bigender?

[Yochanan]

I think I may be bigender, but I'm not sure. I mean, I have only been cross-dressing a short time, but when I am male, I find it difficult sometimes to go back to being a girl, even when there are others around. And sometimes, when I'm feeling girly, I can't imagine acting any other way. It really depends on the situation and how I feel or how I view a certain situation. I don't know. All I DO know is that being able to switch freely between male and female makes me feel really good. I'm the same person either way, but my mannerisms and thoughts are different depending on whether I'm a boy or a girl at any given time. For a while I thought I had to choose one or the other or be completely androgynous, but switching feels better. I don't want to say I'm bigender if I'm not, though... Ahh... I'm just feeling very uncertain... Sorry. >_< Any thoughts/comments are appreciated...

[Wesley_Lexi]

It sounds a lot like what I went through, and it led me to realize my bigenderism. Here's a piece of a diary entry I wrote when I was at the point you are. You'll notice the similarities.
------------------------------------------------------

I might not have mentioned it earlier, but I am not only bisexual, but I seem to have a feminine "alter ego" if you will. I use the quotation marks because it isn't as much a second personality as it is another part of my personality. I'm still me, but I get... very feminine. Not as in "I like guys" or "I'm sensitive", but more like I feel like I shouldn't be a boy. When I switch back to being my normal self, I'm confused by this, because I normally have no problems with being a male. My attitude shifts like that sometimes, and I'm even able to force it.
------------------------------------------------------

So if it were my guess, then I'd say yes. Then again, you might want to take what I say with a grain of salt. I don't know everything about bigenderism.

If you do decide that this is what you are though, I'd suggest to let your lesser-used part out to experience things it normally wouldn't. Let it grow as another person would. That's what I did with Lexi, and I see her as a seperate person now.

[-Kt-]

At the same time, being bigendered does not mean you have to have multiple personalities, many bigendered people don't.

[Wesley_Lexi]

That's true. Some have a single personality that is split into two genders that the one person moves between. Sorry I left that out.

[Yochanan]

Well I definitely DON'T have multiple personalities! I'm the same whether I present as a gal or a guy, it's just my mannerisms, clothes, and attitude that change, not my inner ME.

I have been experimenting with cross-dressing rather a lot lately, and my next step is to go into a social situation as John. I know several places I can go where I'd be accepted no matter how I present myself. I'm kind of excited to have discovered this other part of me. It's sort of like being freed for a time.

Anyway. Thanks for the replies!

[MiaAndMarq]

J-

Thats usually a good indication you're on the right track. If thinking about things in a certain way feels liberating or feels comfortable for you, you're probably heading down the right track. Take the time to learn as much about yourself as you can and pursue these different opportunities that will let you express all aspects of who you are.

We're glad to hear you're pursuing these opportunities and best of luck in finding yourself out.

Mia and Marq

[Liv]

Hiya

I have been thinking maybe this is how I would be happiest too. I also have experimented with trying to be anrdogynous or just male or thinking I might be transsexual, but I think maybe I would most enjoy just being able to switch and be quite masculine or girly as I felt like it. Being androgynous can maybe feel like you are not getting the best of either worlds and are just kinda in-between (I ofen think of myself that way and also tried to do that in my presentation at one stage and wore two ear rings and - sometimes - nail varnish and - sometimes - girls' tops or trousers or flat shoes and tried just being a bit more than usually feminine man - wasn't going too badly, but then some traumatic stuff happenned in my life and I went back to being more conventional). I know according to the academic Sandra Bem who popularised to idea of androgyny it should not have to mean you are a perfect shade of lilac/in-beween person but that you can draw on both conventionally masculine and feminine traits to be a rounded person with more options to express yourself than a really masculine or feminine one. However I think in my head if I try to think of myself as androgynous then I am thinking of myself as quite in-between and not accessing the most masculine or feminine bits of me, that do exist as well, and can be useful or fun (even though I feel like I am a bit prejudiced against letting myself be too masculine sometimes and think it's a bad thing and I am a sensitive feminine person who should not be too manly - which is just limiting really. There can be a time and palce for manly). I often think I would rather be female, or would rather have been born female, but I don't think I feel strongly about that enough to transition, with the difficulties it involves, and I don't feel 100%, or even 90% female, sometimes I feel about 85%, but sometimes only about 35%, so ... Also, I fear that if I transitioned, and had to work on making sure my voice and mannerisms never came across as too male etc I might feel too limited by that as well. I also worry how hard it would be to look really good, especially as I've lost a lot of hair and don't know how well transplants work/how much they cost, never mind also permanently removing the hair that disobligingly sprouts just about everywhere else (I have had some lasered and plan to do more, but still have to wax - ouch!! - or shave lots of bits if I want to look feminine).

