Hi. I'm afraid to even suggest what I am because I haven't really known for a very long time. There are four situations I'm concerned about, and Google isn't making this easy, so I thought I'd ask here. I'm getting mixed signals and I don't know which signals to trust. I do not intend any ill will with anything in this post.
1. First and foremost, I am concerned about
this article. It makes sense to me and I largely agree with it (particularly the bits about usage history), but everything else I see in this sphere gives me the impression that this is the wrong thing to do. On the other hand, I've never seen anyone take issue with Julia Serano other than TERFs and other vile types. I would like to put the principles in this article into practice with a mandatory disclaimer and link to this article, but I have no idea if even that is a huge mistake.
2. It is very clear to me that being transgender is not a choice for many people, but is it possible for it to be a choice at all, for some individual out there? What if you are actually satisfied with how you were assigned, but dissatisfied with how you are expected to be according to others, and you want to resist that expectation in a big way? I am definitely not just talking about some knee-jerk thing, but a longstanding belief in this. If this is not a point where you would be transgender, what
would you actually be? Is such a person actually lying to themselves all along, despite not feeling very pressured to and otherwise feeling comfortable?
3. With that in mind, I'm not actually sure what the difference between 'gender' and 'sex' is anymore. My understanding for many years has been that gender and sex are very different things, and that gender is a social construct; this makes perfect sense to me, and I have always agreed with it. But I don't know how to reconcile 'gender', a thing that also seems to be important enough to the body for people to get surgery and treatments over it, being a thing distinct from 'sex', a thing that's supposed to be directly related to a person's body in general. What is the real difference? Shouldn't they be synonyms at a certain point? Is the issue that sex is referring to the wrong thing altogether? But then what happens to the word gender when sex adequately describes the situation? I have had it suggested that gender specifically refers to the mind to reconcile this, but... even "gender is a social construct" is something I've gotten numerous ways about; I've been told many times that is a very off thing to say within this sphere, yet I have also seen numerous examples of it being used within this sphere. This also feeds back into my confusion over just how important gender is to the body.
4. This is probably the one that troubles me the most. Continuing from above, I have no idea what to do about the very touchy subject of sexual orientation. I have seen this go in every single possible way by every single possible group of people, and it's left me feeling scared and confused about telling anyone about my orientation or ever acting on my orientation for any reason. I feel that, in the end, my orientation is discriminatory, but that it is not wrong and not something I wish to change, if I even can. I have no idea what a non-discriminatory orientation is except to truly open yourself up to everyone... I don't know of very many people within this sphere who are willing to do that, and it clearly goes beyond the definition of 'orientation' if you can just change it like that.
I truly do not know these things, and I don't know who to turn to about it except what seems to be a pretty wonderful thread of people who seem to really care about this. Hours and hours of Googling have not decisively solved these problems for me, and it was because of these hours that I'm making this post. I feel that I need to solve these problems in order to get on with my own identity.
edit: ohhh goodness, I just realized I probably should have posted this in the main LGBT thread