why I play my girl as ineffectual

Okay-my wife and I play Dungeons and Dragons...in fact, my wife was wahooed, somewhat unwillingly, into being the DM.


I started out playing a lawful good dwarf fighter, but them I got way too emotionally involved with my character, so I wrote  him out of the story (he got to go back home and get married to his sweetie).  I am now playing a chaotic neutral rogue.
I have been playing her very ineffectually though...and I wonder, is that just how I think of females? do I think of women as ineffectual?
I mean, I certainly hope not.
I'm glad that my wife doesn't read this blog, because, next game, my character's going to tear someone a new asshole.  No more missy nice rogue. I'm going to play her like the cold, hard, bitch I should have been playing her as all along, ruthless, courageous, cunning, wicked, with little impulse control and a taste for danger.
My wife doesn't want me to change characters again, you see, so I'm going to make her life as the DM  more interesting.

letter to my professor

This is _________. 
Don't know if you remember me.  I'm out of school at the moment (money+mental health problems were and are kicking my butt) but planning to enroll in distance learning at _____college this spring.  (Still working full-time, of course.)


It occurred to me today that you might be interested in a personal development that's been going on with me, since you're rather into gender and sexuality research.   I'm suspecting ( but trying to give it plenty of time to be certain) that I am not entirely female, psychologically.


That is to say, I'm androgyne. Bigendered, specifically-as opposed to neuter, I feel like I'm both, really, a little more female than male, but both.  I feel like it's important that I recognize and act on this somehow.


This appears to be something that draws less animosity than transsexuality-but it's also not studied, and people aren't really aware of it.  We don't have legal status... or pronouns, really, or visibility.  Nobody's hurled abuse at us on Jerry Springer.


And where do I take a leak in public?  I mean, I'll probably stick to my biogender for practicality, but I'm lying when I do...


Anyway, I wasn't so much writing to you for support as writing to you because I figured you'd be interested in asking me questions about androgyny...and I might not know all the answers to them, but I think having the conversation would be a learning experience for both of us.


I posted a link to an online version of the Bem personality inventory on an androgyny talk board, and someone observed that it's biased to say a personality trait *has* a gender attached.   And I remember that our textbooks said androgynous people were the most likely to succeed rather than rigidly "male" or "female" people...and I totally realized that the way that was put showed unconscious gender bias. And I did not question it.


It was a real facepalm moment for me.   You put on those third-gender x-ray specs, and suddenly you see things just a bit differently.


It's not "androgyny."  It's just that people with a greater range of potential responses to situations in their social toolbox do better than those with a limited range of responses.
Androgyny is a totally different critter, as I can attest.


Anyway, hope you and the family are doing well, and hope to hear back from you soon.

gender and names on the brain

I have recently come to the tentative conclusion that while my primary gender, my physical one-female, doesn't actually entirely cut it.  I think I'm bigendered, or androgyne.  Maybe.   I'm trying not to get all freaked, and to give the feelings time to resolve-as either temporary or permanent.

So until today, I've been all excited to realize I was androgyne, or as I like to put it, a/g.  Today, it occurred to me that I would eventually want a new first name if these feelings last...and this does not turn out to be a phase.

That's sort of scary.  I can pass off a more a/g way of dressing and cutting my hair as "Oh, I just feel like dressing practically."  "Oh, it's easier to put my hair back for work this way, and all those layers were a pain to keep up after."


I guess I can pick a nature name or color name, and have it not be explicitly be male or female.


Since this blog is going to remain anonymous, I'm not going to post my ideas here.