What I've Learned About Toxic Masculinity As A Trans Man

[stumbledin]

I read this article thinking it would be about how a woman who had decided to transition then found herself part of the patriarchy.

But in fact what it says to me is that young people are being educated to not know or acknowledge the reality of biological sex. And because of this are left trying to understand their reality and the impact of society's gender stereotyping while denying the underlying basis of sex / sexism.

Far from helping young people as they grow up and try to work out how to be comfortable with themselves, trasn activism and language is imposing an additional, and purely notional, social straightjacket that creates further disassociation.

The politics of identity, whose hazy concepts and doublespeak, is an obstacle race that many young people just dont need in their lives.

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/toxic-masculinity_uk_5d78ed0fe4b09342507cb2cf?guccounter=1

Still pondering...

The stereotypes are how they maintain control.

Which means there's a strong imperative to ensure there's a class available to attach the stereotypes to.

We've said "Not happening" and we've got the word out that we won't submit to the stereotypes without a fuss. They've heard that message loud and clear.

So they've reframed slightly. A conscious reframing that they can trick themselves into believing, so they can feel like they're still in control in the face of our increased resistance and give themselves free rein to keep indulging in their controlling behaviour.

We all knew woman and female were basically interchangeable when we're talking about humans. And we said: no; the stereotype is not us, we are not the stereotype, woman is not feminine, woman is female.

And in response they have redefined woman for us, to exclude those of us who consciously reject and resist the imposition of the stereotype. Yet they still, in their heads and hearts, attach the stereotype to real female bodies rather than to whoever's-occupying-the-woman-label.

Men need femininity.

They need it to maintain control. Of us.

That's why trans ideology is so popular, so mainstream, so well-funded, so successfully dominant. It's the mechanism they're using to reassert control, by redefining "woman" as the target location for the stereotypes to better target it at the women who are still susceptible to the stereotypes. Men who aren't sufficiently susceptible to the stereotypes get caught in the crossfire too (HSTS and ROGD). (AGPs not caught in the crossfire; AGPs getting off on pulling the trigger.)

A side-thought:

In boys, proto-ROGD + porn + time = AGP?

Where "proto-ROGD" implies "traumatised by patriarchy".

Does that make sense?

(I'm going for a tea break because my brain is fizzing too much.)

Where "proto-ROGD" implies "traumatised by patriarchy".

Tyro, please would you expand on what you mean by that?

I'll try, bd, but please do bear in mind my subconscious spotted a pattern a few weeks back and this is the first time I've really been able to face it head on and try to put it into words.

Ttranssexual types according to Blanchard et al are AGP & HSTS in men, with ROGD as a new form that predominantly appears in young women.

Typical ROGD profile in women has three major pillars - autism, trauma, and non-hetero orientation - yes?

ROGD makes sense to me, I occupy the same sort of space but interpret myself differently. I'm mired in a mental knot over my own orientation that I've been thinking about through a compulsory heterosexuality lens and linking to trauma. I score very very highly on the ASD screening test but have been in another mental knot over the fact I have an ethical objection to identifying into autism - but a lot of my answers in that test could equally be rooted in sexual trauma (which in my case started very severe and very young). So I feel comfortable saying these three aspects of the typical ROGD profile are all linking up with a common trauma or series of traumas.

AGP ex's drummer recently announced he's a woman and it confused us both trying to work out how he fits into Blanchard - he's too young for the typical AGP profile and isn't displaying typical behavioural narc-ish traits either so it doesn't feel like it fits; and HSTS doesn't fit because he's not gay.

But he might fit in the ROGD profile. He says he's bi, he's massively awkward on the social skills that are a close enough match to maybe tick the ASD box, and he's had shit mental health since he was a kid but has nothing specific really diagnosed, which makes me think trauma. He looks like he ticks all three boxes, same as I do.

We tend to associate ROGD with transmen and transtrender females, but I have a hunch we're going to see it increasingly in young men too. I think they're going to be following the patriarchal trauma -> ROGD path when they discover the ideology - but they're boys, and they're effectively also being gender-traumatised by porn into abusive sexual behaviour combined with no self-awareness.

Because what porn's doing to boys - that's a much more overt and powerful form of indoctrinating them into the cult of masculinity, isn't it? It makes them much better suited to acting out the sexual and psychological violence that traumatises and indoctrinates girls into acting out the submissive and subservient behaviours that keep us under the thumb.

We get the paedophiles and the rapists and they get the horrific porn, but the effect's basically the same, just to different degrees, isn't it? It's patriarchal trauma. Just affecting the mind in a different direction dependent on the individual's position as oppressor or oppressed.

