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Hannah's avatar

Julia Serano has a good differentiation between gender as a social construct and gender as artificial. Which is a huge difference - but many conflate the two. Also she proposes a "gender inclination model" which fits your ideas very well.

She poses we have some innert trair that makes us gravitate to certain genders and thus this is a phenomenon which exists in many different cultures with different gender configurations.

I firmly believe that, like you said, trans girls (as an example) are not inclined to like pink or dresses - they just have this intrinsic feeling of "I should belong to the group who typically does those things" - and thus it might be affirming and still later they might gravitate to a more tomboyish or butch presentation.

If our culture would symbolise being a woman or girl through different things, trans girls would wish for *those* things.

And we do it subconsciously. Even though I didn't *know* I was a girl and didn't dress like one, I adopted other things until the boys taunted me for walking and talking funny, couldn't understand why I related to girls differently, etc.

I wasn't able to completely mask as a guy and I always paid a huge price.

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