Let’s be clear: sensitive ≠ feminine.
Lots of highly sensitive, averagely masculine boys and men believe they’re feminine.
I’m a highly sensitive, masculine guy, who for most of my life tried to address my self-image struggles in terms of being a feminine male. People could make sense of the idea. The struggle to accept my femininity. There was language for it. It felt good and righteous even. But it wasn’t it.
No, I’m not “pushing” masculinity on anyone. Nor am I teaching how to be masculine, or even pretending to have a precise definition of the word. But I’d like to invite a fresh consideration of it for us guys who have felt alienated from it.
I am beginning with the assumption that there are certain biologically-based behavioral and psychological patterns common and hardwired into men which many men have become ashamed of. Rather than try to describe things which resist precision and admit of all sorts of exceptions and variations, I want to invite males who have long thought themselves to be among the far outliers when it comes to masculinity, whether they might rather be overall typically masculine but suffering severe shame about it.
I can only give impressions and an invitation. I trust that men are capable of figuring out what it means for themselves, since we’re already built the way we are.
Genspect’s conference, The Bigger Picture, happened two weekends ago, a historic moment in presenting much needed, serious alternatives to gender affirmation “therapy” and transition.
There were multiple panels, including one on “Lost Boys”.1 They acknowledged what people are gradually waking up to, that boys are ashamed of becoming men, not only for feeling like they don’t live up to masculine expectations, but even for being masculine. I felt the world become a little more benevolent for that panel and the discussions following it lately.
Society in general seems locked into the narratives of “We already know enough about men” and “Haven’t we already celebrated men enough?”
So, I’m much more hopeful that there will become more good resources for struggling young men who look for it than I am about society in general snapping out of it.
Parts of society dehumanize women more, part of society dehumanize men more, most dehumanize both at the same time in different ways. We get it. Or if we don’t, when are we going to grow up? One of my goals in writing this is to avoid this thing Benjamin Boyce said:
“It’s as if we are expected to take everything into account, before we can account for anything.”
“Society”
“Society” for all we know will never care about what’s really up with men. It’s far from curious about the ways it devalues men, how it shames them while they’re still boys, and shames them for being ashamed.
Even when it notices that, okay, true, something is definitely up with men, it usually completely misses the point. It takes a casual swing at how the problem kinda sorta looks, fails miserably, and then it’s back to: Why do men have to be like that? I guess they’re just messed up and don’t mind wallowing in their messes. Men complaining about prejudices against them just sounds so entitled and bitchy. Who wants to hear it? There are so many other groups with REAL problems, and you think we need to listen to your “““problems”””? Get a grip! Aren’t you claiming to be, like…men anyway LOL? So why don’t you uhhhh, I don’t know, “man up” or whatever!
Masculinity is associated with privilege, so if you are masculine, how could you struggle to own it? Wouldn’t you just take it? It must be rather than you’re in denial about being feminine. It would be easier to just accept that.
As for men who insist on being masculine, it sounds like men used to have all the power and attention and now they’re mad that they don’t get to have it all now. That’s the amount of depth many people think goes on in our brains. This is obviously not a small disconnect.
So let’s remember not to worry about them and these reactions. That’s the lesson we detransitioners so often learn. We were trying to shape how others saw us.
Yet, how can we not worry about society, since society shaped how we think about men in the first place, about ourselves, or what we imagined we would grow into?—and since it’s interacting with that same society which strikes these nerves?
And yes, in a sense, we do have to think about “them”. We have to recognize the messages we internalized—before we were old enough for it to even occur to us to question them—so we can stop taking them for granted as true. We don’t have to agree just because the person saying it seems really morally stern about it or something. It might not be our fault that it began that way—that it sticks in our minds so deeply—but now we need to take charge.
We thought badly about men and masculinity so we would be acceptable, so we could feel safe in our community, so people might value us enough to be there for us. These are such basic needs; you can’t blame yourself for that. Especially as a small child, boy or girl, it’s natural to want to be endearing. But being endearing has a much shorter time for boys.
