Difference between revisions of "User:GirlInside"

Revision as of 00:00, 12 June 2011

GirlInside joined AVEN in October 2007. She was told about it by a friend, who in turn heard about it from another friend. (For convenience, GirlInside will be addressed using feminine pronouns; as her username implies, she considers herself a woman in a man's body.) She has no interest in sex as a man; because she would be open to sex in the female role, she thought of herself as a Grey-A for a long time; she has sworn off romantic relationships and realized that she is Aromantic. What she is looking for is, as she puts it, "someone I can be like sisters with--not that I expect it to actually happen." She has decided against raising children as well, for a variety of reasons. Instead, she has adopted five guinea pigs who satisfy her maternal desires.

GirlInside's beliefs about life are unusual, even among AVEN members. She is somewhat Antisexual; she believes that sex unnecessarily complicates the lives of sexuals (and thus complicates the lives of asexuals as well) and identifies with many of the listed reasons behind antisexualism. In her own words, "I wish sex didn't exist and humans just grew out of stone like dwarves." (She is referring to the dwarves of the Chronicles of Narnia series.) She tends to think of female culture as "just the way things are, the way everyone should be" and feels that men are too foreign, "like being in a country where the people have really strange customs and hate Americans." By her own admission, she thinks of women in the same light as people of her own race and culture. For this reason, she often finds herself in opposition to many feminists; she thinks of female culture as a legitimate culture worth preserving rather than a handicap to overcome. In general, she is very socially conservative.

GirlInside is best known for her website: Boy On The Outside, Girl On The Inside, a very informative site about transgender topics with a special emphasis on the topic of being transgendered and not changing one's body. She created it after searching for transgender information and finding almost nothing about the many transgendered people who choose not to "transition" (change their bodies through hormones and surgery). For many reasons, GirlInside has chosen to keep her male body and go through life presenting as male. She takes steps to make sure that no one can identify who she is in real life. Her "photograph" is a feminized version of her actual appearance, made to resemble the characters of The Simpsons (obtained from the ever-popular simpsonizeme.com). She never uses a first name, but her profile, in the field for the first name, simply says, "Call me Sarah." She also does not reveal which U.S. state she lives in, but simply says, "You can think of me as living in whatever state the Simpsons live in," referring to the unidentified location of the fictional town of Springfield.

On her site, you can see "an explanation of being transgendered in plain English (the FAQ), a list of famous transgendered people (which includes royalty and even a pope!), a warning against changing one's body, a firsthand account of what it's like to grow up as a girl in a boy's body, a few tips on how to feel a little better, a description of a culture that would have raised me as a girl, a growing collection of articles from other sites, and, of course, some links."

The site also showcases GirlInside's imaginary country, the Kingdom of Daruny, where a person can choose to be either male or female simply by presenting as the gender of their choice. It was intended as a thought experiment and became a full "geofiction" of its own.

In 2010, GirlInside became a practicing Catholic. She was baptized as a child, but she and her mother were out of the church for many years until their return. She is currently learning all about the Catholic faith and is in the process of adding a page to her site for transgender Catholics. (Contrary to popular belief, the Catholic Church does not see transgender people as any more inherently sinful than anyone else; while sex reassignment surgery is a sin because it is mutilation, people with transgender feelings just have a difficult cross to bear and need to be celibate, just like people with homosexual feelings. Some Catholics believe that it is a mental illness that needs to be cured, but this is not official teaching.) After noticing that most sites for transgender Christians cater to Protestants by focusing on the Bible (and fairly liberal interpretations at that), she added this section to her site.

GirlInside's blog

In 2011, GirlInside officially declared on her blog that she is "moving on" from her site to "other things." In other words, her transgender internet identity is no longer in use, except to keep the site up for historical purposes and to correspond with anyone who e-mails her about it. She will no longer be posting on AVEN.