AWKWARD ZOMBIE

I've known a lot of girls who had success with vocal training. I also hear learning to sing helps too? May be worth a shot to supplement it with that.

Now that you mention it, I can kind of sing in a female voice quietly. It gets rougher the louder I get, but it's something.

Probably something you can work up to!

Haha, yeah, hopefully!

Also I posted this is the Piss You Off thread, but I think it'd be better served here.

Why in the world would you pay attention to the braindead Redditors on Imgur at all

Seriously

Because I keep hearing about what a great, supportive community they are.

And then this shit happens.

Reddit and Imgur have their own communities, really. There is a little bit of crossover, but Imgur is definitely closer to Tumblr in terms of aggression and Youtube in terms of educated community members.

Reddit is more divided up into sub-communities, so the people suffocating with their heads up their own asses usually stick to their own subreddits because they get downvoted to hell if they spout bullshit on the default subs.

But yeah, being raised by an intensely religious family obviously doesn't just cause you to just hate yourself for a very long period of time or anything.

I agree with CN, but it is obnoxious to be treated like you want attention and that community was shitty to be like that to you. People like act as though they support trans people all the while dismissing them completely like they need to "protect" the trans community from "outsiders" by policing who's trans and who isn't.

The problem is that it isn't just other people deciding to be the sentinels of the trans community, it's often the result of infighting within the trans community itself. People disagree on what counts and what doesn't, some people think that there should be a hard line, while other people think that no one is ever truly 100% rooted in any gender. Some neighborhoods (if you will) of the greater community are awesome and supportive and basically "hey, as long as you aren't flinging shit at other people, we'll be emotionally supportive." Unfortunately, there's always at least one shitty neighborhood, and it frequently gets to be the most vocal part of the city.

As someone who spends a lot of time on Imgur... its a terrible community, if only because there are so many people that use it these days that they can't agree on anything and so constantly seem "hypocritical". I would say it isn't a "community" at all, there's just a few that circlejerk around giraffes and bananas and pretend that Imgur is a magical place with perfect people. In reality, especially when submitting a new pic, it's all down to luck whether you run into shitbags or nice folks. Don't count on Imgur for anything other than amusing pictures.

But I suppose that's off-topic. The point is, strangers can't always be counted on for support. And don't put too much stock in people's opinions when they don't even know you at all.

The trans* community can be pretty scary at times to see the amount of shitflinging going on and how wildly different definitions for trans* can be for people. People claiming that ftm trans* people are just trying to gain male privilege, that mtf trans people are sex perverts, that you have to be some level of trans to even qualify, or that gender reassignment is a requirement or you don't actually have "true" dysphoria...

When you have a community that's this diverse in their interpretation of what should or shouldn't be in the community along with a number of individuals that will fight tooth and nail to defend this nebulous community ideal, you've got problems.

And of course you also have unfunny waste of space, time and resources of course trying to get a rise out of people and even normally reasonable people can sometimes think they're being trolled by someone's comments.

As far as the whole "Shouldn't you KNOW if you're trans* at a young age?" argument... I'd really like to bring up a thought experiment I came up with a few years back about ethics and nature/nurture debate but I'm not sure if this would be completely the right thread for it or not... hmm...

I just never really thought about it when I was little. Geez, when I was eight, I didn't even know what transgender even meant. I was just worried about getting past the next level of Donkey Kong Country.

I just said to ask if they thought all gay children before the age of sexual maturity cried themselves to sleep over the thought of not getting married.

The answer is no, because often times, there really is no identity for a kid besides an extension of their parents' own. And most kids don't see any kind of sexual identity from parents, nor do they take any interest in one themselves, until 14-20 years old, depending on the individual once they start trying to cement their own identity.

Marcata ninja'd me, but the point still stands.

I think that's part of the issue too. People used to (and still kinda are) complain about the "gay epidemic" and now kinda discussing the same thing going on with trans* issues, but honestly it's probably due to the fact that the concept seems so alien considering the messages we're taught, not even just from our parents (which as Riku said, we often model ourselves after early on). My mom was pro-gay, but the community I grew up in was at best hush-hush about the subject and pushing a "you grow up, marry someone, and have kids and that's your priority", plus we definitely had the "girls like X, boys like Y" mentality shoved at us all the time even with programming (I still remember asking my cousin if it was okay to watch the Powerpuff Girls movie with her or if people would think I was weird, and she just kinda laughed about it and said she'd cover for me if anyone gave me shit).

There was just kind of a social code that you did not really question as a kid. People told you who you were and you just went with it.

I would beg to differ on the idea that the problems come from the trans* community itself..

As for the childhood thing yeah I agree. Trans* children have different priorities just like adult trans* people and cis people, straight people, non-heterosexual people, etc. Children have radically different ideas about goals in life so a child may or may not feel like they should conform to their assigned gender early on. Life is fluid and people don't develop their gender the same way and people who have notions about "how to be trans*" don't seem to understand that.