I was going to make a joke about my innate sense of self being not too dissimilar to beyonce, but its too 50 shades of stupid for that. These experiences literally describe the universal experience of life, yet the whole of life is about coming to terms with who you actually ARE https://twitter.com/GrRoary/status/1309599067413057536

in physical reality, not honing yourself artificially to match an image in your mind. So many times in my life I've thought I could just reject who I AM in favour of a vague mirage of who I really would feel most confident and comfortable presenting myself as to the world.

That entails me looking very different and having a social personality which just has everything mastered. That is my innate sense of self - a me with every problem I have in relating to the world and myself in reality simply ironed out.

The trajectory along which my body was developing from when I was say 11 seemed very much to be "at odds with the way in which my innate sense of identity was developing". I got acne, glasses, boobs & a period yet my beckoning sense of self was more like a hip hop video model.

Before I got to uni I thought quite literally I could become a new person and manifest the 'real me' as in the me without all my social and physical holdbacks, into reality. Guess which version of me won out when I got here in reality? The one that actually existed in real life.

So we don't have an innate inner identity, gendered or otherwise which should be respected above all else. As literally the universal experience of life will attest, growing up is a process of relinquishing unrealistic control and facing who we actually are in reality...

if only so we may evolve organically through doing so. We are not supposed to design ourselves as though a real life sims character, from a conveyor belt of options, to modify ourselves beyond recognition in the name of enacting authenticity and 'alignment'

What must be wrong with you to stand as a Doctor and encourage a worldview which entails such an unhealthy, abstracted, medicalised perception of self? "Im not the real me yet because I don't like my body"

I have had to learn, through the course of my life so far, that I cannot arrive at destination authentic self through any process of external change. My internal discomfort or at times self loathing is not an encouraging directive issued from my innate self.

Yet Harrop is telling us that if this self rejection is gendered, it is an obvious, objective and medically understandable call to authenticity.

This dislike of the self as is and image of a better inner self is not only socially constituted, but also a mirage - you can't abstract the body from the rest of self. Thats why its such a lie for Mermaids et al to squeal 'we never said you could be born in the wrong body!"