Hm. I'm going to make a brew and wait for further input before meandering further.

Side note - I actually made a major leap forward in my trauma-processing just by thinking this through, so thank you for prompting me to, bd.

You know how we're all kind of polarised and entrenched by this point, and people end up making very forceful assertions of their ideological position that serve as a declaration of a hard boundary? And the moderate majority lurking feels kind of uncomfortable and doesn't know how to resolve the fact that they can see the sense of both sides, and so they disengage?

We need to be analysing that discomfort from a different angle. Think trauma and recovery, think coping mechanisms, think abusive relationship dynamics being repeated on a class level and also within the different layers of the individual mind, think and think and think and then look at the thing we're not letting ourselves think.

When you're traumatised and lack self awareness you unconsciously engineer the people around you into an abusive dynamic. I know this; I have done this. The Relationships board gave me the self-awareness to stop.

When you're traumatised and lack self awareness, your conscious self - that's your intellect, the language of words you use to shape your understanding - and your unconscious mind are stuck in a codependent abusive dynamic.

Class Woman is traumatised and lacks self awareness, class Man is traumatised and lacks self awareness, and so the two are locked in a codependent abusive dynamic.

Which is all preamble to allow me to really look at the thing my words are trying to stop me from looking at.

You know when people say "autoandrophilia isn't a thing" because they're trying to counter the validity of the patriarchally-constructed lens of AGP as a predictive model of male behaviour?

Always made me feel uncomfortable, and try to disengage.

Because, actually, I've had internal experiences that can perfectly accurately be captured by the word autoandrophilia if you strip it down to purely a description of sexual behaviour within the mind.

I don't any more. But when I was younger and hadn't made any real progress on the self-awareness front, I lived in fandom, I lived in fanfic, and I was exclusively into the male/male relationships. It was an all-consuming unhealthy coping mechanism.

It was a way of role playing a sexual dynamic that didn't contain any femininity whatsoever because I intuitively understood that to experience femininity is inherently traumatising (and traumatising=toxic, btw, that's where the commonality between Us and Them is, two words, one experience) and I unconsciously understood that "sex is traumatising for females" because I'd had ample direct experience of this from age two upwards - and it had utterly and completely crippled my ability to be a sexual subject instead of a sexual object.

I'm more self-aware now than I was. I practised role-playing heterosexual sex without an abusive dynamic, just in the privacy of my own imagination, for fun, compulsively and obsessively, just to get a picture of how it might look.

Then I made a conscious effort to step into the picture, and role-play what hetsex without an abusive dynamic with me in it might look like. It's an ongoing process. It's the feminist flipside to the antifeminist rape fantasy. I've had both; they're functionally the same thing - role-playing the sort of sex you have an expectation of getting.

(That's where BDSM fits in, isn't it?)

I still haven't worked out if I'm actually sexually attracted to men (I think because the word-lens we use to define sexual attraction doesn't have scope to capture the degree to which I am consciously aware that my sexual capacities have been shaped by the evolutionary pressure inside my own head to appease the male sexual urge) but I've realised I've come so far that the odds of me ever meeting a man I could have a genuinely non-abusive relationship with are nil and I'm fine with that.

And I know I'm not yet capable of handling my instinctive response to an indicator of someone else's sexual interest in a psychologically-healthy way that I can usefully process, so I still haven't got enough data to start on role-playing f/f inside my head. But it's on the to-do list, and I'm working my way around to it from several sides at once.

So, yeah. There's a few of the Things I've Learned About Toxic Femininity As A Woman Who Refuses To Submit To Identifying Herself Through The Lens Of Transman.

Fascinating post Tyro.

Sorry not to be able to contribute a more erudite response, but that really is one of the most self indulgent, contradictory and nonsensical things I've ever read. At least I thought so until I followed some of the links to other pieces about gender identities ...

Sometimes I really think all this stuff is for sure a class thing

All of the young transmen I know are poor. They are all vulnerable, don't fit in with peers and live somewhere where the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity are strong. I can see why 'identifying' out of that is attractive to someone with limited life experience.

Some will escape to uni away from their little town and that coincidental finding of a better life amongst the middle classes may entrench their view that being trans helped them.

I don't think it's all simply self indulgence (though clearly some are). I think those who mutilate themselves do so from sincere need.

It's sadly ironic that we all want to pull down gender stereotypes but are busy arguing with each other. (That does not mean I think we can back down)

Ah.

This is the person who has been given dfe money to create lessons for Educate and Celebrate and has written books published by Jessica Kingsley on early transition.

So they're basically projecting their confusion on the UK's children.

