But it won't make me happy!

from that emoji movie

In a dark echo of Andrea Long Chu’s now-iconic New York Times op-ed, “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy (And It Shouldn’t Have To),” we now have “Transitioning won’t make me happy but I’m still going to go through with it anyway.”

First, let’s revisit the original. Long Chu begins by unfolding his tale of woe, which goes something like this: Major surgery is a drag! His body will regard his new ‘vagina’ as a permanent wound. Furthermore, there’s no real reason to think it will help Long Chu feel any better about the worst and second-worst things that have ever happened to him (being male and being trans, in that order). And so on.

Basic familiarity with narrative arcs leads the reader to expect that we must have started this story at rock bottom and will not keep digging.

Long Chu keeps digging:

I feel demonstrably worse since I started on hormones. One reason is that, absent the levees of the closet, years of repressed longing for the girlhood I never had have flooded my consciousness. I am a marshland of regret. Another reason is that I take estrogen — effectively, delayed-release sadness, a little aquamarine pill that more or less guarantees a good weep within six to eight hours.

Like many of my trans friends, I’ve watched my dysphoria balloon since I began transition. I now feel very strongly about the length of my index fingers — enough that I will sometimes shyly unthread my hand from my girlfriend’s as we walk down the street. When she tells me I’m beautiful, I resent it. I’ve been outside. I know what beautiful looks like. Don’t patronize me.

I was not suicidal before hormones. Now I often am.

These do, indeed, seem like very good reasons to not only stop someone from undergoing major irreversible surgical interventions but also to rethink every single aspect of transition.

Having thrown suicide into the ring, Long Chu concludes that “Nothing, not even surgery, will grant me the mute simplicity of having always been a woman. I will live with this, or I won’t.” This ‘gesture’ —if we can call flaying your penis a ‘gesture’—is entirely futile. His desires are plainly unattainable. He’s not sure whether he can live with the impossibility of ever getting what he really wants.

The argument for transition seems to boil down to: I may not be able to live with it, but I can’t live without it.

---

Enter our Redditor:

When I was closeted and for the majority of my time transitioning I believed that transitioning would make me happy; that it would fix all of my problems and insecurities. Only within the last few months I’ve reflected on it all and realised: Transitioning will never make me happy, I will never be satisfied with my transition.

I pass fairly often and I’m certain one day I’ll be able to go fully stealth but even the thought of that doesn’t make me happy. I will never be biologically male, I missed out on a boyhood, I missed out on being raised as a boy and being taught how to be a man. I’m afraid that I will never understand what it means to be a man. I have missed out on so many important experiences that boys/men go through, especially gay guys (cause I’m gay). I will never have a ‘proper’ cock; one that gets hard naturally and produces fertile cum. I will be dependent on testosterone forever, there will always be a part of me that’s “female”. Anyone who knows that I’m trans won’t see me as a real man, only a delusional girl who’s trying to be a man. I will never be my parent’s first-born son, or my brother’s older brother. I have been and will be rejected and hurt a million times by people for being trans. If I had at least half of these things then I would be satisfied with my transition but obviously I never will.

It’s made me consider de-transitioning a few times, because if I’m not even getting what I want then what’s even the point of all this suffering?? but I’m still going to go through with it. I’ve somewhat made peace with the fact that I’ve missed out on the life and body I want, and I’ve realised that I’d rather live a mediocre life as a trans man than a miserable life as a cis woman. Even thought I would be treated better as a cis woman. Maybe I’ll be more lucky in the next life lol

This woman begins by laying out her unrealistic and only recently renounced expectations for transition: that it would make her happy and fix all her problems. Now she knows better. She will never be happy and satsified with what transition has to offer. She predicts that she will always be seen as a “delusional girl” who will be dependent on testosterone and incapable of ever eradicating every last reminder of her femaleness from her body.

In fact, she’s not even sure what it all means to her. She’s “afraid [she’ll] never understand what it means to be a man.” So what, exactly, is she identifying with? What is it that she—disillusioned as she is (“what’s even the point of all this suffering??”)—is still chasing?

The thing is, members of online trans communities say these kinds of things all the time* but then label these feelings ‘internalized transphobia’ or ‘imposter syndrome’ or ‘intrusive thoughts’ and promise they're trying to Do The Work and Be Better. The only thing that’s remarkable about this post in any way is that she doesn’t hide from herself behind any of those labels. She doesn’t try to dismiss her feelings as pathological wrongthink. Her negative thoughts about transition are dead on and she knows it. Like Long Chu, she seeks (whether or not she achieves) radical honesty about the utter futility of it all and how she’s going to do it anyway. Eyes wide open, I guess?

But some members of the community aren’t having it and set about trying to drag her back into line:

The world out there is full of cis men who, unfortunately, experience for example testicular cancer. Or who lose their penises due to unfortunate circumstances such as car crash, work accident, and so on.
Plenty of cis men who are born with hypogonadism and must rely on HRT for life, just like us.
And they do experience similar thoughts to us, "Oh I'll never be male enough" "I'm never gonna be happy again". Think of all the cis men who are unfertile and they face depression because they'll never be able to make their spouses pregnant and coinceive a child together.

If I had a penny for every time men hypothetically losing penises in freak accidents and feeling sad about it comes up in online FTM communities, I would be a wealthy woman. (I still wouldn’t have a penis, though.) The line of argument seems to be: Some men feel inadequate in their masculinity and yet remain male, therefore women can be men. I don’t know about you, but I don’t find the logic of this terribly compelling, much less reassuring.

If you accept a suggestion from a quite old dude, please consider stop detransitioning.
Because I am not able to see how going back on the female side could stop these intrusive thoughts you've been having.

Yes, the thought that you will never, in fact, become male is just an ‘intrusive thought.’ Nothing can be done about that. Time to accept you’re a man!

This commenter signs off with a “big manly hug.”

Even if you were born as xy, it’s not a guarantee that your life would’ve been perfect anyways. But you can control your future at this point and make things hopefully more ideal for yourself. Maybe not perfect, but nobody’s life is perfect anyways.

This is, of course, in a trivial and totally-beside-the-point sense, true: nobody’s life is perfect and even men are not to be numbered among the nobodies whose lives are perfect. This doesn’t make transition and a future spent playing pretend a great life plan, but I digress.

There are plenty of people out there who will see you as a real man even knowing you're trans, because you are. If I'm reading you correctly, you also are your parents' first born son and your brother's older brother. I'm sorry if they don't want to accept that, but that's a failure on their part, not yours.

“We will play pretend with you even nobody in the mean old offline world buys in and even if you yourself are halfway over it.”

*Including such variations as: I feel so much worse since coming out as trans. I feel like a fraud. I feel like an imposter. I feel like I’m lying to everybody all the time. I can’t accept that I will never be truly male. I’m worried I’ll regret this. What if it’s a phase? What if it’s a hyperfixation? What if I just hate being a woman? I hate that I will never have a real dick. I hate the way the back of my skull is shaped. I don’t feel like a real man. I don’t know what it would even mean to feel like a man but I don’t. Rinse, wash, repeat.