Behind Gender Dysphoria, Story, Healing (Working Through Gender Dysphoria After Detransition: Part 2)

So what has healing involved?

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This article may get a little abstract at times, but I promise I do not want to remain in abstractions; the goal is to work toward the specifics. Because even if my specifics are different from others’, it’s in the details where we really find healing.¹

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When I detransitioned 6 years ago, after 2 years of transitioning, I was glad to put all the minutia of gender to rest a while;

I was never into the politics and activism, before or after;

But 3 years ago unresolved GD returned in full force (as mentioned last article).

I had to really learn effective skills,

Which I developed through not only introspection and meditation, but also cultivating genuine, in-person friendships, having a quality therapist, and finally getting in touch with the online detrans community.²

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For what once seemed impossible to ever overcome, I now had skills and insights;

Last summer was my last bad wave of GD—not nearly as bad as 3 years ago, but really, any wave of that is a devastating, ugly feeling.

I was not able to brush off that wave; I was, however, able to take it in.

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Those feelings are still there for me to work on, but they don’t take over;

The more I take them in and learn from them, especially as they appear under the surface of day-to-day life, the less oppressive they are;

But no, they are not removed, but transformed into a feeling of ownership of my body and my manhood;

Because in the aching I felt in “GD” was already an aching for that kind of self-acceptance and self-love. So I do not reject those feelings.

Those feelings teach me so much about the way forward.

These feelings are a struggle for a basic kind of comfort in my own body, not a sign that a drastic change of my body or presentation will do it.

I can do better than hoping to hate my body less by approximating a female.

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Here’s a sample of what I mean by not removing but transforming:

—The more I took it in, the less “GD” looked like wanting to be a woman and more like wanting to be loved just for who I am, cliche as that might sound—and I finally reopened my long-suppressed desire for a woman to share my life with, even to have children;³

—The more I took that in, the more I saw I needed first to take care of a deeper desire to be cared for as a child, for the love of mom and dad;⁴

—The more I took that in, the more I saw that I had not matured in certain ways because I had not felt safe to make my needs known and receive care;⁵

—As I engaged that I saw that in many ways, growing up, I could have made my needs known, but that it would have come at the cost of my dignity.

I want to be loved as a son, but I also wanted to be respected. And these felt incompatible—so I hid my needs;

Because I respected myself, even cherished myself, even beneath all my self-hatred.

I’m loved and respected, and proud to say to God: I’m your son.

I do not need to be a woman, or a child, to make my needs known, to be loved; all these can be as I am, a man.

I do not need to do extreme things to signal my needs or retreat interiorly to protect my dignity. I can both love and be loved.

But I’ll come back to these things later.⁶

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“If there’s ever a longing that is more core to the heart, it is the longing of a son or a daughter for a father or a mother.”

Adam Young

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These self-hating habits in my perceptions, not taking them for granted but being willing to take them in—

To acknowledge GD as it was happening: that was a first step to exploring why.

I could practice being attentive to my body and emotions, even as GD repulsed me from doing this;

Noticing these habits in all kinds of different ways (how I moved, how I talked, how I perceived others’ perceptions of me…) and know it made sense to reframe how I habitually see my body:

To not only accept my body, but to begin to love it.

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I had to slow down to do this.

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Easier said than done—it takes persistence more than skill. Don’t think my persistence was graceful—that didn’t matter at all; that was what it took.

Acceptance can be a wonderful start, but our bodies are ours, so it’s in our nature to love them, not only accept them.

Indeed I am finding more and more things to love, practically, aesthetically, and just in the fact it’s my body. That is priceless.

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So don’t be dismayed if you learned that transition was a mistake and yet you still feel GD. That knowledge does not automatically heal you.

Hating my male body, as a male body, is a habit I learned.

I am no longer gripped by this apparent brute fact that my inside doesn’t match my outside.

—Not a brute fact: but a wound with a story to be engaged.

—Not gripped by it: because I have the option to explore alternatives.

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“Because I wasn’t born female.”

“Born in the wrong body.”

“My inside doesn’t match my outside.”

