Edit: This article was a very imperfect attempt to try to explain things that seemed to me so straightforward, because they’re so viscerally familiar to me, until I tried to say it, and it became so elusive. I think I know what to say until I begin to say it, and I lost track of where I was going with the first two articles (which may still be relevant, even if they were only a start). But I leave this here for now since there’s a lot I may want to come back to and explain more to the point once I have some more distance from the topic. I’m long, long past ever wishing to be female, but the deeper reasons I got trapped in that wish in the first place continue to surface. For the most part I’m long past it, but not quite enough to be in a place to explain it. I’m lucky to have a good therapist (one has to be careful seeking a therapist for this). As it turns out, it isn’t that I wanted to be female so much as to escape being an [adult] male, and that still governs many of my mental habits. So this might not be a very practical piece, but if anyone has some leisure to grapple with what this convoluted thing we call gender dysphoria is about, maybe there will be something insightful here.
I’ve often said trying to describe feelings around gender is like an eyeball trying to look at itself. It resist explicit descriptions, and the fear of being misunderstood seems to always hijack those attempts. Maybe it’s a weird choice to discuss anger, given it’s one of the newer aspects for me to consider, but at least that keeps me from expecting perfection. All the parts of this topic are so interconnected it’s been much more arduous trying to shorten this piece than to elaborate, and I would still always feel I was leaving important things out.1 So feel free to ask for clarification on anything in the comments.
Some people just need a swift separation from this topic when they detransition; so I don’t want to encourage people to get all analytical (this article, while elaborate, does not come from a lot of analysis, just lengthy descriptions of experience). On the one hand, detaching from the wish to be female was an arduous, drawn-own process for me; on the other hand, I accepted the bare fact I would never be a woman in any meaningful sense unusually abruptly. I left the idea of transitioning completely behind; I did virtually no theorizing about what “gender dysphoria” is or isn’t; but the emotional wounds still caught back up with me years later, and I had to be willing to get really uncomfortable, to confront my self-disgust over traits which, on their own, are perfectly normal.
So I preface all this with a bit of caution about getting too wrapped up in this topic, but also about trying to shrug it off. Some really stressful work can be necessary, but the overall thrust of it should always be relieve ourselves of the mental trappings of gender—which is the last thing one really ought to have to think about—so we can take our sex as a given, and just live, which is the real goal.
Okay, the actual article now:
Today I’ll talk about one aspect of how my former transgender identity (dysphoria-inducing as it was) served to protect me from self-disgust:
Anger. My relationship to my anger. My difficulty recognizing my anger.
Gender Dysphoria and Self-Disgust
As I loosen up from the mental habits which had made me vulnerable to GD and which sustained it—as my therapist recently put it: associating everything bad with being a man—I’m no longer covering up so much of my self-disgust;
Which means that, although I’m not any more disgusted with being a man, and become more and more pleased with it over time, I am, however, more aware of whatever habitual self-disgust still lingers
—Not more self-disgusted, but more aware of the same old self-disgust that was already long there, when I was also more in the habit of constantly distracting myself from it—
Which can easily be mistaken for an increase of self-disgust, when it is in fact the very beginning and the means of its decrease.
This makes dealing with gender dysphoria, or the remnants of it, quite a minefield, because the process of healing could scare me into retreating, into thinking I'm making the problem worse.2
But that's just why we often have to go very gradually or to give ourselves grace for making mistakes along the way.
That is, by ever so gradually letting down the old protections and letting myself take in the pain of self-disgust, I finally give myself the opportunity to see it as the distortion of me that it is, and so see myself anew,
To see myself without the aid of superimposing something from outside myself (female) onto myself—and maybe then even to notice that I, as male, have my own kind of beauty.
Anger
One of the newest aspects which has taken longest to recognize is my anger, to become aware of my anger, a major cause of self-disgust.
Without superimposing a female persona onto myself, I am less protected, so to speak, from recognizing my anger, since I do not like seeing myself as an angry person. This is too simplistic a way to put it, but I think I’ll refine what I mean as I go on.
I used to not recognize my anger almost at all, because anger seemed like bad character. Angry people get angry; who wants a person like that?
No, I was just extremely sensitive and anxious and saddened by cruelty and insensitivity, not so much angry, so I thought, nothing aggressive. Aggression is dangerously close to abuse.3
In high school I was seen as either emotionless and rational or just really calm. Some of my friends would comment that anger is just not an emotion I feel. They actually eventually got me angry because they kept going, “GET ANGRYYYYY!!!”
Growing up, my dad was the sort of guy who would swear and curse when he got frustrated, whether while working with tools, with a glitchy computer, or in traffic, etc.
He worked a lot, he was a hard worker, a lot to respect there about him, but he did not do well handling daily inconveniences and distractions from his work. He was easily irritated and very impulsive in venting his anger.
When I was very little and I was the inconvenience or distraction, this sometimes terrified me. So, unsurprisingly, I have some bad associations with that.
But I think what some don’t expect is that the first association that comes to mind about expressing anger, for me, is not as much ‘cruelty’ or ‘danger’ (true as those can be), but ugliness.
Ugliness
Indeed, cruelty and danger are ugly - a mental, spiritual ugliness, ugliness in the soul. “From the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks.” And can there be anything uglier than sexual violence, objectifying a person of irreducible value so completely?
So ugliness seems the better term for mental associations, both in terms of breadth and depth: it applies to all kinds of things (cruelty, danger, sickness, waste, disorder, death…), and relates to the basic emotion: disgust.
