"Why can't there be men who wish they were women?"

Willem de Kooning

Let’s take another look into the virtual worlds of trans-identified boys and young men, and how they can end up stuck there, even when they desperately want to find a way out.

Take this 25-year-old, who says transition “feels like a prison.” He started to identify as trans back in 2014, when he would have been around 15 years old. He’s been taking estrogen for the last five years, as well as undergoing voice training and electrolysis and multiple rounds of ‘gender therapy.’ He’s one of the NEETs—a young man not in education, employment or training—due to his poor mental health. He “boymodes constantly,” which means he presents himself to the outside world as a man. Most people he interacts with—though in what capacity and to what extent he interacts with anybody in the real world is entirely unclear—have no idea of the identity he’s been incubating for all this time, or the steps he’s taken to realize it. He mentions a few friends who know he’s trans, but he reflects that, “wherever I've tried asking my friends to call me she/her and a female name I've always inevitably felt like I was being dishonest.”

He keeps returning to Reddit because he “can't justify why someone with my body should ever be allowed to call themselves a woman, or to pressure other people to call me a woman, or to use women's spaces and make enough of them feel unsafe or uncomfortable… I don't want to have to ask someone to ignore what their own eyes are telling them. I don't want to put on a performance for people to think of gendering me as a woman.” Elsewhere, he writes that he “would never want to trick people into believing I'm something I'm not because I was a convincing fraud. I'm caught between needing to be a real woman and needing to be honest with myself.”

Listen to the language here: dishonest, performance, trick, fraud. These are his real feelings about his trans identity and transition. These are also the sticks his fellow Redditors will use to beat him as they attempt to drag him back into compliance with the toxic belief system they all share.

He says he “doesn’t understand the idea of gender identity,” the basis for his transition. Still, he “know[s]” he’s “trans,” whatever that means. “I feel like I should be the definition of a trans woman, but I have never been able to answer why my gender dysphoria makes me a woman and not just a sick man who wishes he was a woman.” He’s begged his most supportive friends to “help me find a justification for why I'm not just a sick man” but “none of their explanations have ever felt tangible.” He keeps seeking reassurance from Reddit and a series of gender therapists, to no avail: “No matter what, I still just feel like a man.” After years of torturing himself over this question, he concludes that “[t]he closest I can find is that I strongly wish I was female and would socially interact with others as a woman if it were in my power to do so, but I don't see why a wish is more meaningful than my actual body and how I currently interact with those around me.”

He repeatedly describes himself as “lost” and suicidal. “I feel like transition hasn't helped, [and] that detransition wouldn't help either,” he despairs at one point. Not only have trans identification and transition not helped, they’ve clearly made him feel worse by providing new and specific ways for him to feel defective and wrong: “I feel so irreversibly tainted by how I was born.” When he started taking estrogen, he says he “was really hopeful that it would make me feel better, but it never did.” He stays on estrogen not because he has any hopes for passing in the future, but because he has come to fear the “poisoning” effects of his body’s natural hormone levels.

Meanwhile, he feels humiliated by the lack of “progress” he’s made toward becoming the woman he told his friends he wanted to be. This sense of humiliation is shredding his social life and driving him into ever-deeper isolation. He confesses that he hasn’t seen most of his friends “in person or spoken with them out loud online in years because I don't want to highlight and advertise my failure.”

He never mentions his family, loving, oblivious, or estranged. I wonder what they know and don’t know about his life. I wonder whether he’s told his family any of this at all, or whether he only brings his despair to Internet strangers, who cannot possibly meet him with the honesty and openness he needs because his questions and doubts threaten their white-knuckled grip on their own trans identities.

Instead, he’s subjected to coaching and the blunt application of social pressure:

“‘I am a woman inside’ is still the most accurate way to describe it. I don't know why we've shyed away from it.

To me, the whole purpose of transitioning is to get my body to match who I am within. Sometimes this process succeeds and sometimes it fails.

You've always been a woman. The problem is somewhere along the line, biology fucked up and you were born in the wrong body. Again, I don't know why we ditched these explanations.

You are who you are inside NOT however your body looks. That is gender identity. Whether you pass or not, you're still a woman.”

“What makes me a woman inside?” he asks.

“If God gave you a character creator and told you to create yourself and hit save and as soon as you do, you'll inhabit that form for all eternity, what would you create?

