Don't you dare keep that woman prisoner!
And other pressure tactics
The original post disappeared overnight, before I had a chance to archive it. But it almost doesn’t matter what it said, word for word. Every story sounds more or less the same. In this case, we’ve got a 30-something man, on the verge of getting married, vowing to keep his trans identity to himself. He declares that he accepts himself as a woman deep down, but in real life, he knows it can never be: “I can only be so in my mind.”
He doesn’t say where on earth he got this idea or what it means to him that he feels like something he has no experience of being.
This is all rather beside the point. The point is, his problem is everybody’s problem, and nobody gets to describe himself in his own terms or ‘solve’ (or shelve) everybody’s problem in an unconventional way. That’s too threatening.
What matters is the response, where his fellow deeply disturbed men set about dismantling barriers to transition in a few easy and not at all manipulative steps:
Taking hormones is no big deal!
So, why wouldn’t you try it? It takes months to see any effects. And if you don’t like how you feel, just stop!
...girl, literally just start taking estrogen. No matter what happens, if you start that precription, you'll know what you have to do - whether it's transition, or stay the same. You'll know. The regret you're gonna live with living like this is unbearable.
Not only that: the way your body responds to exogenous hormones will resolve any doubts you have (and you know you have a lot of doubts!) about whether your body was meant to “run” on “E” or “T”!
This way of thinking makes your endocrine system sound like a car engine, never mind that the wrong fuel can destroy an engine. That, and the endocrine system is not an engine. So, whether you accept or reject the analogy (and you should definitely reject it), there are problems here.
You’ll never feel differently than you do right now
This feeling you have is only going to compound on itself and will never go away.
Do you want to live the rest of your life with a part of you screaming to be heard? Can you live the rest of your life like that? Sincerely, how long do you think you can handle something like this eating you up from the inside out? You’re already at the point where you need to vent about it on Reddit, how long do you think will it take for enough pressure to build up that it starts spilling out sideways?
Those feelings won’t magically go away, so your choice is living your one life as a lie, or embracing who you are. Neither are easy, but I guarantee you one is much harder than the other
As much as I hate to say this on a venting post, you should steel yourself. The dysphoria's only gonna get worse as time goes on - especially considering you understand it now.
I went through the motions for years(most of my life) with it slowly eating me inside. Please don't do that to yourself.
There’s no other way to deal with these feelings
“You’ll never feel differently than you do right now” goes hand-in-hand with the claim that there’s no other way to deal with these feelings and that—if you don’t transition—you’re just suppressing or denying your true self, either forever or until you break:
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that feeling likely won't ever go away. No matter how far back in the closet you keep it. It's never too late to transition, but it can be harder the more you entrench yourself in a life that isn't authentic to you.
Imagine you are going to feel 10-20 years from now if you think it's too late already. Obviously nobody here can make that decision for you, but you made your cage, and you're the only one holding the keys to the lock. Be careful that it doesn't creep up on you. It manifested itself as alcoholism, shame, and depression in me.
If you choose to not transition you'll be endlessly misrable. If you choose to transition you'll be briefly misrable.
Do you think you can live with this forever? You will only accumulate frustration and transfer it to everything around you.
I’m almost 40 and I only just started. I have to tell you- if I had stayed as I was, “acting” the part of a cis male and never trying to change, I would still be locked in a deep depression, and likely dead in a few years by my own hand.
Suppression and being ‘normal’ wrecked my health over the long term. Those feelings never went away and eventually my suppression strategies failed.
… once that metaphorical egg cracked, and I finally understood why I've been quietly miserable my entire adult life, the prospect of leaving things as they were for even a second longer than I had to was intolerable. I'm not just hopelessly broken - there's actually a way to feel fully alive and maybe even happy for more than a few minutes at a time? Sign me up! Even knowing I may risk blowing up my life as it stands, that's a good bet - as I am, most of my energy is spent forcing the despair down so I can perform a halfway-reasonable simulation of living. I've wasted enough time twisting myself up into the semblance of what everyone else thought I was. I want to find out - finally - who I really am.
What I'm trying to say here is: tell "the pragmatist in you" to go jump in a lake. You only get one lifetime. Why would you want to spend it forcing yourself to pretend you're an unhappy man, instead of finding out what it might be like to be a happy woman? You're falling prey to the sunk cost fallacy in a big way here.
That guy everybody thinks you are never actually existed in the first place, so getting rid of him is no big deal
If you mean the "male version" of you - was he ever really alive in the first place? Or was that just a mask you didn't know you'd been wearing all this time?
From my point of view I was never really alive in the first place I was just existing waiting for the day it would finally end.
Who cares what anybody else thinks?
This appeal is closely tied to the claim that the person everybody else thinks you are (a.k.a., a man) is just a mask/imposter/walking corpse. Why would anybody who purports to love you be attached to something so superficial? And, if you find out that your friends and family only love the mask you’ve been wearing, you’re better off without them:
The person you thought you were - and that everyone around you thinks they know - is a distorted shadow of your full self. Those that truly love you will realize that easily if you have the courage to take that mask off. As for those who can't or won't accept that fully-realized version of you - if all they're willing to care about is that lifeless mask, even when you can't stand to keep wearing it anymore, why should you suborn yourself to their flawed views?
LET THAT WOMAN GO!!
This is by far the strangest entry in the disinhibition genre… When the original poster says he feels like “this other person [I] could have been is just...dead?”, he gets hit with a bizarre appeal to his humanitarian side:
She's not dead - she's trapped inside you. And you're the only one that can let her out to finally live.
This reads like a perverse attempt to activate a man’s inner Saint George emergency response system: SET THAT WOMAN FREE!!!
(Please don’t.)
I was struck by this comment:
"...I finally understood why I've been quietly miserable my entire adult life, the prospect of leaving things as they were for even a second longer than I had to was intolerable. I'm not just hopelessly broken - there's actually a way to feel fully alive and maybe even happy for more than a few minutes at a time? Sign me up! Even knowing I may risk blowing up my life as it stands, that's a good bet - as I am, most of my energy is spent forcing the despair down so I can perform a halfway-reasonable simulation of living. I've wasted enough time twisting myself up into the semblance of what everyone else thought I was. I want to find out - finally - who I really am."
Imagine reading this anywhere else. There's no mention of "gender" or "transition" here. It tells the universal and timeless story of the existential angst we all deal with to some extent or another: "Am I really living? Life is hard and sometimes feels intolerable. Am I living for myself or who others think I am or should be? Am I a broken person? Can I be free of all this self-doubt and the pain that is part of the human experience?" Seen anywhere else, we would recognize this talk for what it is, not a sign someone is "born in the wrong body." The promises of transitioning and hormones provide a direct path out of all of the pain of being human. This is what I'm talking about with my comment on the "questions about the boys" post from last week. Is there some form of AGP that is a pseudo-AGP, a script picked up from being on these Reddit pages where this kind of generalized life dissatisfaction gets molded into an AGP script that can easily take over a man's life, and some boys and men are more susceptible to latching onto this explanation and the script than others because of individual life circumstances and personality and temperament traits?
(I'm not denying AGP or fetishes/paraphilias exist. I'm saying this might apply to a subset of the men and boys)
Yes, this assumption that the body is a machine rather than, say, an ecosystem, is so clear when they assume exogenous hormones are like fuel for an engine—you’ll run better on the “correct” fuel! When, of course, it’s more like dumping oil into a coastal ecosystem.