Personally, I think the sound of the word filth says it best, but I feel a bit ugly making my reader read “filth”. Oh gosh, actually, the only grosser word than that is…fetid. *shudders* Sorry for making you read that word!
If something was only “bad” according to pure dispassionate judgment—like not optimal, incorrect, excessive, defective—it wouldn't have the effect to make us look away.
But ugliness makes us look away. Self-disgust makes me look away from myself. What I look away from, I cover. I cover ugliness with beauty.
Or, well, at least I blunt it.
Beauty
To quickly clarify what sort of beauty I’m focused on, it’s that beauty which is neither so elevated as the moral beauty of virtue, nor so basic a still-image of someone’s face or body—
But the very personable, humanizing beauty of our body language, which either comes through naturally and timely and beautiful, or unnaturally and untimely and ugly—and whether the emotions expressed are dramatic or casual, positive or negative.
A person with an ugly face or body can still be beautiful with their body if their bodily expressions come through naturally and fittingly.
I’m not denying the goodness of physical beauty, but it’s better character to be more attuned to this other kind of beauty—to have the ability to see something of the invisible character of the person through the visible body. “The body expresses the person,” we Catholics often say.
To be sure, it isn’t only happy expressions that are beautiful; sadness and anger can be beautiful if expressed genuinely and fittingly—which I’ll come back to.
I think this kind of beauty can be closely related to the beauty of virtue or moral goodness, but we don’t need to bring morality into this here (nor am I saying morality is irrelevant here).4
And even if we are more attentive to this kind of beauty in people than to the more superficial appearances, people still can deceive by controlling their body language, and we still very much can have distorted perceptions of it, as I will discuss soon.
Venting Anger under a Superimposed Female Image
So, back to swearing and cursing. This is a pretty minor vice, that's why I'm using it.
It's an impulsive thing, swearing. Yes, we can do something about the habit, but it's not exactly something we decide to do each time we do it.
So, as I grow up, I become an adult male, like my dad who had a swearing habit; I find life frustrating, I get angry; what's my natural impulse? To swear and curse with the deep bass of a voice of my male body, of course.
Now, actually, I never developed the habit of swearing—out loud, that is, since it seemed like an ugly personality trait. But I look back on my life now, and I realize, actually wait, I did swear and curse—inside. Since writing this I’ve been noticing I still do pretty often actually, whenever I get frustrated with something.
Thoughts might not be as vivid as an audible voice, but this inner “swearing” was vivid and lively still. I can clearly observe all the same impulses happening inside, just as impulsive as if I swore out loud.
We can feel the difference between “just a thought” and a thought propelled by emotions which, even though there’s no sound, ring in our minds with a certain quality we didn’t choose.
So, when I would “swear inside”, I would feel the unmistakable quality of anger in the tone of that inner “voice”. This is just a part of normal experience.
Now, if me swearing out loud with my clearly male voice would be a natural way to blow off that steam, then when I swore inside, you’d think I would hear it in a voice like my physical voice, since it’s largely involuntary. That would seem natural, right?
But I notice: When I swear inside, even today, my longstanding habit is to turn that swearing “voice” into a shrill woman—or, to be honest, more often like a screeching girl.
“FaaaaAAAAAACKING SHITFUCKS!!!! DAMMAAAAT! RRRGHHH!!!”
Sometimes it’ll even just be that kind of scream—that shriek—that only a girl can do.
Again, it’s the spontaneity of the thoughts, propelled by emotion, that gives the thoughts such a vivid quality, as if there was a “sound” to it. It’s unmistakable, and I still tend to do it. It’s been this way long, long before I actually ever took note of it.
That “inner swearing” doesn't sound at all like my voice, not even close. It’s not always a high-pitched screech; there's exasperated growls and sighs and various ways to blow off steam. But I must say, there can be a lot of screeching, and somehow it seems so normal to me.
Is it stereotypical? Well, it’s unmistakably a voice no adult man could imitate.
Certain distinctly feminine qualities from females naturally stand out to me as an obvious alternative to my actual male qualities. So finding that the most distinctive and familiar examples of femininity come from females need not have anything to do with assuming it describes all females.5 Part of the deal of this coping mechanism, after all, I think, is that it should be realistic, based on what I’ve seen from actual females; otherwise it wouldn’t be that effective for coping.
But Anger Is Just An Example
On its own this isn’t really a big deal. The point of this article isn’t, “Hey guys when I want to swear I screech like a girl in my head instead. Weird huh?”
But it’s a part of the question: “Why did this habit and,” to the point, “why did habits like this become such necessary coping mechanisms for me?”
Anger just happens to be a very easy-to-introduce example of what have been usually subtler ways of replacing a self-image corresponding to my own body with a self-image that is distinctly female—
Which are supplied from without, supplied from female voices I’ve heard, or from any number of mannerisms that seemed common to women—
A kind of inner “expression” which sometimes, like in the case of a girlish shriek, quite literally, physically can’t be expressed outside by my male body.
Being bottled up as a default state makes it very counterintuitive how to get in touch with what kind of body language would feel genuine to me.
The things which feel on the surface so genuine and sincere can’t be expressed; not for moral reasons (though there's sometimes that), not even for aesthetic reason (though there's sometimes that), but just literally, physically…it can’t be done! At least not in a way that actually turns out fulfilling once it comes out through my body.
Anyway, I have no idea what me screaming would actually sound like, and I feel no inclination to ever scream or yell.
Someone a few months ago said to me, “You need a good scream,” but I don’t know how, so I wouldn’t know how to make this inner “voice” resemble my own voice.
I would have to supply some other man’s voice, and this would actually take conscious effort, whereas the girlish voice comes “naturally”.6 Weird dilemma, huh? The question of what's “natural” becomes counterintuitive.
