It's weird to me that as trans people we're always seeking validation of our experiences of gender to ourselves.

It's weird to me that as trans people we're always seeking validation of our experiences of gender to ourselves. This is kinda understandable, as we've all been told we can't trust our brains or our feels, but need some other "objective" standard to validate them. And there is no arguing that gender, itself, is both an internal experience and a socially observed one. Yet, many of us seem to doubt the internal experience keep seeking some objective validation.

And my own experience continues to puzzle me. While I have the certified tr*nny diagnosis (GD + PTSD (yay?)) I don't put a lot of stock into it. My internal experience is that doing things simply for myself that are coded as feminine (eg. shaving legs, removing body hair, wearing nail polish, applying makeup, etc) just makes me happy and content. Yet, I remain fully aware that these things are constructs of western femininity that are less than 200 years old. This alone should be enough to validate my sense of being trans femme; yet, the dissidence is powerful.

In examining this, I feel this is mostly due to the way psychologists and researchers have framed / understood trans feminine people and how that has trickle-down into the broader understanding of us. Up until very recently, the general consensus was that trans femmes were simply fetishists or hyper-homosexual men. One researcher, even suggested that most trans femmes transitioned in order to have a broader base of sexual partners among str8 men (just eww). As a culture, we tend to sexualize femininity itself, so it's no wonder most researchers were unable to see past their cultural conditioning and believed their was some correlation between feminine identity and sexuality. Yet, any discussion with a group of trans women would show this to be false: whereas, I have always been and remain very sexual, I know several trans women who are asexual.

This is where we get to the "trans women are untrustworthy" trope. Researchers and sexologists in the 60's-80's put enormous restrictions who could be treated for "gender identity disorder" with hormones and surgeries. Many trans women learned how to navigate this system by withholding the full truth about their experiences to get the treatment they desperately needed. Upon discovering this, major sexologists and researchers declared all trans women as untrustworthy and deceivers who would lie to cover their 'true' experiences.

We continue to see the results of all of this today, as any glance through r/trans or r/asktransgender will inevitably include a variant of "Am I trans or do I have a fetish?" Both culturally and internally, trans women are taught to distrust themselves and their impulses. We're told feminine impulses or wants are merely a sexual fetish and sexual impulses should be controlled. Yet, the truth is, just like cis women, our sexuality may intertwine with our gender, it's not defined by it.

I suppose, this is just to remind myself that most of these problems are patriarchal in nature. They tend to revolve around men setting standards and expectations for women based upon norms of gender performance.

@steff The medical stand are created by men. Consciously or unconsciously they think the "female existence" is inferior. So why would someone choose that? Their answer is: must be a fetish or kink, something sexual.

For myself I debunked this pretty early. I don't feel arousal when I'm wearing a dress, I feel relaxed and calm.