Quote Originally Posted by squark View Post
There is a biological reality that makes someone a woman or a man, and there are degrees to which each individual expresses femininity or masculinity. A man who feels especially feminine is not a woman, and if he feels that his body needs to reflect how he feels, he is at best a mimic, and does not gain the biological reality of becoming a woman. Likewise, a woman does not erase her biological reality by changing her body or taking hormones. Men do not menstuate - JK is correct in that. Women do not have penises. This is biology. This is reality. Do some women feel more masculine or manly -sure they do, and some would like their bodies to reflect that, and would like other people to call them with masculine terms. They are women, who would prefer to be seen as men and live in the world as men. But they're still women. The problem people seem to have is that they want their gender feelings and identity to be recognized as synonymous with biology, and they're not the same. Back to the original point of gender and sex being separate. If they are separate, then one cannot determine the other, correct? That means you can call yourself masculine and identify by a masculine name and be referred to as him, but your biological sex is separate from that and it doesn't change biological reality, and doesn't change your genetics. No matter how much you want it to or how you feel.
I think it goes deeper than this. I suspect it's that the brain has some innate sense of gender, and when its sense doesn't match the biological body, and thus doesn't fit right in a society that defines things this way, then a person just feels they aren't the gender that matches their biological sex, and I suspect it's a very deep feeling that comes from their nature more than from their thoughts/feelings/ideas/etc. I personally suspect that there is something biological that is determining this IOW. It's not on the same plane in a way as how within a single cis-gender sex there is a range of femininity and masculinity.

Why I think this is because it's a repeating phenomenon throughout time and culture, and my impression of gender from observation and my own experience, is the sense of one's gender goes deep. There is something innate about it.

Just as sexual orientation isn't a matter of lifestyle, this really isn't a choice either. There are only choices the individual can make about what to do with it/about it, if anything.