So, the female voice makes my anger seem somehow more acceptable to me, more justified—but still, bottled up, since it can’t be expressed outside and retain that quality.
And how uncanny it would be to try and contort my voice to do it! Again, what I somehow expected was natural proved unnatural to me. (You'll notice this pattern all throughout what I'm writing.)
But while big anger and aggression are more associated with cruelty, the more day-to-day ugliness of a frustrated male is more like: pathetic, entitled, what the fuck do you have to be so angry about?
Thinking of myself expressing anger, I just assume I’d be SO ANNOYING. Who wants to hear a MAN complaining about his “problems”? If I wasn’t able to see through that—if I wasn’t able to become aware of the self-disgust in order to see that this is just the self-disgust talking—I would succumb to it by…not posting this article;
Before I even had the chance to see myself as possibly acting like a whiny, entitled man, I’d just think, “Oh, I’m not some annoying entitled man who thinks my problems actually matter when there are so many other people with worse problems than me. I’m not even gay or all that feminine. I’m not gonna be like some MRA or something.”
And so, I would simply suppress the desire to complain. Until, of course, inexplicable depression appears and now I have something noticeable to complain about. And, huh, now that I think about it, maybe I am a quite feminine guy after all.
I think when in town: "How irrational my fears
Of bodily behavior!"
Then embarrassment appears,
The stiff moves the thought of looking out of grace stir!
I think I at least embrace what is me
By artistic expression;
But O! when other eyes see
Come such misplacement of nerves I must question.7
Something similar I’ve brought up in the past with friends and therapist: I usually don’t like hearing my voice when I begin to speak confidently, when I speak like I know what I’m talking about, because I hear my voice as arrogant, like I must sound like a know-it-all. Annoying, show-off, bad character, ugly. But whenever I’ve told my friends this, they tell me that I (at least) come across as very not-arrogant.8
And I'm sure, of course, that many people have deep negative associations about shrill female voices like what rings in my thoughts. That to me is very unpleasant too, don’t get me wrong, but with less moral connotation, not so unforgivable to my aesthetic sense.
The Aesthetic Weight of Gender Dysphoric Perceptions
I think the aesthetic angle of GD is important to bring to the table. We might make effort to dismiss it as irrelevant or “irrational”, so that we can overcome the dysphoric feelings by replacing them with cold-hard reason, hoping our emotions will follow suit.
But our aesthetic sense—difficult as it is to describe to others—alerts us to so much in us which reason on its own would just ignore.
I think when speaking of aesthetic ugliness, we might speak of it as: visceral. You’re not gonna argue against the visceral.
Feeling ugly at such a visceral level makes it very hard to shake the feeling one has an ugly personality which pervades every bodily expression.
But you’ve got to respect, so to speak, what’s visceral, because even if you have distorted interpretations about it in your mind, there's nothing illusory at all about the feeling itself.9
That is, it's telling you something true, although you may not know what; all you know is the feeling is there.
And because you fear that if you really listen to it, it will tell you, “You are a bad, ugly, unlikable thing,” you flee the feeling somehow whenever it arises. You may be burdened by the feeling continually, and so you are continually fleeing it, never quite feeling it, never quite numb to it, caught in between.
Another way to put it: the problems of gender dysphoria are not so much illogical, but pre-logical—that is, prior to, outside of the reach of logic. Reason cannot possibly account for every reality in life—prove me wrong!
Gendered language is very helpful for expressing these things—the only vocabulary we have which can approximate it, if you ask me—but the tendency in responding to the trans movement has been to mock all use of such language as regressive stereotyping. I think this is a great mistake.
If someone truly believes they can change their sex, by all means, correct them with reason. If someone truly believes that being a particularly feminine male makes him a woman, or vice versa, by all means, correct them with reason.
But you can be fully aware that a person can never change their sex; you can be the most logical person, and still be no more able to cope with the powerful wish to escape your sex—
Unless your reason leads you to realize that your emotions must be attended to in some way on their own terms.
From there I might get a little access into the framing of my perception. From there it can become manifest in a visceral way that “This doesn’t make sense.
This is not the only way to interpret my appearance; in fact, this is a really unnecessary, idiosyncratic way of interpreting it. No one else would look at me this way. Why would I look at myself this way?”
I’ve had moments like this that I could not “unsee” from then on, but nor was I immediately “cured”. These self-disgusted perceptions were built up over a long time and won’t be undone in a day; I still habitually default to seeing myself the same old way, but I now know (as a felt knowing) that it isn’t the only way. It’s an ongoing practice of replacing the old habit beginning with these little seeds.
Reason very much helps to direct how I go about these processes and to judge whether what I’m doing is really effective, but I need at times first to set aside the intellectualizing in order to just feel the feelings in my body.
There is, of course, such thing as too much engagement with your wounds, if it becomes too dysregulating or causes you to become numb. If in doubt, best to go slow and steady, little by little.10
And just in case it isn’t clear, I am not talking about giving full vent to our emotions around other people, especially not against other people.
(I’m not trying to claim mental health expertise, by the way; this is simply the way I understand my own engagement with gender dysphoria. It really wouldn’t be possible for me to simply let the “anger and gender dysphoria” story speak for itself without explaining something of how I’ve engaged with it, since that is part of the story.)
It’s understandable, after discovering that our trans identities are distortions of reality, to distrust our feelings in a very sweeping way. But we can get familiar with our feelings without interpreting them or making decisions about them.
So giving full attention to our emotions need not mean instant gratification, selfishness, making excuses for acting contrary to reason or for lashing out at people (speaking of anger). Suspicion of emotions can itself be quite irrational, but there are certainly good reasons to be careful.