This is the book:

www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01M5IMA9H/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Recent article on the book.

Has there been a thread on this?

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/09/04/transgender-children-medically-treated-risk-serious-irreversible/

"transmasculine folx"

I'm sure it's been commented on, but I got that far and came back here to write about it. Omg. Since when were "KS" offensive/gendered letters.

I'll go and finish reading it now but seriously

From the telegraph article:

*After analysing a series of books that are circulated in British schools, Dr Matthews found that much of the information given about medical transition is “inaccurate”, adding that “potential harms are ignored, glossed over or falsified”.

She cited a book called Can I Tell You About Gender Diversity? which is aimed at children aged seven plus. The story’s protagonist is a 12-year-old character called Kit who is transitioning from female to male by using hormone blockers to stop the onset of puberty.

The opening passage reads: “My name is Kit and I’m 12 years old. I live in a house with my mum and dad, and our dog, Pickle. When I was born, the doctors told my mum and dad that they had a baby girl, and so for the first few years of my life that’s how my parents raised me. This is called being assigned female at birth. I wasn’t ever very happy that way.”
Later in the story, Kit declares that “the best thing about hormone blockers is that if I change my mind then they won’t hurt my body”.*

'Compression like “this is a space for women and non-binary people”, where trans masculine and non-binary folks find themselves grouped in with “Ladies”.'

Ladies?

God I hate that word.

Folx makes me think that someone was trying to talk about a fox and suffered from a case of the fat fingers. Or possibly that they were drunk typing.

It's twee and massively irritating.

Later in the story, Kit declares that “the best thing about hormone blockers is that if I change my mind then they won’t hurt my body”.

Tell that to the girls who took them for precocious puberty and ended up with bones like 90 year olds in their 20s.

Tyro

Yes I understand what you mean, great points.

I agree we may see ROGD in boys linked to patriarchial trauma soon. Although I think the drag scene is offering some an outlet which avoids full on transition.

Whereas the girls are moving towards non binary which still means mastectomies and taking T.

*Sometimes I really think all this stuff is for sure a class thing
It’s like all this is really all her life is. There seems to be nothing else in her life *

I am not sure if I'd say class, though maybe sometimes. And for the reason you state, sometimes class struggle gives people something more to think about, to do, a more material struggle to identify with.

But I would say that increasingly young people with material struggles like money or class are trying to see them through a lens of gender. And this may be a controversial statement, but I think that in the same way people sometimes try and conceptualise their struggles about those things, or around mental health, as being about something that demands more social response. Right now those are race, sexual orientation, and gender - society recognises those as the things that instead of just suggesting you are a loser, you are actually oppressed and you can make certain claims against that oppression.

But what I do think is a real factor with a lot of these kids is that they seem to have a huge intellectual deficit in their lives, I might even say a sort of spiritual deficit. Like they need to get out there and work at a woman's shelter or soup kitchen, learn to play an instrument, get themselves an allotment and put their hands in the soil, and read a Graham Green novel or learn about art or listen to Bach. They don't seem to have any sense of connectivity, or ability to think about meaning, or anything very concrete to put it all together with.

Gender is a catchall for anything and everything that isn't going right in their lives.

StrangeLookingParasite

"I come back time and again to the idea of the gender tally. How do we collect enough points to ‘pass’ as being male?

But why even bother? Why give a toss about what gets called male? Or female?"

It really does show that gender identity is not just how one views oneself, it is also about everyone else buying into the version of reality. I do understand this and why it is but it seems to be placing one's own happiness hostage to what every one else thinks!

Like they need to get out there and work at a woman's shelter or soup kitchen, learn to play an instrument, get themselves an allotment and put their hands in the soil, and read a Graham Green novel or learn about art or listen to Bach

Yes to these but also there seems to be an utter disconnect with their bodies, with what they are and what they can do.

I always want to take them for a hike up a mountain, get them into martial arts or gymnastics, buy them a dog that needs walking 5 miles a day every day. Something, anything, that reconnects mind with body.

Surely true non-binary status would require one breast (no offence intended to any woman who has this not through choice).

Good point

If non binary means no breasts then it means default human is male.

Which is massively sexist.

I always want to take them for a hike up a mountain, get them into martial arts or gymnastics, buy them a dog that needs walking 5 miles a day every day. Something, anything, that reconnects mind with body.

Yes, this too, though I was thinking of the allotment in that vein. There is something about physical labour in the soil that connects us more closely both to our own bodies, and nature. You have to see yourself as part of an ecosystem, and its heavy work too, and makes people feel self-sufficient and competent.

That article is awful on so many levels. I kinda want to take it apart line by line