These are all irresolvable problems, as I call them, brute facts, hopeless scenarios, with the option of transitioning only to approximate what I seem to desire.⁷

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My sex is a brute fact, but my sex being “wrong” is not, my pain is not;

Rather, it has a story, a story of how I came to reject myself at such a fundamental level — which means that it isn’t hopeless.

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About hope: Hope may seem seductive;

But hopelessness can be even more seductive.

By not hoping, I cannot be disappointed.

The hope of healing from some wounds is a terror. It means descending into the wound and opening up what seems like endless aching, longing for healing, not knowing from where, when, or if ever it will come.

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As Adam Young, who’s all about engaging your story, is fond of quoting Faulkner:

“The past isn’t dead; it’s not even past.”

Who then himself adds:

“We experience reality through the lens of what we’ve already seen.”⁸

We not only look at our past, as if just ruminating, but we engage our stories which shaped our present so that we can live more fully in the present.

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Engaging with our stories does not necessarily mean opening up repressed memories (though it could), but making those critical connections with how I internalized formative events in my life;

What kind of feelings I bear with me, even bear in my body continually;

Feelings I might not want to own as my own,

—Whether longings too great to risk aching, hoping and disappointment;

—Or feelings that feel wrong, that make me feel unworthy or ashamed;

—Maybe some of these feelings I perceive as so feminine that it would be cringy if my male face, voice or body would express them;

—Or maybe feelings which feel too masculine to fit into this self-image I made that I’m “not like other guys”.⁹

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But the story of those feelings, all the associations attached to them, will be so, so personal;

It will not be seen abstractly or from 10,000 feet;

No, it will be seen in all the nitty-gritty specifics.

And those specifics may be nitty and so, so gritty — but they must be, because they’re specifically about your pain.

It can almost sound romantic and adventurous talking about it, but we know, when it comes down to it, it’s ugly.

Just the ugliness can make us question whether it’s right to persevere. We attach a lot of meaning to what we perceive as beautiful or ugly.

And corresponding to that ugliness, to how truly unfair it is, what we inherit and internalize in childhood—

Corresponding to that is such specificity of the beauty of your natural goodness and your glory which was marred.

You simply cannot be held responsible for what you internalized as a child; you, as an adult, however, are responsible for what you do about it. It’s important to hold both these truths at the same time.

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So your story is not abstract, nor seen from 10,000 feet; but we must prepare to look at ourselves and our lives with honesty and honor—to honor ourselves with the truth.

And hear the stories of other detrans people and their specifics. You’ll likely find much you relate to and much you don’t.

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This all can take time. It may be necessary to dance around from a distance at first.

Persevere, but don’t burden yourself as “ignoring the truth” if you’re just taking a rest on your way there.

I don’t feel I can advise when it’s the right time to take a plunge.¹⁰ All I can say is: Start preparing for that time.

It’s not all or nothing; let yourself titrate it:¹¹

1. Try,

2. Get triggered just a little,

3. Retreat,

4. Recover,

5. Repeat.

Some people have been suddenly snapped out of it, but generally speaking, the healing does not come, the pain is not transformed, until you come to the specifics. You are a specific person and you’re worth being treated as such.

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Turns out, gender dysphoria, as an interpretation of overwhelming feelings, was a big [X] in my mind, a “TURN BACK” sign—

Turning me back from engaging that story.

Gender dysphoria, in this way, was a survival mechanism. Perhaps it kept me from suicide at one time, or otherwise abusing myself, if I approached the distressing fact of my manhood more quickly—¹²

Or if I removed the hope of transition without something true and good to replace it. It is not enough to just remove a bad thing, unless for the sake of a positive good.

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Transitioning was a kind of crap-fitting.

What leads a person to do that?

I don’t regret it; I learned; and I was blessed to turn back from it without permanent physical effects as far as I can tell—

But it goes against my human nature to crap-fit myself into a life of holding shame at arm’s length . . . or 10,000 feet . . . or as an abstraction.

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I ache for belonging in my body - physically, mentally, socially, spiritually.

Hope opens up that aching, but what I ache for is too good to settle for crap-fitting.

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So I’m ambivalent but increasingly appreciative of being a man, even with the struggles and expectations—

(Not to mention prejudices that I can’t help feel like an entitled burden mentioning, because as a man I’m not supposed to acknowledge when I’m wronged, according to people on either end of the horseshoe.)

