Laura Funkgod on good funks and bad funks

Laura Funkgod—a.k.a. Laura Becker—and I talk about attachment, Tumblr, transition, detransition, fantasy worlds and making art in my latest Genspect column:

EM: Talk to me about fantasy escapes. When do you think retreating to a fantasy world is healthy and when do you think it crosses a line?

LB: I spent a lot of time alone as a kid wrapped up in complex imaginary play. That was my favorite way to play. I’d be alone with 500 animal figurines and make up my own universes and meta-universes, rather than interacting with other people. I think that can be fine, but it becomes unhealthy when you’re failing to develop interpersonal skills. I was uncooperative and very selfish because I was used to being alone, doing my own thing. It took me a long time to learn how to give and take in a relationship and develop theory of mind.

When you have parasocial relationships with musicians and actors, it can inspire you creatively. If you really have nothing, that’s better than nothing, but it’s not the same as addressing your problems in real life. Sometimes I had that way of fantasizing about relationships with real people when they had feelings and wants and needs of their own and my magical thinking wasn’t going to work. Magical thinking is when it becomes an issue. You can use magical thinking for spiritual purposes, but when it rises to the level of, oh, I can be perceived and loved and have sex with a gay man as a female, when you’re going deeper and deeper into that fantasy of being male, that’s when it gets to the level of being damaging.

EM: Can you talk about how your relationship to imagination and fantasy has changed over time?

LB: I was humbled by reality. When you do a ton of acid and feel like you’ve been reborn spiritually and that now that you’ve accepted yourself as a woman that you’re the divine feminine and this person you met is the divine masculine and that person ends up being a perversion, that impacts you so hard that you have to wake up. You have to be self-aware of the potential of fantasy to mislead and cause harm in reality.

Honestly, I’ve had a lot of anger and grief over losing my fantasy and over losing magical thinking as a coping mechanism. I feel cynical sometimes and disillusioned, and sometimes I’m angry that I’ve had to lose magical thinking, but I also am grateful that I am no longer so susceptible to maladaptive fantasy. If you’re a highly creative person who is gifted and intelligent, if you put your mind to it, there are a lot of things that you can do. You’re able to imagine all these idealistic futures and all these synchronicities and that makes it hard to accept the limitations of reality, of your body, of other people, of your past. That’s still something that I struggle with. It’s existential. But putting your imagination into art where it’s OK to create and destroy—versus real life—can be really beneficial.

EM: You’ve written a lot about the appeal of gender to ‘quirky, sensitive, artistic weird girls.’ Can you tell me about this girl and what the appeal of gender is to her?

LB: The Archetypal FTM! She’s highly cerebral, highly creative, progressive, open to new experiences, very sensitive, overthinking, strong sense of justice, possibly neurodivergent or autistic. These girls can be so sensitive—emotionally and sensorially—that the outside world is an intimidating, overwhelming and confusing place they’d rather not participate in and that can influence retreat too heavily into her inner worlds or online worlds and make her vulnerable to magical thinking. Being highly cerebral, it can be hard for these girls to be in their bodies. It can be hard to exist in a physical space. This kind of girl may be more vulnerable to social contagion than the average because she’s so isolated or because she may lack self-competency to progress in life, and then she ends up feeling stuck in endless loops of intense thoughts, emotions, fears, and self-destructive behavior.

I also think there’s a spectrum that runs from quirky to weird, where ‘quirky’ is neutral but ‘weird’ means other people find you off-putting. You just don’t fit, on a level where there might be something wrong with you. I think the two manifestations of the archetypal FTM are the ROGD [rapid-onset gender dysphoria] girl who is very sensitive, shy, introverted, who tends to daydream and internalize, and the ‘weird’ girl who may have some borderline traits like extreme sensitivity, obsessional fixations, cognitive distortions (‘magical thinking’), lack of sense of self, fear of rejection, narcissism, and maladaptation. I think highly creative people are drawn to the creative appeal of gender and body customization. But life isn’t a cartoon fanfiction you can draw up. The body keeps the score.

Read the rest at Genspect!