(15-02-2014, 04:50 AM)Missed Miss Wrote: I'm not telling them anything else!! Let `em guess!! Besides, the FBI uses FB as their main source to research people they want to spy on!!
I don't use Facebook either. I just found it interesting that lately, across the country, and elsewhere for that matter, gender awareness is becoming more and more important. Dare I say de riqueur?
I'm a little bit embarrassed to admit this, but the idea that a bio-male, like me, could consciously or subconsciously identify as female was not in my vocabulary a year ago. Yes, I knew about Renee Richards and a transwoman at my place of employment; I stumbled on 'shemales' on porn sites, but I viewed those instances as oddities so rare as not to be worth serious thought. Now I see degrees of crossgenderism all over the place, aside from within the limits of my own skin and the girls here at BN. Makes me wonder how many other aspects of this shrinking world are oblivious to me.
I look at people differently now. I see people not as being male or female, but as falling on a gender scale from manly-man to girly-girl. I wonder how many are aware of their own true gender identity, knowing the powerful capacity of the human mind to delude itself.
We, here at this forum, have for years, or just recently, discovered that our sense of gender is not black and white, this or that, but a unique blending of many flavors of what it means to be a man or a woman physically, emotionally, and intellectually.
So my question, "What's your gender?" is not meant to be a matter of labeling oneself, as it is to sort out those aspects of your self-image that are being revealed slowly or at an alarming rate. It's equivalent to asking, "Who am I?"
After more than six decades, you'd think I know who I am, but clearly that's not the case, and the discoveries of each passing day are both reassuring and unsettling for me.
Clara