trans | May. 10th, 2003

I'm sure that everyone by now has heard of the "bailey book". How he basically lumped all TS people into two types (both with the label of male.)

[edit: sorry, want to point out that the comment was NOT from the book.]
Then this comment in someones LJ caught my attention this morning:
"FTMs write like girls and MTFs write like guys. There's simply no way around it. I think it's because of school."

Again with the putting people into nice little boxes.

Society has a problem of "Well if you aren't one or the other, what are you?" , refusal to acknowledge that people do not fit under just one label, nor wanting to be labeled. Likewise ignoring that the fact that there are other possibilities other than what they were told as fact.

When I was in school, I had a habit of trying to figure stuff out for myself and blatently ignore what the teacher was trying to pass off "this is the way it is" and was frustrated when they couldn't come up with something other than what the textbook presented. There were two teachers in the high school that you might call the "paranoid conspiracy theorists". I liked those teachers because they made you think. In college I realized that many teachers simply do not know more than what the textbook says, they were hired to simply teach that book.

So how does the way "MTF's write like Guys" and "F2M's write like Girls" come about?

Look through Transgender's posts, and you'll quickly notice some patterns in grammer, punctuation and word usage. It kills me to force myself to diliberately misspell, or use what I know is bad grammer, so as M2F, I probably am guilty of making my writing "look" too intelligent. Though it's by far imperfect. Where my writing does differ from male writing is the content. What I write about, not how I make it look. The same applies to F2M writing and how it differs from female writing. It's what it's about. If you simply go "Oh well so-and-so likes to write about hockey and how hot someone else is, so-and-so must be a guy" or "someone-or-other likes to write about how there is no romance in someone-or-others life and how someone-or-other is envious of their friends so-and-someone and ding-a-ling romance, someone-or-other must be a girl" .

I like to think that my writings sound more like a narrative in a novel. What I see, hear, feel and need. Transgender journals have a unique perspective of having been on both sides of the gender fence, or at least visiting the other side from time to time, so there should be properties of both genders visible in the journal... not just one.

What about everyone elses own writing? What makes you think you think you are reading a girl's journal or a guys journal? Be honest!