Most of us were raised to believe that someone is either a man or a woman. Discovering unconscious parts of ourselves that are not in line with the simplicity of that belief can be very disconcerting.

The truth about humans is that we are complex creatures. You do not have to have dissociative identity disorder, nor be transgender or bisexual, to have both masculine and feminine aspects to your personality, or even multiple subselves. Many therapists consider this normal and some even practice a type of psychotherapy that is built around this concept.

(Please keep in mind that none of this information about different sex subselves is meant to negate some people’s lived experience that they were born with the wrong body for their gender identity. That too exists. But that is not the issue I am dealing with today.)

If you doubt that you can be normal and have multiple subselves with different priorities, remember the last time you made a New Year’s Resolution that you failed to keep.

The part of you that made the resolution may have been eager to make a positive change, yet another part (or parts) of you managed to stop you from succeeding. The reality is that we could not have an inner conflict unless there were at least two different parts of us that disagreed with each other’s priorities.

Even if you are cisgender and happily identify with the physical sexual characteristics with which you were born, you can still have subselves that seem to be different genders. These different subselves may influence who you are attracted to sexually or may be unrelated to your real-life sexual preferences.

Did you ever wonder why some people are consistently attracted to very masculine men and other people prefer men with a........

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