So I notice sometimes a tendency of some to take on a certain rationalist asceticism, where one powers through the fantasy grounded in the hard truth. And I don't discourage that as a part of the process,
But I do not think this can possibly be enough (at least for those of us whose GD persists even after learning how useless it is to transition),
Since, again, we may see a lot of outlandish views common in online trans communities, but it is entirely possible—and undoubtedly happens—for a person to logically accept the immutability of their biological sex, and to believe as a simple matter of fact that men can be feminine and females can be masculine, and still believe that transitioning is the most practical way for them to live authentically.
For that, I tend to think we cannot always reason our way through it, nor that the emotional drive behind the fantasy will simply go away by ignoring it, but at least to bring into the mix a better attention to our unmet needs and desires.
Again, with the ascetic approach, there comes an almost infallible link between transgenderism and selfishness, which overemphasized I fear could discourage them from attending to unmet needs—since, why should they do that if they’re already so selfish? There’s a certain amount of shaming implied: You don’t want to sound like one of those irrational (maybe even fetishistic) trans people. But these are not the full reasons not to transition; the real reason people shouldn't transition is that it in truth is bad for that person.
I think, at least for me, the aesthetic angle is helpful to consider, because, while it might sound all very silly to describe, if we consider how much meaning we attach to the aesthetics of body language, I don’t think I was particularly engaged in extreme vanity of my simple physical appearance when I was transitioning, but I felt that my body language was thoroughly ugly in that it seemed my body was somehow unfit to really express my character. I was aware I had a quite attractive male body, but it seemed to me that an attractive man can only make a very ugly woman.
If indeed people are inclined to trans identities because of selfishness (which I don’t say), I think the solution is not for them to heap more shame upon themselves by thinking themselves selfish for being so desperate to feel okay on a basic level, but to realize that they are not even fulfilling their selfish desires.
So, however destructive our choices in life have been, and we grasp that, yes, we can withhold judgment for a time to simply observe ourselves.
Our emotions, on their own, at the very least “just are”,
And when we don’t even grasp what they are, we cannot reason about them.
Whatever sound reason we already have, we need to hold onto to keep us grounded, but if we attend only to reason, we’ll ignore how our very process of reasoning is colored by distorted assumptions about those emotions.
These can be dramatic distortions which we take for granted in the most casual way, day by day, simply because we never bothered to notice them.
Getting familiar with, observing, looking at, sitting with, noticing the aesthetic meaning these hold for us can tell us a lot about our posture toward ourselves, others, and the world.
The whole thing about transgenderism has been alienation with myself, others, and the world (my own body included as part of “the world”). We need to see our emotions to get familiar with them, that is, not be alienated, but be at home with them.
And notice these feelings are not just mental experiences; you feel them in your body and your body holds a lot of memory.
(Here’s a side-note about meditation.)11
So yeah: I didn't want to be a woman as much as to not be a man.
So the whole superimposing of a female voice was to cover over what sort of inner voice I might have more naturally supplied from my audible voice.12
The aesthetic of the female voice made my anger at least somewhat more acceptable to me; it removed the moral connotation, the deeper part ultimately which affects my self-image.
Certainly one’s self-image can be marred in other ways: weaknesses can make one feel inadequate or useless or unwanted; being objectified can make one feel “useful” in all the wrong ways, or “wanted” while really being unwanted for anything that’s really you.
But feeling unjustly powerful, when that isn’t true, affects one’s self-image in a way more like this:
I have advantages, but I deserve to lose them. My happiness is an unhappy thing, because it comes at the cost of others’ happiness. If I’m happy, I should be ashamed of that. My life is better than others’, because as a person I am worse than others. I have nothing to complain about; if anything others should complain about me. And so on.
I’m just grasping a bit for some words for the moral connotations that, for me, come with disgust over my distinctly masculine features. (Why would I connect these things?)
I have a deep voice. I’m tall. My presence could make women and children afraid who are by default good, since their very presence can’t instill this kind of fear. Hence, they are good until proven bad; I am bad until proven good.
These are, of course, stupidly simplistic depictions, but they are, I think, something of the basic alligator-brain perceptions going on below the conscious surface.
The fear of being perceived as a threat by the most innocent, just by our presence, is a very, very deep fear for many dysphoric men like myself.13
We can come to strictly regulate how we move, where we stand, where we look, how we talk. Am I being too friendly? Is that creepy? Am I being too unfriendly now? Is that creepy? Maybe I’d best just stay away from women and children, but then…what kind of a thing does that make me?14
These kind of paranoid thoughts didn’t come from analytically trying to figure out the social rules. Rather, before it even occurred to me that I was doing it, I was already doing it, as if it was a genuine instinct.
In one sense it was my way of relieving myself of the bewildering burden of figuring out the social rules, by just playing it safe and erring on the side of just not doing anything that I could maybe kinda sorta see how someone might take that as threatening.
How it felt was like, if someone did see me that way, I just don't know what I'd do! Maybe I'd hide away and not socialize for a long time. I didn’t consciously assume anyone thought these things about me; I just didn’t want to find out what would happen if I loosened up. I was playing it safe.15
But back to anger and the mental swearing and cursing. These kinds of protective covers can apply to all sorts of areas of life colored by gender dysphoria, all sorts of ways superimposing images of the other sex onto myself could make certain feelings feel more acceptable. Anger is just one example.
