As a child, I was under a lot of pressure to act like an acceptable man, and like an acceptable woman, by different people in different times and different places. They didn't know that's what they were pressuring me to do, they just knew that children aren't real people and need to be rigorously trained to be exactly like their parents and families in every respect, even the contradictory ones, lest they grow up wrong.

I tried to do all of it, but in the end, I decided to follow the rules that were about how to not hurt people and how to be pleasant and how to be easy to deal with, and that meant I followed almost all of the "how to be an acceptable woman" rules except the parts where I would ask for help if I needed it, and almost none of the "how to be an acceptable man" rules except the parts where I wasn't allowed to have problems.

I cannot separate cause from effect. What caused my gender? If I had understood my gender differently as a child, would I have chosen different resolutions to these contradictory rules, even when presented by the same people in the same way?

I was never taught how to be an acceptable child, only that children are a temporary nuisance who should be as much like acceptable adults as practical, as quickly as possible, but must never mistake themselves as real people, like adults were.

A lot of my co-dependent behavior has a root in thoughts around "My job is to make things easier for people", a classification that largely excludes me. I'm aware of at least some amount or the harm it has done to me, but habits are difficult to change. Still working on it.