved when I was a small child), whereas girls wonder if they can stand giving birth and being a good mother (and as a result I never could get into the games as much as the boys did as it wasn't a driving question for me). Not all want to give birth (just like not all men want to prove their valor), but I have heard that many who had felt a deep connection with all the women who came before them as they gave birth, and perhaps this passage from White Oleander by Janet Fitch is another example of that:

I couldn't stop thinking about the body, what a hard fact it was. That philosopher who said we think, therefore we are, should have spent an hour in a maternity ward of Waite Memorial Hospital. He'd have had to change his whole philosophy.

The mind was so thin, barely a spiderweb, with all its fine thoughts, aspirations, and beliefs in its own importance. Watch how easily it unravels, evaporates under the first lick of pain. Gasping on the bed, Yvonne bordered on the unrecognizable, disintegrating into a ripe collection of nerves, fibers, sacs, and waters and the ancient clock in the blood. Compared to the eternal body, the individual was a smoke, a cloud. The body was the only reality. I hurt, therefore I am.

The nurse came in, looked up at th monitor, checked Yvonne's contractions, blood pressure, her movements crisp and authorative. The last shift we'd had Connie Hwang, we'd trusted her, she smiled and touched Yvonne gently with her plump hands. But this one, Melinda Meek, snapped at Yvonne for whining. "You'll be fine," she said. "You've done this before." She scared me with her efficiency, her bony fingers. I could tell she knew we were foster children, that Yvonne wouldn't keep the baby. She'd already decided we were irresponsible and deserved every bit of our suffering. I could see her as a correctional officer. Now I wished my mother was here. She would know how to get rid of Melinda Meek. Even in transition she would spit in Melinda's stingy face, threaten to strangle her in the cord of the fetal monitor.

"It hurts," Yvonne said.

"Nobody said it was a picnic," Melinda said. "You've got to breathe."

Yvonne tried, gasped and blew, she wanted everyone to like her, even this sour-faced nurse.

"Can't you just give her something?" I said.

"She'd doing fine," Melinda said crisply, her triangular eyes a veiled threat.

"Cheap-ass motherfuckers," the woman said on the other side of the white shower curtains. "Don't give the poor people no damn drugs."

"Please," Yvonne said, clutching at Melinda's white jacket. "I beg of you."

The nurse efficiently peeled back Yvonne's hand, patted it firmly onto her belly. "You're already eight centimeters. It's almost over."

Yvonne sobbed softly, rythmically, hopelessly, too tired to even cry. I rubbed her stomach.

Nobody ever talked about what a struggle this all was. I could see why women die in childbirth. They didn't catch some kind of microbe, or even hemorrhage. They just gave up. They stopped caring whether or not the baby came. They knew if they didn't die, they'd be going through it again the next year, and the next. I could understand how a woman might just stop trying, like a tired swimmer, let her head go under, the water fill her lungs. I slowly massaged Yvonne's neck, her shoulders, I wouldn't let her go under. She sucked ice through threadbare white terry. If my mother were here, she'd have made Melinda Meek cough up the drugs, sure enough.

"Mamacita, ay," Yvonne wailed.

I didn't know why she would call for her mother. She hated her mother. She hadn't seen her in six years, since the day she locked Yvonne and her brothers and sisters in their apartment in Burbank to go out and party, and never came back. Yvonne said she let her boyfriends run a train on her when she was eleven. I didn't even know what that meant. Gang bang, she said. And still she called out, Mama.

It wasn't just Yvonne. All down the ward, they called for their mothers. Mommy, ma, mom, mama. Even with husbands at their sides, they called out for mama. Nine hours ago, when we came in, a woman with a voice like a lye bath alternately screamed at her husband and called for her mother. A grown woman sobbing like a child. Mommy....I was embarrassed for her. Now I knew better.

I held on to Yvonne's hands, and I imagined my mother, seventeen years ago, giving birth to me. Did she call for her mother? I imagined her screaming at my father, calling him worthless, a liar, useless, until he went out for a beer, leaving her alone with the landlady on a cold November morning. She had me at home, she'd never liked doctors. I could imagine how her screams and curses must have pierced the quiet of the walk street in Venice Beach, startling a kid going by on a skateboard, while the landlady smoked hash and rifled her purse. But did she call out, Mami, help me?

I thought of her mother, the one picture I had, the little I knew. Karin Thorvald, who may or may not have been a distant relation of King Olaf of Norway, classical actress and drunk, who could recite Shakespear by heard while feeding the chickens and who drowned in the cow pond when my mother was thirteen. I couldn't imagine her calling out for anyone.

But then I realized, they didn't mean their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn't mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood, women who let their boyfriends run a train on them. Bingers and purgers, women smiling into mirrors, women in girdles, women on barstools. Not those women watching TV while they made dinner, women who dyed their hair blond behind closed doors trying to look twenty-three. They didn't mean the mothers washing dishes wishing they'd never married, the ones in the ER, saying they fell down the stairs, not the ones in prison saying loneliness is the human condition, get used to it.

They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide-hipped mother, awesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mothers big enough, wide enough, for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of, mothers who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.

Yvonne was sitting up, holding her breath, eyes bulging out. It was the thing she should not do.

"Breathe," I said in her ear. "Please, Yvonne, try."

She tried to breathe, a couple of shallow inhalations, but it hurt too much. She flopped back down on the narrow bed, too tired to go on. All she could do was grip my hand and cry. And I thought of the way the baby was linked to her, as she was linked to her mother, and her mother, and all the way back, inside and inside, knit into a chain of disaster that brought her to this bed, this day. And not only her. I wondered what my own inheritance was going to be.

"I wish I was dead," Yvonne said into the pillowcase with the flowers I'd brought from home.