While anger is a newer emotion for me to work on, the name of the deepest kind of self-disgust for me I can identify is: creepy. And the self-image cover for that: cuteness. I’ve brought that up in therapy quite a lot the last few years but that would take time to work up to writing about it; another area I both have made a lot of progress in and have a lot left to go.
Some of My History with Anger
But there’s a happy end to this. Kinda anyway.
Anger is definitely a negative emotion—perhaps the most basic response to pain—but, rationally and morally speaking, of course, on its own, it’s neither good nor bad to be angry; it’s morally neutral until we know: What is the person angry about?
There can be just and unjust anger.
So what's helped me reframe this habit of feeling unjust about my anger in general?
I’ll just mention this one thing about how meditation is helpful for me in taking in difficult, bottled-up, unprocessed emotions. For me, a fruitful meditation begins when painful emotions tempt me to flee the meditation, but then, being persuaded to stay by remembering this:
Nothing I’m doing is causing the anxiety right now, so, neither would stopping anything I’m doing stop the anxiety. I’m not becoming anxious;
Rather, I’m becoming aware of how anxious I already was and have long been. These are the exact same anxieties I’ve been carrying around for days, months, years, maybe since childhood, who knows;
Finally, an opportunity to get a look at what’s crippling me.
As I said, I used to think I never got angry.
If I look back to when I was younger, the times I couldn’t help but notice my anger were probably when watching war movies or hearing about atrocities in the world and in history, maybe some occasional dreams too.
I didn't like war movies growing up, but my dad would show show me them sometimes. I think he wanted to drive home the harsh realities of life, both 1. to teach me gratitude for being among the most fortunate people in history to live in such affluent security, even if relative to my surrounding world I just seem like a pretty average middle class American; and 2. to show that we still live in the same world that produced these wars, that the world is a very harsh place with no guarantees and I have to be prepared at least for some fraction of the tragedy I see in these films.
This played a huge part in my formation. And I’m grateful for how I’ve benefited from it in ways, but I think 1. he introduced such things to me at too young an age, and 2. he seemed unable to shut off the need to teach this lesson, hammering the point again and again as if he had not already taught it.16
When I would see atrocities depicted, I just couldn't fathom it; I'd remember that these things do happen in the world, and I'd almost involuntarily begin having fantasies of torturing whatever people in the world have done such evil. I wanted them to suffer in the most painful, drawn-out ways possible; I needed them to regret it.
It still felt wrong and scary and ugly and I didn't want to identify with it, but when I think about it, it adds up:
It was in a sense an acceptable way for me to be conscious of the level of anger I already had in me.
And the most recent example, I think last year, of a super violent dream happened to be against a group of Nazis. Well aren’t I righteous. All it seems to tell me is I needed some relatively unobjectionable object for my wrath. Evil men.
So, when I’m not angry at war criminals, what am I to do? Where is my anger to go?
What if I’m just angry at my mom or dad, or my friend or my teacher, or some inconvenience—you know, regular stuff? There’s no justification for that much anger; but the impulsive, raging swearing still can happen inside.
So, I make it a female voice, not pleasant, but not the risk of an abusive man. Not the fear that alllll that anger will spill out on people who don’t deserve it. I don’t trust myself.
I often mention to my therapist and close friends, I feel all this bottled up emotion, and I feel an intense desire to express all kinds of emotions, like joyful or artistic feelings, but I don’t trust myself not to make a fool of myself or become overbearing or something else, and so that applies to anger too. I fear that, if I let out a little bit, I’ll let out the whole thing, years and years and years of overwhelming emotion which I’ve exhausted myself all this time trying to contain.
Now that I’m gradually being more receptive to my anger and not quite so automatically associating maleness with everything bad and ugly, I’m able notice my anger more often.
I gradually started thinking about it last year. My friend and I started watching Lost—yes, Lost, last year—and oh man guys. That first episode. The camera’s panning all around; people are screaming and running around and explosions; it’s madness.
My survival instincts start kicking in: Guys, you NEED to FUCKING COOPERATE: NOW. No: Stop your shit; get a grip…and COOPERATE.
Some of the people, like Jack, obviously, are trying to help. But then you’ve got these two…FUCKING…IDIOTS…causing even MORE HAVOC??? Are you crazy?!?!?! At a time like this!!!1!!!11!1!1111
Oh no. OH NO. Oh man I wanted to smash those guys’ faces in, especially that one guy, Sawyer, because he didn’t even settle down really afterward; he was still being all threatening and that’s EXACTLY WHAT EVERYONE DOESN’T NEED. I wanted to tie him up and have us make a prison for him.
It just felt obvious to me: It needs to be done. It didn’t even feel vindictive; I have little sense of anyone being irredeemable. It just felt like a matter of charity to the more vulnerable members of the group, that I would be gambling with their lives otherwise.
I was describing this to my friend, and he was kinda like, “Woah man, settle down.” But I was getting in touch with all these instincts I didn’t realize I had.
I never wanted to imagine myself as a leader, but just out of a feeling of pure necessity, I was suddenly planning out what I would do if I was there, if I was in Jack’s position. I’d go around to all the people on the island, ask them about their concerns, establish a rapport with them, and tell them, “Hey, just so you know, I’m keeping an eye on that Sawyer guy. If he or anyone else does anything that gets you worried, let me know.” Then if Sawyer starts being really threatening again, the rest of us will already be ready to pacify him however necessary.
Whoosh. I’m new to this male aggression thing even though I’m not really. I gotta channel that somehow before I really make use of it.
And then, earlier this year, in a distinct moment of progress, I guess you could say I was meditating in the mirror—not something I do often, but have occasionally at important times—letting my thoughts wander, speaking them out loud to myself, just saying whatever came to mind.
