A short guide to how understanding terminology may help with therapy

All of us come across these terms through contact with professionals, or on sites like Susan's, but they mean different things to different people. This post in this much neglected blog is here because Mrs Oliphant inspired it, by prompting me to remember back. You may or may not find any or all of this useful because it's written for all trans people and so considers everyone including 'intersex' people, who face many of the issues we do. This is just one model but it was the one that worked for me and for people I worked with.

English words are as fluid as the language itself, which is why the Oxford English Dictionary has pages of definitions for many. 'Sex' is a perfect example, because while it means the sexual act to some, it can also describe whether a person was assigned male or female at birth. It gets more complicated than that, because 'sex' is weighted for many trans people, not only because most cultures see it as binary, but also because 'sex' is sometimes taken to be synonymous with 'gender.'

At the core of problem I live with every day is I was brought up to be gendered masculine because I was assigned male at birth. Others will have been brought up the other way around, while a lucky few will have been understood by their parents and brought up with a gender that is not congruent with their sex assigned at birth, but instead congruent with their wishes.

The success of trans people brought up like the latter group shows it's possible to bring up someone in a gender which is not aligned with the sex they were assigned at birth, if they wish it so. The dysphoria the rest of us suffer shows how badly it works if we aren't.

To go further we need some definitions, so I'm taking three from the WHO, variations of which are increasingly used by health and social care organisations.

Sex

Sex refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs.

Gender

Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed.  This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time.

Aren't gender and sex the same thing?

Yes... and no, but increasingly pyscho-social professionals, researchers and health and social care bodies are splitting them apart to reflect the lived experiences of their clients or groups they study.

Gender and sex are related to but are different from gender identity, but the key message is that in this sense gender is an expectation by society of someone's behaviour, down to the most nuanced of interactions, based on which sex they appear to be. People are so used to reacting to the smallest clues around gendered behaviour that if even slight mismatches occur, they feel awkward because they don't know what to do. Behaviours that awkwardness will trigger range may extend through denial to flat out rejection at the most extreme, with non-binary trans people often finding themselves in the firing line because they don't conform to any gender.

Gender Identity

Gender identity refers to a person's deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person's physiology or designated sex at birth.

That's it then? You've run out of definitions? Surely?

Not a chance :-) If this was that easy, none of us would be here, would we?

To show how complex the interactions between sex and gender are, gender needs even more definitions, because even here, many people default to a masculine and feminine binary. We've touched on this already, but maintaining that sex and gender are the same orphans a substantial and growing slice of trans people who are non-binary, as well as people who are intersex, many of whom are genetically male, but are taken for granted to be female at birth and so are brought up gendered female.

Whatever flavour of trans we may be, a split between sex assigned at birth and gender is something all of us have spent decades coming to equilibrium with, whatever our preferred gender may be and even if we believe gender and sex to mean the same thing.

Why?

Conservatives would spit gender into a binary, with masculinity and femininity as polar opposites. So the 'more' definitions we need are masculinity and femininity.

Masculinity

Masculinity is a cultural/social model defined by agentic traits and behaviours including independence, assertiveness, courage, ambition, leadership, rationality, dominance, emotional control and willingness to take risks.

Femininity

Femininity is a cultural/social model defined by communal traits and behavior including dependence, docility, empathy, sensitivity, modesty, humility, unselfishness, supportiveness, cheerfulness, emotional lability and a nurturing, yielding nature.

These definitions of masculinity and femininity reflect how society sees masculinity and femininity, not how things are in all human beings. This is because, as the WHO definition makes clear, masculinity and femininity are not innate, nor fixed across all societies and all time.

Once you are onboard with this, you'll understand there's no biological reason why someone who's assigned male at birth (AMAB) cannot be brought up to be gendered feminine should they wish to be, nor any reason why someone who is assigned female at birth (AFAB) can't be brought up to have masculine behaviours and traits if that's what they want. With parents who are supportive of their trans children's wishes, that's often what happens and doing so eases gender affirming care enormously for their children by cutting off a major source of conflict at the pass.

Which is not to say it's an easy path to tread even so, but that's because of other people's prejudices about gender. If you want examples of this, look at the news, which is full of social conservatives (small 'c') who feel so threatened by any challenge to society's equivalence of sex and gender and who are so committed to the sex/gender binary and so threatened by having to change their own attitudes, they feel free assigning criminal motives to anyone who challenges the status quo.

