Look it is highly hypothetical BUT if I was to tomorrow suddenly feel that I was perhaps transgendered myself, and If I was to feel within myself that I was not a male but perhaps more female than man and waned to embrace that, I would HAVE to realise that my life and all it was built on would need to change.
I would appreciate that every step in life and every interaction I had and indeed many of the values and social and cultural mores that I had accepted as inherent to who I was would need revisiting.
I am not saying this would be easy or that I would just be a chick. This is a cop out. I would need to tear down this foundations and rebuild brick by brick. It would not matter if I had accepted being a transgendered female at that point. That would be a start and nothing more.
To grow and accept this as a new way of me being me, I would have to examine every fundamental aspect of me and defend it and learn what being a woman was about. I would need to take on the bad aspects with the good and defend everything.
Not easy, but then I don't think anyone but the truly ignorant would say it was.
Now if I say that Soph holds on by all appearances, female socialisation or behaves like a female, this is identifying that perhaps (as much as Soph may have started the road to self-actualisation to a masculine identity) that perhaps Soph has a ways to go.
Enough perhaps to get GA's knickers in a twist but at its core pretty lightweight in what is said.
Funnily if Soph or GA for that matter have recently (in terms of years of their life) accepted their transgendered identities, it would be ridiculous to believe that they would automatically be what they identify as. They would take sometime to become or reach self-actualisation. In the meantime they have to learn and evolve. It is not simply a matter of making a decision or feeling they identify as this gender and "Hey Presto".
I am not saying this and I don't believe I ever have or that they would even expect this.
I don't know why either would be sensitive about it either.
You surprise me. Perhaps there is more to you than the majority of you posts would indicate.
What you've said is pretty accurate but you come at it from the wrong angle. But the I am exhausted of explaining it all. The basics are being transgender doesn't "onset", the accepted theory is that it's always been there, that the transgendered person often tries to identify as their birth-assigned gender, they try to fit in, but they don't. It doesn't work. This is where transgenderedness comes from. They realise that they can not fit, do not want to fit, fit in elsewhere, or something along those lines. This can take years, some people not fully realising until much later in life, some much earlier like Kim Petras.
What you elude to, in "female socialisation" is cultural imprinting of the gender binary. People expect certain behaviours from certain people and react in a way expectant of such behaviours. Meaning "See Male: Interact as with Male." and vice versa. Every one has a certain "script" pre-loaded on how to interact with male or female. Society "decrees"* that every member fit into either Male or Female, and that behaviours match outward appearance. Society, as us autistics should be well aware of, is often flawed in magnificent ways.
*= Decrees implies some sort of law making committee, but society is merely a product of the majority's perceived* opinions, stereotypes, etc.
*= There is research to suggest that people will sacrifice their own opinions in favour of a perceived majority opinion, even if a statistical majority of people don't agree with this perceived opinion. Therein like the problems with society.