If you're told that pressing save will make every last bit of dysphoria disappear and you'll be totally comfortable in that body, what would you create? Did your answer change from the first question?

If you created a woman in both questions then you're a woman inside. And nothing will ever change that.

If you created a woman at first then created a man in the second place then you're a man. Atleast you want to be a man but something causes dysphoria that won't let you be a man.

I'd love to hear your answers but you don't have to. I hope it tells you something about yourself though.”

His interlocutor’s questions are utterly detached from reality: If God were a video-game designer (!)… if you could create yourself… if you could create yourself and then feel totally comfortable in that creation… None of this has anything to do with transition and what it can accomplish and what will remain hopelessly beyond the reach of even the most advanced medical technologies. Nothing remotely like this is on offer.

To his credit, the young man recognizes the absurdity and uselessness of these questions: “I'm afraid it doesn't, really [tell me something about myself]. I can recognize that it's a mind that wants to be a woman's, but I don't think I can justify saying it's a woman's mind, because it doesn't belong to a woman.”

When he says he’s “not sure [he’s] comfortable with reducing womanhood to a performance,” he gets hit with Judith Butler: “gender is a performance.”

He’s told he’s “valid” (“Holy shit, sister. You are valid. Stop the train. You are valid.”) and that he “do[es]n’t need anyone else’s permission” to see himself as the woman he is. His response to this is heartbreaking: “I need it to not feel dishonest to how i feel on the inside.”

In response to the flat assertion that “men don’t wish they were women”—therefore, he’s a woman—he says, “I guess I don't really understand this part. Why can't there be men who wish they were women?” In return for asking this sensible question, he is treated like an amateur birdwatcher who claims to have spotted an exotic bird-of-paradise at the local marsh:

“This is a different question. Of course there COULD be men who wished they were women, just like there could be multiverses or aliens or animals unknown to science.

What do you think is more plausible? A 2022 study estimated 1.64 million people in The United States were transgender. Could you be transgender, like so many other people are and have been, or do you think you have some rare, undiscovered illness that presents like being transgender but because reasons isn’t that?”

Yes, the mere possibility that there might be “men who wish they were women” is multiverse-and-aliens-type stuff.

The phrase “because reasons” crops up all the time in online trans communities. It’s a convenient, mocking stand-in for all possible sources of doubt that means no one ever has to grapple with—or even mention—anything of substance.

Meanwhile, the original poster’s feeling that he would be “tricking” people if he ever managed to pass as a woman is compared to the ways everyone fails to live up to “ideal woman/manhood.” You could say this is comparing apples to oranges, but that’s far too generous:

“every gender conforming woman, cis or trans ‘tricks people’ into believing she's more of an ideal woman than she is; body language, vocal affect, clothes which are cut to create a body type, etc.

and everyone cis or trans cannot live up to ideal woman/manhood, theres always going to be something here or there that isn't ideal.”

And:

“cis women who don't pass are still women so trans women who don't pass are still women. sounds like you might be dealing with some internalized transmisogyny.”

Others try to leverage collective pressure to affirm one another’s identities as a source of reassurance about one’s own shaky identity claims:

“For me what helped was shifting the focus from myself and see it more socially / politically, if other trans women have such rights no matter their levels of passing then I kind of had the same duty towards myself to fight for my own right over cis people’s pressures (whether real or hypothetical).”

Finally, all that’s left is this: He is a bad person for having doubts.

“Your issue is internalized transphobia. Work on not being a transphobe, which is beneficial regardless of whether transitioning is the answer for you… It’s wrong to describe yourself as a man wishing he were a woman because that’s transphobic. Transphobia is bigotry and bigotry is wrong.”

He is a bad person for expressing these doubts in such undressed language. He is a bad person for making other trans people feel bad by reminding them of the futility of the quest to erase a hated self and play God by creating a new and beloved avatar and imagining that one could ever fully inhabit such a fabrication.

What would real compassion look like here?

Yes, it’s possible for a man to feel this way.

No, that doesn’t mean you’ll feel this way forever.

Yes, you need help, but maybe gender’s not the problem.

No, just because transition failed doesn’t mean everything you try will fail.

Yes, there’s a way forward that doesn’t involve any trickery or pretending.