Ones mental image of oneself

There is a lot to say on this, I think the psychology is complicated and I should start by saying the more I think about this, the more I feel I don't really understand myself or how my "identity" works really.

I think for years I have habituated a way of thinking of myself as a boy and man, and along with that I have learned to perform that masculinity in addition to a tendency to rationalize or find ways to think about myself as a man, even when in retrospect the way I think doesn't really match being a man.

For example, I was very interested in learning to cook, bake, sew, and iron (traditionally female coded activities), but I thought about this as something I did to redeem myself as a man to be attractive to a female partner, and as a way of being a "good man" - i.e. it was my "masculine" identity that drove those things, even when I simultaneously promoted being thought of as a "wife" when taking on those roles. The intensity with which I clung to home cooking as an identity was at odds with the gendered narrative and my rationalizations.

Growing up my family noticed I had an usual eye for fashion and creativity as a kid, but I didn't have any way to make that a safe activity, at the time that kind of thing was too gender non-conforming and would raise eyebrows, even though I started wearing female clothes that were handed down to me by women in my life. Again, rationalized in some way as masculine.

So it's important to note that the way I think of myself as "male" has often been the very same things that might make me appear feminine to others, at least behaviorally.

Transitioning medically by taking hormones resulted in suddenly being viewed as a woman by others, but that change surpassed my own perspective changing - I'm stuck behind in the pre-transition way of thinking while others see a woman and thus treat me as one.

And yes, transition does impact self-concept, at least it has for me - for example, when I spend a day passing as a woman and existing as a woman in social situations, there is a kind of self-concept that arises from those situations that is female, i.e. I start to think of myself as a woman as there are more and more situations where I am treated and seen as a woman.

At first this is a bit of a "fake it 'til you make it" situation - I try really hard to pass, and then pass or fail in various situations (or often, I just never know how I am perceived), but as the hormones changed my body and my work on voice therapy resulted in changes to my voice, I eventually started to pass more and more "effortlessly" and there was a kind of social momentum that developed where I started to pass more and more, and eventually I couldn't not pass, nobody sees me as a man and I don't think I could go back to being seen as a man anymore.

When I was more visibly trans and people weren't sure what my gender was, I would say my self-concept was fully male, but once I passed all the time, I found myself starting to be able to see myself the way others see me a little more - cracks in the masculine self-concept.

This was a big part of voice training, since that requires basically habituating a new way of speaking it also means habituating a new way of thinking - when I felt I wasn't passing, it was much harder for me to change my voice as my confidence was undercut by my self-consciousness and sense of being a fake. As I started to pass visually to people, it made it easier to hold my voice in a feminine configuration because it would be weird to sound more masculine and I felt I had permission - they are the ones gendering me as a woman, so my voice is just conforming to their expectations of me.

So I might have days where I go about and run errands and I'm 100% a woman in the world - I'm a woman because other people see me as a woman and treat me as a woman. When I get home the momentum carries me and I still see and think of myself as a woman - in the mirror I'm more likely to see a woman in a moment of momentum like this, for example. But usually when I go to bed, in my dreams my habituated male-self reasserts and all those years of living as a man and those memories take over. I wake up from dreams of myself as a man, and I wake up usually "feeling like a man" - which is not really the same as actually feeling like a man, I should clarify. I now see that a lot of the ways I think of myself as a male is not particularly consistent with the way men actually are, for example.

If there are some days I don't leave my house, don't put on makeup, don't put on a cute outfit - those are days I notice my self-concept is much more masculine, my voice is harder to keep feminine, and in general my gender "rots" back to a habituated male baseline.

I should also say, the way I think about myself is entirely separate from what I consider my gender identity, which I think is entirely unconscious / implicit, not something I have direct access to, it's more like the invisible space that shapes or informs my cognition but which I don't actually have any direct awareness of. For example, when I was 15 and I looked at the dark hairs covering my legs, I felt sick and hated the hair - I shaved it, and I did this despite feeling insecure in my masculinity and feeling like my puberty was delayed and I was afraid of being bullied for being too feminine. Despite all those feelings, I still shaved my legs, why? I don't know, I don't know why I felt that way. That's probably that unconscious drive kicking in, that's probably my gender identity finding expression.

Why did I love wearing women's clothes my entire life? Why does a skirt just feel right? I have no explanation, it just does. When I wear women's clothes I sometimes think of myself as a man - I rationalized skirt wearing as the reasonable choice for a man, after all historically men wore skirts before women (supposedly), and skirts just give more space for movement and is cooler, and it makes using the bathroom easier, and so on and so on - skirts are just rationally superior and consistent with my male gender, there is no conflict here, no gender conflict here. So when I wear a skirt, I can sometimes actually not feel gender-affirmed as a woman, because I wore skirts as a man, and I think of myself as a "man" when wearing a skirt.

(Turns out, other men don't do this so much, they aren't feeling more happy and comfortable in dresses and skirts and then generalizing this by telling themselves this is the rational choice for men everywhere.)

So I have an implicit "gender identity" that is like an engine fueling my gendered preferences, and I separately have a "gendered self-concept" (how I think of myself in a gendered way), and then separate from that I have a "social gender" that is basically the way others see and treat me in a gendered way.

So, by transitioning medically I managed to look like a woman (and by voice training, sound like a woman) and that allowed me to become a woman as a social gender, which then helped align with my subconscious gender identity (which reading between the lines, my gender identity seems female), but what is taking the longest time to change is my "gendered self-concept", which has so much history and momentum it's hard to change, like a deep habit.

So I think this will just change over time, gradually - that's my experience. As I become more aware of the way people see me, the more I can see myself that way, and the more I do that the more entrenched it becomes. Sometimes in dreams I'm a woman, I even have dreams where my gendered self concept is fluctuating based on the social situation I'm in.

Indeed! When I think about things I'm mostly thinking about properties, relationships, and feelings. I can't really visualize myself, but I can vividly imagine what it feels like to see myself in the mirror.