The majority of members of Susan's find ourselves here because we've been brought up gendered in a way with which we disagree. But we are members of society too and so how we understand our personal situation will vary. At one end, some trans people are so strongly binary they feel they've been born in the wrong body and commit to fixing that so they can at last align their gender identity and sex. For them, sex and gender are equivalent, or become so.

At the other end of the scale are non-binary people (rapidly becoming the most common group of trans folk) for whom that solution will not work in any way, for reasons I need not explain. In between are many trans people who feel sidelined by other groups, who aren't truly non-binary and could be described as gender fluid. Some of this group will have found themselves labelled as crossdressers but they are as trans as everyone else here. If you are in this group, you are experiencing another flavour of an issue we all share.

Whichever situation you are in, all of us finds ourselves left to deal with the psychological wreckage of having absorbed at a subconscious level a set of gendered thought patterns, values and behaviours with which we feel no affinity, but which have become so deeply embedded we can't switch them off, leaving them to gnaw away at us.

Sexual orientation

Finally, we have sexual orientation, in some senses the last frontier of transgender. With the exception of a few authorities, right up to the moment Alfred Kinsey published in 1948, the assumption was that if you were, say, AFAB, you should be brought up to be gendered feminine and would be heterosexual. The bad news is little has changed.

Notice I don't say "attracted to the 'opposite' sex" as you often read even here. 'Opposite' implies a belief in binary and few things in nature are binary. Kinsey was one of the first authors to develop the idea that sexual attraction lay on a spectrum and people might lie at any point along it.

Kinsey wasn't a god and not everything he wrote was right, but his assertion that sexuality was not dictated by sex assigned at birth still holds up all these years later. He wasn't the first to suggest it, but was prominent among those who helped make the concept stick.

The 'normative' triad

Despite that, in the binary world our culture regards as 'normative' today, there's still the triad of expectation that someone AFAB = should be gendered feminine = will be attracted to AMAB. Or conversely, if you are AMAB, you should be gendered male and attracted to people who are AFAB. The 'normative' alignment of the triad lies at the heart of assumptions in society about roles and social relationships and exerts an almost irresistible subconscious pressure to conform to the expectations we sweep up under the header 'gender'.

We experience the power of this equation within ourselves because conflict between the first two elements of the triad form the wellspring of our gender dysphoria. But on top of being brought up to internalise being gendered in a way we do not wish to be gendered, we've had pounded into us the expectation we'll be attracted to another sex than the one we were assigned to at birth. This is the least of our worries when we're struggling with the massive issues around gender, but one which has the potential to catch some of us out at the worst possible moment. Why?

Because the normative equation has such power, many of us only came to accept we were trans once we were well into adulthood. Many of us had no choice, because our parents wouldn't countenance the idea of us being trans and there are members here where the acceptance has happened as late as their sixties and seventies. This adds in another dimension, because the longer it takes us to overcome the equation and reach acceptance, the more likely we'll be to have formed a long term relationship... and because the normative equation applies as powerfully to our partners as it does to us.

When someone in an existing partnership accepts they are trans and particularly when they enter gender affirming care (GAC), their partners often smash up against the normative triad so hard the impact destroys the relationship. This is another challenge of being trans which must be faced and it's a complex one, but be aware it's there and with most partners will have to be dealt with. The only advice I have is choose your time and it's better done sooner than later.

Be aware another axis of sexual orientation may also come into play during GAC. A few members have found their sexual orientation has changed to some extent after they've begun the GAC pathway and the change has come unexpectedly. This is possibly the influence of hormones, but it may also happen that when we at last overcome the gendering decided for us at birth some of us also loosen the 'normative' alignment between our gendering and our sexual attraction. They are part of the same triad, after all.

For anyone experiencing this, one way to look at it is just as many of us try to submerge our dysphoria by overcompensating our adoption of the gender we've been brought up in (as in someone AMAB who goes through a period of being hypermasculine) some of us also submerge being mostly straight or even gay using the same process. Hey, it's no coincidence some gay people come out in mid-life, it isn't something that just happened to them, instead, they've finally seen past the pressure to be normative. Just like we did. Their relationships take a similar hit.

This post is an advert for therapy and in the next, I'll explain another part of my journey which contributed to it. Therapy is a powerful part of gender affirming care because if we don't get our heads right, what we do with our bodies will never be enough. Only through engaging with therapy will most of us be able to navigate the minefield the triad has laid at our feet and at the feet of those we love and who love us.