But wanting to be a woman?—nice thought in a lot of ways, but no, that is not what will make me happy.

It’s not that I want a female body; it’s that I’m uncomfortable with MY body; and one of its most conspicuous aspects is that it’s a male one.

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It’s always a work in progress, but here seem to be three most basic points:

1. I’m uncomfortable and disconnected from my parents and people generally (social/attachment anxiety)

2. I’m uncomfortable and disconnected from my body (sensory discomfort)

3. I readily connect that physical and social discomfort to disgust with my maleness (social+sensory?)

Where does this habitual disgust toward my male body come from?

1. Is it toxic masculine expectations?

2. Is it internalized misandry?

Well, it’s a confusing mix of both, you could say. But both those terms are hopelessly, horribly FULL of baggage.

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So I will attempt to describe them in Part 3.

For now, let’s describe the one as: Discouragement, through shame, from whatever elements of my behavior seemed feminine¹³ which were perfectly normal and ought to have been simply allowed to be there;

And the other as: Shame for being male and for behavior associated with masculinity, which makes up the bulk of my natural behavior (I hardly have ever come across as effeminate, just extremely sensitive).

1. This is by no means an attempt to lay out some kind of systematic program for overcoming GD. It really is just to give an idea of how, so far, I’ve understood my approach.

I have a hard time resisting elaborating, so I moved elaborations to the footnotes, which you can take or leave, no problem.

2. Here’s what I think have been my most essential helps:

1. Having a quality therapist who was on the same page with me about transition;

2. Cultivating in-person friendships is perhaps most essential of all, genuine connection, caring about others, and grounding in the world outside my mind.

3. Connecting with the online detrans community; a lot of relatable and contrasting experiences to think things over more explicitly; insights from people who have gone through similar things.

4. Prayer and meditation integrates and unifies all I do. It’s somehow both fully social and fully introspective. And it’s of course more than that—which I mention to make known its essential role for me, not so much to give advice on it here;

5. Physical activity that’s fun and gets me in touch with my body and explore movements I normally hold back from. This is the one I probably neglect the most, but it really helps. Personally I like to dance to music. And remember: Haaaaave fun with it!

3. Which I suppressed out of fear of what it would take. I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say about this later.

4. Although I’m still not so sure about my mom and dad; this is a current conflict for me. My mom and dad are not bad people, but I have never been comfortable with them. I’ve begun to tell them this in the last year. It’d be a long story, but for all I know it’s the very heart of all this.

It’s also clear that to be loved as a child seems like an easier way to conceive of being loved “just for who I am” than in the mature demands of being a husband. So there is a sense in which I had already seen this desire to be a child during the end of my transition. The desire for a wife, however, was its own source of motivation against the fears of those mature demands (a massive well of motivation I had previously been expending a lot of energy squashing, to avoid confronting those fears).

5. We by nature arrive at independence only through having had a healthy dependence first, normally on our primary caregivers, who are normally our parents.

6. Here’s advice from Laura to parents of detransitioners, from the recent Detrans Awareness Day Webinar which I hope is hopeful and consoling. It runs about 4 minutes from the time-stamp beginning at 4:25:20. I’d say, give special attention to the topic of attachment issues and her advice to “use this as an opportunity to find a point of honesty and connection that you might not have had before.”

7. To be sure, I went to my high school GSA; I went to my college Pride club. While transitioning, I didn’t think being male meant I wasn’t “valid” or not “truly trans” or not “truly a woman”. I believed I was a true woman and I had no intention to get sex reassignment surgery.

But what I understood my desire to be was to simply be female, or rather, to have always had been female. I mourned that I was never and would never have been socialized as a girl.

I would have liked to have a vagina instead of a penis, but it wasn’t a high priority; I was happy that HRT lowered my sex drive so much. I did plan to get electrolysis and shave my Adam’s apple down, but never did.

8. The Place We Find Ourselves Podcast with Adam Young, Episode 1: “Why Engaging Your Story Is The Best Thing You Can Do For Your Brain”. It is a Christian mental health podcast which has been hugely influential for me in the last few months. I’ve been told non-Christians have found it helpful and that the religious elements were not intrusive. Some episodes, especially later episodes, have more religious themes than others, which you can usually guess based on the title.