Eventually I got on the topic of misandry, and how there's prejudice against even the very idea of even talking about or noticing that there are specific kinds of prejudices against men too.
How the idea of there being prejudice toward men is treated as ridiculous and entitled of men.
How I was supposed to be embarrassed for thinking that I should be angry about it. But I got angry about that.
And it was then that it became clear, in a felt way: my anger can fit. It clicked.
(I wish I could remember what exactly I was saying at that moment. It’s hard to get right to the point, but I think it was one of those moments where I really narrowed in on the point.)
We being men don’t need to choose between a posture of timidness or contrition on behalf of the male sex in order to deserve respect and consideration that we, like women, have deep struggles that it takes a male perspective to fully understand.
The challenges of both sexes are incommensurable and we both have our strengths and weaknesses. So, like women, we can be forthright about it when we receive prejudice without “being a victim” or being “entitled”.
It was just. It wasn’t violent, but it was proportionately fierce.
I knew it was right and it felt right. I didn't find my voice or my expressions ugly.
I felt confident, not arrogant.
More about Anger
The confidence I felt in my anger that day in the mirror was a kind of beauty. It was controlled and dignified.
Rage can be beyond ugly and jarring; even just anger easily becomes unjust when it starts and gets out of control or excessive or is taken out on another person.
It isn’t an easy balance to strike, but I suppose some effort has to be made somehow, since our anger will always go somewhere. And as one person said, when we can’t bear our own suffering, we transfer it, one way or another.
So to be clear, I’m not even exhorting any kind of activism here. We have to give ourselves time until our familiarity with the matter is simply a part of us, and until we no longer get dysregulated every time we think about it, before we can expect to even know what effective action would look like. Relieve yourself of ideas about changing the world; your responsibility is to heal.17
So I’m still having to patiently ask myself how to go about taking in and channeling my anger, since letting out bottled-up anger looks to me not as much like removing a single segment of a fence, but popping a hole in a balloon—that if I let out a little, it will all come out. But my body has long-standing numbing mechanisms to prevent that, I suppose.
So, maybe easier said than done, but when one knows what one is doing and saying, and channels their anger in a collected, intentional way—neither withholding it nor letting it take hold of them—standing up for what's right is a beautiful thing, even it means there’s anger.18
My body and face are made to express things, and anger is one of them, and when it’s for something good, and one sees how it fits, it’s beautiful.
An odd way of finding beauty, but I think the image I most liken it to is the big brother who stands up for his little brother—maybe because of my big brother’s love for me. And who can say that isn’t beautiful? The word “brotherly” has such a sweetness to me now that for some reason is making me cry. Why didn’t I see it before?
Yet that isn’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind when we think of “beauty” or “sweetness”; it’s not the most overt kind of beauty, but when we have a feeling for the meaning of something, we don’t care quite so much about the overt appearance; rather, we associate the appearance with the hidden beauty.
So I think it’s useful to broaden our concept of beauty, at least for the purposes of this article, that is, for men to know there is something dignified, true, good, heartwarming, meaningful…beautiful about being men, in a way particular to men—because I’ve seen how so many dysphoric males can see nothing but tasteless, desolate, wretched, cold, stiff ugliness in being men. If only I knew the first thing about how to make that click for another person.
Some Clarifications
You might wonder, “Well, didn’t you ever see women get angry? Did you find their anger ugly? Or did you always consider their anger just?”
That’s one of those questions that makes me step back and ask myself again how I got on all this in the first place.
I make it sound almost as if I literally hallucinate devil horns over men and angel wings over women. But of course, of course I always saw that women get angry; yes, I had seen the particular unpleasantness of an excessively angry woman. If I held such stereotypes, it was not obvious.
Truthfully, I question whether people who ID as trans really are guilty of stereotyping the sexes as often as it’s said they do. They certainly can—many detrans women regularly encounter this sort of thing—and a lot of (trans)gender rhetoric I come across online does really crystallize gender stereotypes more than anything.
But I think people who ID as trans more often apply glaring stereotypes only to themselves, because these are either 1. conspicuous ways to escape their sex, or 2. dramatic ways of approximating repressed emotions they don’t know how else to express except by modeling their behavior after the more conspicuous examples of the other sex.19
We are talking, after all, about unconscious associations. If you’d asked me any time in the past, “Do you think it’s always unjust when a man is angry, and just when a woman is angry?” I would unhesitatingly say, “Of course not; who would think such a ridiculous thing?”
Likewise I would have said, and consciously thought, “Of course men and women are equal by nature,” when in fact I unconsciously perceived women as morally superior. Because I regarded men and women as “equal” while in fact feeling a certain obligation to empathize with women’s perspectives over men’s, men who didn’t match up to women’s standards were simply failing to match up to human standards.
I probably have had some bias to assume a woman has a good reason to be angry when she is or that a man is just being a jerk, but I think that is going away, especially since seeing in recent times (like in certain feminists' reactions to detrans men) how very possible it is for women to be profoundly sexist against men too, without having even a hint of self-awareness about it.
But such gender biases tend to be very amorphous and nebulous, not always the easy cartoon-devil-with-horns that we think we can easily brush away as airy cultural vestiges. They often do not boil down to any easily identifiable stereotypes.
I have no expectations of changing the culture on these points, and I don't really recommend people go out and fight for them.
But if we can see how we came to obligate ourselves to hate and deny core realities of ourselves in order not to be a burden or a danger to others, we can begin to love those parts of ourselves,
And find that we have natural gifts and wellsprings of motivation we haven’t been tapping into;
Or, when it comes to those unruly aspects of maleness we don’t yet know how to work with—even our “shadows” so to speak—we can at least respect them as we respect a wild animal or a storm and be open to learning about them, rather than caging them up so we don’t risk seeing what horrible things might come of them.