We didn’t want to fear that people would be disappointed and reject us when we became too hard, too edgy, too much of various things growing boys become competitive about. The fears and disgust start to really kick in when, despite all your good-natured, enlightened indifference to masculine competitive aspirations, puberty hits. You’re ambivalent about you’re feelings, full of contradictory desires, because you’re human—but you’re human in distinctly male way.
To be 1000% clear: Toxic masculinity is not the heart of the shame.
To be sure, there can be toxic masculinity; I’d never go so far as to say there can’t. More in some places than others. Maybe where you come from there’s a lot of it. But I spent all my teen years and early 20s complaining about that, thinking feminine men were way cooler. I had some good reasons for thinking that way, but it turns out that restrictions on being feminine was a pretty secondary issue.
I grew up in a quiet, mild New England town with a certain libertarian spirit to it. There were some of those “toxic masculine” types in my life, and that mixed badly with the pervasiveness of the attitude that masculinity is usually bad;2 the one gave justification to the other. (It's a mess; we’re not going to root out subtle messages from anyone but ourselves.)
I’d feel embarrassed for this or that surface-level aspect of my personality that could seem a little feminine, or that I didn’t like playing sports. But this all just reinforced how right and good it is to embrace femininity in men, how freeing and pure it felt. I wasn’t like those other guys. I wanted to be part of the change and be accepted by those whose acceptance would really mean something. Certainly no one would have bad reasons for wanting to see men bring out their femininity. Those who would reject me, well, their rejection wouldn’t mean much.
But my body had zero way of even coming across as feminine (you’d never suspect I identified at trans 8 years ago), so I just found myself longing and longing to have the physical features that would allow me to somehow express femininity, so it would be intuitively clear to everyone from the moment they met me that I’m not like guys are.
Often when people turn back from transitioning, it’s a major step just to let the fact of their sex to sink in. To let the fact sink in that having gender nonconforming traits doesn’t make you trans, doesn’t make you less a woman or a man. Online detrans communities understand this well.
To say that men struggle under excessive masculine expectations, or because they’re gender-nonconformity—that’s fine. But these have become the convenient parts of this conversation at this point. There is abundant language for this.
The hard parts to bring up are, naturally, the parts that are not brought up often. That’s why they persist as core problems. The parts that feel shameful to name. The parts that make you anticipate being shamed for bringing them up.
A lot of those who say they want us men to be vulnerable end up being uncomfortable with what we need to be vulnerable about—or they can’t even recognize it as vulnerability. We can’t make them.
Society is not comfortable with the idea of a seemingly average guy having a wounded self-image that wasn’t caused by his own naïve stupidity. It must be because he’s mad that he, as a man, doesn’t get to be the celebrated center of attention quite so much as men used to be. Reality shattered his fragile, entitled self-image and now he’s mad. Some people can’t seem to picture it any other way.
How could you even begin offer an alternative picture? There’s not language for it that doesn’t inspire mockery and disgust. It sounds like “men’s right activism” and nothing could sound more worthy of ridicule. All the language available sounds like a joke.
This is at the heart of it—or maybe it is the heart of it:
This can leave you stuck a habitual state of despair, a foundational, bodily expectation that nothing can or will be done; a bodily expectation that no one will care. You’re powerless and no one who has the power to help will help, so it’s pointless to try.
The problem of not having the language to effect change overrides the seriousness of whatever the original problem was.
Without language, especially during childhood development, you have no way to reach out. But reaching out is absolutely necessary for a child to learn healthy coping mechanisms. Very young children do not learn healthy coping mechanisms on their own; they learn unhealthy coping mechanisms on their own. They also learn unhealthy coping mechanisms from adults who can’t or won’t understand what they’re dealing with.
This may be more necessary for kids, but it’s a human thing; adults are still thoroughly relational beings, they can still be traumatized. And they too need to reach out in healthy ways to others, especially if they’re still locked in the very same trauma that began in childhood.
So when I say we don’t need to change how others think, that’s all I mean. We still need to seek out those who do, or are at least willing to understand. But trying to make people who won’t is less than pointless.
