Dear Janus:

Snowing in New Jersey: here it is no longer snowing and yesterday’s snow turned to ice. Thank you again for the information and for the answer to my question. I just came across the book Out of the Ordinary: A life of gender and spiritual transitions online (trans reads. org).

Chapter 1 is called “Birth and Origin”, Ch. 2: “The Nursery”, Ch 3: “Schooldays”, page 73 (the parenthesis and the italicized are my additions): “Now that I was growing up I had begun to suffer from the naggings of all the aunts and grown up cousins, for not becoming womanly. When I was small, being a tomboy did not matter, I was told, but now I should try and be a young lady….  Suddenly I was struck with an awful thought… He (his 18-year-old nephew at the time) thinks I’m a woman.” It was a horrible moment and I felt stunned. I had never thought of myself as such despite being technically a girl… People thought I was a woman. But I wasn’t. I was just me. How could one live like that?…”-

– there are more chapters, but I will stop here. What amazes me is how completely he felt that he was not a woman: a woman identity was completely foreign to him. He was technically female, and he knew it, but only technically. In other words, it was not that he was a woman who was dissatisfied about being a woman and wished to be a man instead (as many women are). What it was, was that outside technicalities, he was not a woman at all. In yet other words, using modern terminology: his gender identity was 100% that of a man. I have a better understanding now thanks to you, Janus, for introducing this  book to me!

anita