9. This will deserve a lot more attention later, so this side note might not be an adequate description.

For a long time I thought the problem was mainly a struggle to accept my femininity, but that has turned out to be the more surface-level issue for me; the struggle to accept my masculinity has turned out to be the much harder part. It was much harder to even recognize my masculinity, since the struggle to own my femininity, real as it was, became a struggle against my masculinity. I always felt it to be a righteous struggle to express femininity, whereas I hardly felt masculinity had any positive connotations, other than maybe physical strength, which was about the lowest of strengths. It was anti-feminine and anti-good.

I would never have imagined until recently that I would find it liberating to embrace my masculinity. Masculinity was too closely associated with arrogant entitlement, predators, creeps, abusers, oppressors, all the greed and prejudice that has ruled human history. I can think of no deeper self-image problem than these; I cannot find something more loathsome to think of myself, something which more plainly says: ‘I do not deserve to live; I do not deserve care or consideration; the world would be better without me.’

How exactly that makes its way into my mind as a young boy takes a lot of focus to tell, and I know not everyone sees how this can be, so I expect to write on it in a later article. Before I knew what was going on, I knew that some men could be that frightening; women seemed not to be like that ever; I felt it was because of maleness itself; and I wanted at all costs to avoid being seen that way. But I now know I can do better than a life of avoidance.

10. I have to remember, after all, how it was for me 3 years ago. Some things might be literally impossible to take all at once, but not impossible to take a little at a time over time.

11. Something I also do for socializing, as the Crappy Childhood Fairy explains (funny name, I know, but she’s great—a little more on the “tough love” side than Adam Young). Surprisingly many of the principles in that video concerning social anxiety apply here too. I’d like to stress again the importance of cultivating an in-person social life—whatever you can do with where you’re at. Being social might be sort of the opposite of being introspective, but being social is one very important place to notice and test your GD.

And yes, as for step 2 (“Get triggered just a little), there’s always going to be a degree of unpredictability as to how triggering it might be.

12. The level of sensitivity apparently required, then, to neither affirm nor directly challenge someone’s trans-identity can seem like an unreasonably difficult task, but it seems to be what parents and non-affirming therapists have found to be a necessary balance.

Which is why I would say we can only really expect to make an impact on those who are actually in our lives.

When I was transitioning, I came to my own conclusion about the impossibility of what I hoped for in transitioning, without people opposing me or telling me what I didn’t want to hear. So this may be my bias, but that’s why I tend to think that “telling the harsh truth” is not necessarily effective in helping a person find their own internal reasons for accepting and loving their own body. Being honest and not concealing your position on the matter is important—if you’re a parent, please do not allow medical transition as far as is in your power—but I have rarely seen direct challenges to a person’s trans-identity (who was not already expressing openness to new perspectives) that I honestly thought could reach them given their mindset.

You will not be able to maintain this balance perfectly, so don’t let it become walking on eggshells (unless you’re really afraid of your kids being taken away from you). If and when push comes to shove, “err” on the side of the truth; and this also means, as Robert Withers explains, being willing to be hated by that person for the moment: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33202051/

It’s a hard task to be given. Which is again why I would say we can only really expect to make an impact on those who are actually in our lives.

13. I don’t think any men are, by definition, “feminine”, but I really don’t want to be picky about language, and basically you probably know what I mean when I say this. Some men do quite naturally have personalities we sometimes will think of as “feminine” or “effeminate” but 1. they’re not necessarily any less masculine and that’s the surface level behavior that comes naturally to them and it’s fine, and 2. I was never one of them. So if you’re interested this is more along the lines of what I’d mean by “masculine” and “feminine”: https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/hildegard-of-bingens-vital-contribution-to-the-concept-of-woman/

About how I never came across as feminine/effeminate. Being excessively sensitive, like especially to an unhealthy extent where you’re really fragile and probably have unaddressed trauma, like part of you being stuck in childhood, often gets passed off as “femininity”—which isn’t something to mock but it also isn’t something to just accept as a good way to stay your whole life. Sensitivity of a good kind is part of being a truly strong person.