Help me settle a bet plz
I’ve never felt like I’m anything but what was assigned at birth. On the other hand I’m still not sure I understand what a gender is supposed to be. What is a “man?” What is a “woman?” Can any of you define those things? Because I sure can’t.
Think about the first time you heard your voice recorded. It probably felt wrong and you probably felt some sort of discomfort. There was nothing wrong with your voice. It’s how everyone else heard you all the time. But you heard it and you expected to hear yourself and you heard something that was just… off.
That experience, the experience of misaligned identity, isn’t something that can be recognized by analyzing the formants or resonance of your voice. It’s not a property of the voice. You might be able to pull apart the frequencies between a bone mic recording and a room mic recording of you saying the same thing and see what makes the resonance different. But the experience exists subjectively. You couldn’t look at a frequency and say, “that’s the one that made me anxious”
Actually I’ve never had that recording discomfort. My voice sounds different from inside than from outside just like everyone else’s, but it has never sounded ‘wrong’ to me. Though I get that’s a very common experience and understand where you’re coming from.
That doesn’t really get me any closer to understanding what a man is supposed to be.
Dammit, and that’s the first time I used that analogy too. Sorry I couldn’t be of more help
I am also comfortable being a man, but I get along better with women on average and often get perplexed at “lad” behaviour when I encounter other men.
So I put a 4. I am a man, but not masculine in the way that my environment is. Never really had a male role model either, so I guess that is part of it.