As I say, my gender moods vary, but I am also a naturally good actor and am good at getting into different emotions and roles when I want to as well, so say, if I do have an opportunity to dress up girly and do the complete girl-mode thing I enjoy that and feel feminine. Sometimes also in my day to day life as a man I will feel quite feminine too at times, depending on my mood, but not so much as others. And in some circumstances I can feel quite masculine so.. um, yes, I was saying I also think bigender is not too bad a word for me, although genderfluid is quite good and flexible too, doesn't tie you down to anything!!

I was also going to say, but Kirsa beat me to it, that being bigendered does not have to mean being multiple. Some people can feel more feminine or more masculine at different times but it's still basically the same person, even if they might like to use two differnt names at times or whatever; while other people feel they are completely seperate people in their male and female aspects. On this board we have suggested before the terms "multiple bi-gender"and "singular bigender" as a possible way of distinguishing these.

I guess "singular bigender" can in some cases to much the same as what some people would call being a crossdresser, but I'm not wild on a word that is just so focussed on clothing, when it is about more than that, and I would dispute that I cross-dress as part of me feels female/feminine so if I dress feminine I am just doing what is natural and not crossing something. It makes it sound like you are deliberately being transgressive or provocative (transvestite, which is still used quite a lot in the UK, is even worse, and sounds too clinical and just has too many negative associations for me). Bigender is nice and neutral and a better description (especially where the person is dressing to express something to do with their inner feelings about their gender, not just, eg for a laugh, or entertainment or a fetish etc).

I love this board and find it is so open-minded and cutting-edge about the whole gender thing - no rules and preconceptions or judgments about anything, no closed minds. I guess you could tell that from the name though -- what is gender? not "come here and we'll tell what gender is."


PS Thinking back, I certainly started very much bigender. If I dressed up really girly I thought "I'm (being) a girl" and it felt really good. I might feel a bit depressed at first to go back to being male, but I didn't necessarily think of myself as transsexual as i could also feel like a (somewhat more feminine than average) boy and wasn't anything like 100% sure of being "a girl in a boy's body". When I was 20 I found a local cross-dressing group where I could go along and "be a girl"and thought that life could be nice like that if I could just be more open to my family about it and sort out my body hair etc. I think what then confused me was coming out to my Mum who was upset and worried it was too "schizophrenic" and also that my feminine side would "take over"and I would decide I was transsexual. To me at that stage I had hardly heard of transsexuals apart from in the odd sensationalist news story and did not think it was a realistic option for a normal person and i also thought you would only fancy men if you were transsexual (I was that naive), so I didn;t think I was that (though I was confused about myself as although I fancied girls i also had fantasies about having sex with men as a girl). But part of me became worried about what would happen if I just liked being a girl too much, and also I thought about the "schizophrenic"thing (by which she meant multiple) and started going mad with reading and writing and theorising about gender to myself and decided the solution was not to have two roles but that society just caused us to think in this binary way by making boys repress any femininity and liking for girly things, so you end up having a conventionally male day-to-day self with the girly stuff botttled up that you then express by deciding you are a ( part-time) girl sometimes. I then also became a fan of Eddie Izzard, the British actor and comedian who believes in "Total Clothing Rights" and that there is not really such a thing as cross-dressing and men should be free to dress however they want to express themselves without having to try to be women(even though in reality things are not as clear cut as this for him -- he is quite bigender, or genderfluid or something. He admits he has often thought he would like to change sex if he wasn't worried he would make an unconvincing woman, for one thing, and has said before that he probably wouldn't even bother dressing up really femme if he actually had a feminine body , as he wouldn't need to prove his femininity to people with externals. He also tends to be rather one thing or the other - you see him in heels and a short skirt and half a ton of make-up or whatever, and at other times in a butch suit with a beard acting quite macho... he has also said he sometimes has long blokey phases so directors will not pigeon-hole him. He also started, after being famous for a number of years, including for his fashions beliefs, sometimes wearing false boobs, which kind of doesn;t go with the "it's about clothing rights" thing). Since then I have had various phases in my gender identity and expression.