The Topic That Finally Made Its Way to Publishing is Anger
So what helped me accept my anger with a clear(er) head? Not by finding some man eviler than myself to mercilessly destroy, but judging myself a man not evil for being angry and showing his anger,
Not for the sake of joining the “oppression Olympics” or “victim mentality” or whatever other dismissive term some like to use out of hand when they don’t recognize the same prejudices at work which others do;
But to realistically, accurately see the excesses of guilt I’ve felt obligated to hold onto;
How this guilt consists at the heart of it of feeling guilty for even recognizing it as something worth telling, being worth reaching out to others, me, a privileged man not of any particular minority group, having the audacity to think my problems really matter;
To see that, not in order to convince the world through social activism, but in order not to internalize it anymore, or rather, to uproot it from myself and reframe.
Entitlement distorts our view, but so does false humility. I have to be accurate about the fact I didn’t merit this self-disgust, to have a bit of self-respect, if I’m to be my best self for my sake and others’. It is needlessly self-critical.
It's counterintuitive, but all these distorted views of myself had become a simple thing for me—as if it was natural, as if it was my own idea—to think I had no right, as a man, to see what was right in front of my face;
That, though I would never have said it was shameful to be a man, I regarded what is entailed in being a man shameful.
I may have been embarrassed to show my feminine side to people who would make fun of it, but I was proud of my femininity; I was not open to my masculinity. I was not ashamed of being a feminine man, but for being a man. That was my default; somehow it made things simpler.
It was a “simple” status quo to have such a mental “complex”.
It’s good to keep life simple when possible, but life in fact is not always simple. And this self-hating mindset had become my “simple” default; to undo it was a complex process, which only later made things simpler and in a better way.
I had to reopen those wounds in order to do a better job stitching them back up this time.
To accept that it’s complex can make things relatively simpler; to insist on being simple about it can make it become even more complicated.
But I think we can have a simple approach to it all by, say, realizing that this will get worked out gradually, not solved like a puzzle where you see it all come together and place the last piece.
I know how people like to say, “You’re overthinking it,” but this can be a great mistake.20
One has to be more discerning and attentive to when that’s needed and when it isn’t. As I said at the beginning, it’s important to not overburden ourselves with figuring these things out, which you know you’re doing if it gets you dysregulated or going around and around in circles thinking “I know I’ll eventually figure this out.”
On the other hand, if we’re stuck in a kind of miserable status quo and we’re taking comfort in the simplicity of letting our complicated mess of a life just be as it is; it’s gonna take some agitation, some pain, some introspection, some effort, some work to get out of it.
If that agitation becomes dysregulation, it’s time to take a break; there’s nothing to be gained, no clarity in that.
I think I'm glad I largely took these things off my mind at first when I detransitioned, but I still had to come back and do this work eventually.
Some Last Thoughts
I never expected I could write out anything systematic or step-by-step; my hope is at least to spur some exploration. I hope this is more helpful than confusing, but I really don’t know. I do have more healing to do, and perhaps that would help me say things more simply.
What has helped in my meditations has been that moment when I’m so impressed by my inability to figure anything out, I can’t help but simply let go and pay attention to my experience. Similarly, I am so impressed by my inability to really get to the heart of this topic, that all I can do is say what comes to mind as most relevant now.
I don’t have much advice about anger right now. I guess just be open to recognizing your anger. Let yourself be angry, but take it slow before thinking of how to act on it. Find physical activity that can get excess energy out and get you in touch with your body.
Anger is, still, quite a volatile emotion, and something has to be done with it, but it is also very easy, as I said, for just anger to become unjust when it pushes us to excess, making one part of us feel justified in doing things we know we would regret. So I am not suggesting giving free reign to that one part of you, but to begin getting acquainted with that part of you.
It’s important to have supportive friends you can talk to and who can give some containment to you as you open up your wounds, when these things come up. But of course, treating friends as therapists is not good, and I do find therapy very helpful for gradually processing my thoughts with an attentive listener rather than having my thoughts all bang around in my head.
And it’s important to see if you can just sit by yourself with these wounds, to just get in touch with what you’re angry about. You might be very surprised in the end what you’re really angry about,
And you might rob yourself of the chance to see that if you busy yourself and invest yourself in having others feel the injustice you do or with debating the topic online hoping to see your actions effect some change in the world (which would all be breadcrumbs anyway). When you’re ready, you’ll naturally start making good changes in the world. But again, it’s your job to heal first, not to heal the world.
So, most importantly, don't think your healing would be selfish or come as a burden to others. I see at the heart of so many detrans men’s internalized misandry is this belief.
Take a look at what you carry inside, regardless of how you'd describe it to others.
That’s largely what the footnotes are for and you’re welcome to skip them.
About “Coping Mechanisms” ← Just an incomplete side-tangent.
Even assertiveness and confidence were somehow too close to arrogance, so I made myself very timid. But that’s a whole other topic.
I want to say more about this on social anxiety, social insecurity, social awkwardness, etc., but that will get too long.
Okay well here’s something sort of related:
I think this is a point not well enough understood when dysphoric males are mocked or told they’re stereotyping women because of their wishes to be female.
I mean, why would I need to make conscious effort to supply…another man’s voice…into my mind…in order to express my inner thoughts more…naturally? No, that doesn’t not sound like a solution lol. Even though it would be closer to my own voice than a female voice. There must be a more natural way to go about that; I think, more likely, my aesthetics will change accordingly as I begin to see how unnecessary it is to read a male-sounding “inner voice” as disgusting.
