"I will go to even greater extremes than the culture asks me to do"

Reading Reviving Ophelia

So, I finally read Reviving Ophelia: 

"Self-harm could be seen as a concrete interpretation of our culture’s injunction to young women to carve themselves into culturally acceptable pieces. As a metaphorical statement, self-harm could be interpreted as an act of submission: “I will do what the culture tells me to do”; an act of protest: “I will go to even greater extremes than the culture asks me to”; a cry for help: “Stop me from hurting myself in the ways that the culture encourages”; or an effort to regain control: “I will hurt myself more than the culture can hurt me." 

"As the true self was disowned, the false self was elevated. If others approved, the false self felt validated and the person was temporarily happy. With the false self in charge, all validation came from outside the person. If the false self failed to gain approval, the person was devastated... Authenticity is an ‘owning’ of all experience, including emotions and thoughts that are not socially acceptable. Girls lose confidence as they ‘disown’ themselves. They suffer enormous losses when they stop expressing their true thoughts and feelings... To totally accept the cultural definitions of femininity and conform to the pressures is to kill the self. Girls have long been trained to be feminine at considerable cost to their humanity. Another name for this training could be false-self training."

The resonance with my research on transgender identification among girls and young women is obvious. I also just wish I'd read this book as a teenager, when I was deeply wounded by rejection. In retrospect it's obvious what happened to me and why: I was a brainy, bossy, mischievous, quirky late-bloomer who clung to imaginary play while the other girls pivoted to boys and fashion. I didn't get the shifting social codes, so I ended up on the outside looking in. 

Pipher writes that "Girls have four general ways in which they can react to the cultural pressures to abandon the self. They can conform, withdraw, be depressed, or get angry."

I withdrew for years. Starving was an escape and a way to make an exception of myself, to say: none of what I can't accept and can't live with will apply—to me. I only got angry later, once I stopped exempting myself.

Alice Miller said, "'It is what we cannot see that makes us sick.' It’s important for girls to explore the impact the culture has on their growth and development. They can all benefit from consciousness-raising. Once girls understand the effects of the culture on their lives, they can fight back. They learn that they have important choices to make and ultimate responsibility for those choices. Intelligent resistance keeps the true self alive."

Right now, as we've done many times in the past, we're naturalizing and privatizing and pathologizing the conflict, locating it in girls' bodies and 'innate identities.' We're not only letting our culture off the hook—we're excluding it from the picture altogether.

I think a lot about what a detransitioned lesbian named Elle wrote: "Understanding that my gender dysphoria comes from the outside rather than from the inside like I had always believed was such a big reason of my detransition. The problem was never located in me. The problem is all around me and I can fight it instead of fighting against myself. Trans people are made to believe that they are their own enemy, that suicide might be waiting for them around the corner if they don't get medical help. This diverts attention from the fact that society is erasing gender nonconformity and meanwhile doctors are playing the heroes. This manipulative narrative gives dysphoric people the role of the victims, depriving us from any agency over our own gender dysphoria. We're at the hands of “specialists“ who want to fix us at the expense of our health. I refuse to let them locate the problem in my body anymore."