Anyway........................ the point of this was to say, i am not sure how useful all this self-analysis and stuff was, and I might have been happiest anaysing nothing and just being a "part-time girl", which I loved and didn't feel bad about because I was doing nothing wrong and harming nobody.............. and I think I might do that, as long as I can find places to go out to in France and people to socialise with who are cool with it and I can lose some weight and laser some more body hair....

PPS Although you are not multiple, we don't have anything against people who are here, and it sometimes seems like about half the board are more than one person. I'm not quite sure why this is - apart from that this is a really unjudgmental place to be honest about your experiences, and many multiple people have members of their group who are of a different sex to the body and hence have a similar experience to other transgendered people - but it all adds to the interest and learning factor here. Multiplicity is not necessarily a "disorder" as a lot of people would have us think.

[Liv]

One odd thing about me partly stopping just "being part-time girl" due to my Mum's remarks about multiple personalities or becoming TS, is that, I think, due to not just enjoying my femininty without analysing myself, I eventually, much later, came to a phase of seriously deciding I may be TS and looking into the options.. But I don;t think it would be right for me as, rather than feeling relieved about seriously deciding I should go down that route, I felt quite anxious and unsure and like I might be making a mistake or killing male aspects of me that were also real and not so bad - that i might just be thinking "the grass is greener".. - that things might go better as a male and I might be happier, if I just found the right relationship with the right woman and stuff like that (all of which suggests i am not TS).

I also, a couple of years after coming out to my Mum, having LOVED the chances to socialise as a girl but then not expressed my feminity at all (not just because of what my Mum said - I'm not that easily influenced - there were also things like going abroad for a year as part of my studies and then finals exams) , I started having some weird experiences that i can only explain as me having developed some sort of multiplicity, and which I theorize might have something to do with the stresses and repression I was undergoing at the time. So, yeah.. "just do it" I suppose is what I mean... (in a rather round-about way LOLOLOL)

[Yochanan]

Thanks for taking the time to share, Liv. All these replies make me feel like I'm not so alone. =)

[Wesley_Lexi]

As long as you're here, you won't be. We've got your back, just like they've had ours.

[Liv]

No problem, I was in a thoughtful mood, and it's good if me pondering on my experiences in a bit of a lengthy way, and helping myself unerstand me better, also helps you, which was kind of the point originally It is also good for me to hear about people who have similar experiences.

[rose3]

i use the name of michelle rose to help others to deal with my bi genderism
it easier to express to them the way. Im feeling I even do this to my theripist so we know where it feelings are coming from my male side or female side

[rose3]

Mitchell writes like thisMichelle writes like this

[Ryles]

Mitchell writes like thisMichelle writes like this

can mitchell write a bit smaller maybe? ^^;

[rose3]

ok mitchell writes like this
Michelle writes like this