Perhaps one day a court of human rights will declare it a crime to bring up someone in a gender they do not wish to be brought up in. Why? Bringing someone up in a gender that's wrong for them is surely a form of abuse and while it's (wrongly) sanctioned today, societies of the future may look back on it kindly.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 04, 2025, 06:21:44 AMFor anyone experiencing this, one way to look at it is just as many of us try to submerge our dysphoria by overcompensating our adoption of the gender we've been brought up in (as in someone AMAB who goes through a period of being hypermasculine)

This was absolutely true for me, even though I had no clue that I was doing it. In my mind, I was trying to avoid physical assaults, so I adopted the role. To prevent being bullied I had to become a bully. It wasn't until after three failed marriages (and several other relationships) that I sought therapy to figure out what was wrong with me in these scenarios. I was shocked to learn that gender dysphoria was at the root of it all.

Thank you for this post!

Wow! I inspired that? I feel like Little Jack Horner. And I needed to hear all those words. Lori's words, too. Like her, I overcompensated (what normal sissy boy joins the Marine Corps at 17?). But then there is this: as a male, I am heterosexual. The woman I dream I am is also heterosexual. So, I have dreamt, as a woman, of being with a man. Of falling in love with a man. And, living as a man, I have fallen in love with more women than I can remember. Here's the rub, when, as a woman, I am intimate with a man, the experience is sensual and romantic with little to no eroticism. The few times I can remember dreaming of being with a man as a man and the one time I have engaged sexually with a man while awake, there is nothing romantic or sensual about the experience. It is more violent than erotic. And, afterwards, dreaming or awake, I feel as though my body was violated. Even worse, so was my spirit. Where do I fit on any spectrum?   

Quote from: Lori Dee on April 04, 2025, 09:35:58 AMIt wasn't until after three failed marriages (and several other relationships) that I sought therapy to figure out what was wrong with me in these scenarios. I was shocked to learn that gender dysphoria was at the root of it all.

There go we all Lori. I only escaped this rabbit hole by accident and also because I had the luck to meet Ginny early on. It gave me a window into something I'd never been able to see before, or if I had seen, couldn't comprehend. All this psychology probably reads like crap, but it was only through it I found I could understand myself and the motives which drove me.

The hardest thing in the world is levelling with yourself about who you are for the first time. I was as bad as anyone at that. Yet once you've done it, all the pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into place, because you have to level to see its a puzzle. I think?

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 04, 2025, 10:42:10 AMWhere do I fit on any spectrum?

I have no idea where I fit on any spectrum, but I know I'm not as straight as I used to think I was. It's seeing the normative triad of sex, gender and sexuality as a set of clothes you're given to wear, that allows you to imagine, 'Well, what would happen if I had another set of clothes?'

That's where your dreams were taking you. In dreams, we can be whoever we like and wear whatever clothes we like, because we gift ourselves the freedom of fantasy. So in dreams, your masculinity scripts could be unchained, allowing you to have sensual sex with a man (with you a woman), but in real life, you couldn't unchain the scripts, so the experience was completely different and deeply affected by them. I can have a go at explaining that another way if it makes no sense.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 04, 2025, 10:58:39 AMI can have a go at explaining that another way if it makes no sense.

"Twas brillig and the slithy toves..." I'm not sure dreamscapes are amenable to logic and your response was more than cogent and certainly adequate. The man of my dreams is a character I created almost a decade ago and we've been together ever since. But it's not really like I created him or even the woman he holds in his arms when we are together. It is as though they are creating me, and I am compelled to tell our story. Actually, TanyaG, my dream world seems to be the healthiest part of me. Not that the rest of me is seriously impaired or even unhappy. But in my dreams, we are no longer old. BTW, I added Ginny to the long list of women I love. I can do that, now that I am old.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 04, 2025, 12:39:09 PMBTW, I added Ginny to the long list of women I love. I can do that, now that I am old.

I just checked your age and the good news is you don't have to worry about the age gap, because if she's still around, she'll only be a few years younger than you    For me, she'll forever be in her late teens and daring the world to submit to her will.

I'm still in my late teens, too. Might just be a match made in heaven. Even better news: tomorrow, my daughter and I will shop online for a pretty summer dress for my profile picture. I owe you big time, TanyaG.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 04, 2025, 04:13:53 PMEven better news: tomorrow, my daughter and I will shop online for a pretty summer dress for my profile picture.