I don’t know how clear I’m able to be about this: If the girlish voice comes “naturally” to me in my daily experience, and if we regard it as “unnatural” that I should have such a disposition in the first place, then the process of actually being restored to a natural disposition will feel especially unnatural. This is something of the counter-intuitiveness of gender dysphoria.
I know not many people unironically use the word “mansplaining”, but there sure is a reason the word existed, because everyone understands the general contempt toward men it evokes.
When you get, say, disproportionately angry at your friend, your interpretation that your friend caused that level of anger, and your response based on that, are what’s irrational (not the emotion); the actual cause is something deeper in you, to which your anger actually corresponds and alerts your attention.
This podcast episode may be helpful in understanding how to balance this. If we have a scale from 1 to 10, where 1=hypo-aroused (numb) and 10=hyper-aroused (panic), you want to open up painful topics only to the extent that it gets you between, say, the 3 to 7 range; only in this moderate difficulty are you actually able to productively engage with your wounds. If you go past that in either direction, it's not gonna be effective, which is why I said before not to try to be heroic about it.
I tend to think more along the lines of The Place We Find Ourselves podcast linked above, with their approach that we need to “feel our feelings” but in a prudent, careful way. Crappy Childhood Fairy can perhaps offer a helpful counterpoint, to avoid “feeling your feelings” by venting and expressing them around other people when you’re getting dysregulated.
Again, all this is my description of what’s helped me and how things seem to me, not necessarily what works for everyone.
This isn’t really the place to describe methods of meditation—I may describe how I’ve gone about this some time, but I’m no expert—so you might look into that. I find it good to just intend to go in a very short amount of time multiple times in a the day, so there’s little pressure, and often I’ll find myself wanting to stay longer. I try to be willing to endure some very, very unpleasant emotions that come up, but it’s important not to force myself to be heroic about it (as I said in note 9) if overwhelming emotions cause dysregulation. Likewise, if meditation amounts to a kind of dissociation, that’s not productive either; it should involve mindfulness of how our emotions are stored in the body. You can also just practice slowing down and being more mindful throughout the day.
This is also comparable to one of the last things I mentioned to Benjamin Boyce when he asked me what gender dysphoria was like. I explained how I seem to by default map out my body as smaller and more delicate when I’m alone and have no one to compare myself to. As an adult living in a world that presents transition as an option, this perhaps made it easier to “calculate”, so to speak, being a woman as an explanation for those perceptions, and also as a way to take those perceptions into the world around others and express that part of me more freely—but I now think that is more me perceiving myself as still a child. Becoming a child, of course, is plainly impossible, whereas “becoming a woman” at least can seem like a possibility when transition is presented as a solution, and so is able to factor into my “calculation”.
This topic really deserves its own article, because for some men like myself dysphoria centers on this, and because perhaps the most unbypassable social issues around transgenderism center on this, on women’s safety. Here we might see more clearly than any other topic how inseparable are the reasons males and females want to escape their sex.
For me, I know I had quite early in life acquired a habit of forcing myself to appear as emotionally neutral as possible, which by puberty was my habit in almost all situations, even with friends. So I think, as attraction to girls became a thing (and a very overwhelming thing), that was where I felt especial need to strictly regulate all my body language and contain myself. While people consistently told me I never seemed to show much emotion in my middle and high school days, I always felt as if my emotions must be on display for everyone to see, and so I would fight to regulate myself way, way more than was necessary. I thought they must be visible because my body was indeed emotionally reacting to everything and working to just keep the very outer layer of my appearance still and neutral. So much of my memory of high school is just being tense; but I now do believe that my friends meant it when they said this never showed. So I became paranoid that any beautiful girl could somehow see me being sexually attracted to her just by me looking at her; and those are very intense emotions considering how day-to-day they are, and considering all it takes is simply seeing a girl.
I’ll have to discuss how I reconcile with the social realities around this issue some other time. It’s a very sensitive issue for both men and women and one I’ve talked about in detrans communities quite a bit.
I’m not even saying he acted all grim all the time. He could joke around and be lighthearted plenty of the time; it was just that that kind of lesson about the harshness of the world was like a continual pattern in his thinking that he would return to whether it really fit the situation or not, is how it seems to me.
Just some thoughts for fun:
To be sure, the point of this article isn’t to throw off the shackles of all prudence and self-restraint—not at all. It doesn’t serve me to be averse to seeing myself angry, but that doesn’t mean I would not be right to proceed cautiously in how I go about channeling my anger. I am now working on that, so I am not trying to advise very much about what to do with anger. The point of the article is to discuss gender dysphoria; anger serves to highlight something about it.
For Christians or anyone open to Christian themes, this podcast episode on anger has given me a lot to think about (as well as his similar episode on the topic of lamenting).
Helena posted a piece recently that isn’t quite the same topic but a similar idea which I really appreciated. I think it’s a very important article I would highly recommend to any parents struggling to know what to do concerning their trans-identified child.
This is a great piece NJada. It sounds like you are working on yourself in a very deep and serious way. I really resonated with your description of feeling so ashamed of your anger that you were only able to express it in a 'feminised' way, even in your own, private inner space. I'm glad that you are learning to connect with that anger and channel it productively.
NJada, I am very grateful for your article. As you know there is a great reluctance on the part of therapists to explore the issues around GD. Some think it is actually unethical while others are afraid of getting sued. Most have just accepted the profession’s official line, which amounts to professional misconduct. It is very important for the public and mental health professionals to hear and understand what struggling with GD is like.