But that’s what’s so serious about the mockery, the default disrespect, the undignified state of masculinity: a boy cannot dare speak about it, he cannot even dare recognize it himself, because it will reveal his hopelessness, and that opens up heartache.
But he’s not actually hopeless. There are people who would hear him, but sadly he’s learned to stereotype people who talk about valuing masculinity as the “toxic” kinds who will push him into restrictive stereotypes. He’s learned that the only options are toxic masculinity or anti-masculinity posing as “you don’t have to be masculine”. I mean, if he’s already identifying as trans, he’s well past the point of even wanting a middle way between those options. You could carefully show him that there is that third option and he’ll still say, “Great, it’s okay for guys to be masculine. What’s you’re point? I’m not a guy.”
To have no language is at the heart of trauma and overshadows whatever other problems you needed help with or comfort from. It makes irrelevant the matter of whether women have more problems than men. Boys need their own language for male-specific struggles and for sifting through the convoluted subtleties of those prejudices specifically toward males, when they happen to come their way.
If there isn’t language for that, then it turns out there’s abundant language for this kind of suffering as something, anything other than an average guy. The fact you’re suffering so proves you aren’t an average guy. As one person put it: “My suffering was only legible if I was a woman.”
So my disinterest in making this an advocacy thing: What would we do? Tell people to stop thinking the language sounds cringe? Better, guys can recognize why it sounds cringe to themselves, that it only sounds cringe. He can then choose to articulate his pain to himself and to those he trusts anyway, despite the fact the only language he can use sounds cringe to himself.
So there may be some worthy activist efforts out there, but this is where I’m focusing.
Gender-confused boys aren’t purposely faking a new identity to be heard; they’re trying to make sense of their own experience. They know they’re in profound pain and they “know” that plain old average masculine boys don’t have this kind of pain.
They’re not going, “Ah, I suffer the way girls do. Therefore: I am a girl.” These are unconscious calculations. So pointing out the facts, the logic, the biology of sex, these may be necessary, but they’re dealing with something deeper than a simple logical error.
I don’t want to say too much at once, yet there’s still one article’s-worth of stuff I need to add to make this complete. I’m going to talk next in a bit more detail about how our struggles can become mistaken as being “feminine”, to think about some of the things many quite average guys are unable to appreciate about themselves. I’ve seen it in myself, anecdotally in several others, and the nature of it makes me suspect it is quite common. But again, that’s why this is only an invitation; men can measure my words by themselves.
So I’m splitting this to a second part which I’ll post later. Thank you very much for reading.
Here’s a summary of the panel someone posted at the time of the panel.
Neither of them were terribly overt or radical, by the way, by today’s standards anyway—which is a point I really want to make clear, that there’s a lot of meaning behind casual, popular feminist attitudes which unconsciously treat males as naturally defective. I’m not talking about the occasional overtly man-hating feminist. That’s another reason I don’t want to make this a political activism thing; making this the next calling out of microaggressions just breeds more confusion, power struggle and puts the job of healing us onto other people who are the least willing. I will say, though, that seeing certain twitter feminists—I could hardly believe how sexist they were, how many they were, and how blind they were to it—was a bit of “exposure therapy” to me. It 1. helped me stop idealizing women, not by making me bitter toward women in general, but just showing that they’re every bit as susceptible to dehumanizing people they can’t relate to, just in very different ways; and 2. it brought out in the open, it made explicit the precise nature of many women’s sexism which was previously more implicit, which helped to break the spell. That second point showed me that much of the hatred I felt toward myself had an origin in the world: precise patterns of hatred toward maleness occasionally explicit in radical feminist groups, but spread on a more casual basis by people who certainly didn’t hate men but had absorbed some of the reckless rhetoric of activists.
Thanks for your honesty and vulnerability, Njada. It would be so much easier to hide behind an identity group orthodoxy. Please check out my writing and share with friends and followers if it’s of any value. My writing helps me think too.
Excellent. Yeah, our total discourse, both as it involves the right and the left, is opposed to the full flourishing of so many boys and so men; we've simply further limited their options for working out their lives and their understandings of themselves. Please keep writing!