Zowee!!! Tell her she rocks! And all the other things I'm sure you know exactly how to say to make sure she knows how much she has done 

Quote from: TanyaG on April 04, 2025, 04:21:55 PMZowee!!! Tell her she rocks! And all the other things I'm sure you know exactly how to say to make sure she knows how much she has done 

I will tell her. And she does rock. Now, back to the issue at hand--I was thinking of something long and flowing. A summer dress. Modest, but bright and beautiful.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 04, 2025, 04:47:46 PMNow, back to the issue at hand--I was thinking of something long and flowing. A summer dress. Modest, but bright and beautiful

Any result that ends up with the pair of you happy with each other when you walk out with the purchase is going to look good on you. Do you know what turned her head on this?

Empathy and therapy for those who love us

Much of the stress of being trans lies in how others react to us and it can be particularly acute with people we've known well and for a long time, especially partners. My experience of being trans is it takes us years to adjust, despite the constant stimulus of dysphoria. If it takes us that long to come to terms with ourselves, despite having such a strong driver toward acceptance, imagine how long it takes for someone else to adjust when they don't have dysphoria?

It's tempting to dismiss people who are dismissing us. I should know, I've tried it. When we reach the stage where we accept we're trans, we're a caterpillar yet to metamorphose into whatever butterfly we will become. At that point, our acceptance of being trans allows us to see the possibilities and rewards of metamorphosis, but others, even people who know us well, only see the caterpillar. It would be asking more of them than the average human is equipped to see to expect them to be enthusiastic at that stage.

I did psychotherapy with trans people from the late 1980s after a UK organisation asked for professionals willing to do it. I never told anyone I was trans because it's about the client, not the therapist, but the skeleton of the story everyone told me was the same regardless of which way they were travelling (as in whether they were assigned female at birth or assigned male at birth). It was a story I shared, so much so I experienced repeated déjà vu.

Sometimes, we need to support others to support ourselves

A significant burden trans people face is in order to retain friends and family, we end up doing their psychotherapy. It happens because contacts of trans people don't sit up and think, 'Hey, I should seek help with adjusting to my partner/relative/friend's' revelation', instead they are usually so overwhelmed they dwell on the impact upon themselves. Which is logical, because for people close to us, the revelation we are trans can feel like a bereavement.

This impact often happens at the worst possible time for most relationships because it leads into a period where the trans person has accepted they are trans and is in need of support, but their significant other (SO) is in emotional turmoil and rarely in good shape to provide it. SOs understandably become wrapped up in dealing with finding solutions to their own questions about how the relationship will work for them, leaving the trans person feeling isolated at a key time.

It's easy to feel victimised by this, but easier and more likely to lead to a good result if you understand it.

The more core the relationship to the trans person's wellbeing, the more abandoned this development can leave them feeling, because a key person has been knocked out and will be unable to provide support at a crucial time. It's common for trans people to become angry about this and I get that, because I've felt the anger too, but indulging that emotion, while understandable, never improves the situation.

One SO who'd sat out a session took me aside after and dragged up a line I remembered from a Monty Python, comparing her emotions on being told her partner was trans to being dropped into a bucket of boiling fat. Unexpectedly and from a great height. Was it just her, she asked?

Around this time I was getting people making eight hour journeys to see me for a one hour session and feeling guilty about that, so this comment inspired me to start asking clients to bring any SOs along, the bait being a free session for the SO.

I openly admit this was mostly out of my own curiosity and I thought it marginally ethical because of that, so I ran it past my psychotherapy mentor... only to find myself having to explain the entire trans scenario to them!

It was long ago now and we were still in the era of transsexualism, where being trans was seen as being trapped in the wrong body and the solution as the hormonal and surgical trope of 'change the body to match the desired sex' aka sexual reassignment, then known as SRS. Right. It didn't last because it couldn't and was replaced within a generation by the idea of transgender and Gender Affirming Care, or GAC.

How our relationships define us - before and after

It was my sessions with SOs which made me realise why many people post SRS were struggling. You could say there are two types of SO, those who've known my clients 'before' and those who had only met them 'after' they disclosed they were trans. I'm using modern language here because 'trans' wasn't a word in common use at the time, but suffice to say neither group had a good understanding of how much distress their attitudes to trans were causing my clients. But because of the dynamic necessary if therapy is to work, I could understand why the 'before' group felt the way they did. Less so the 'after' group, but they have a point too.

The 'before' group had a mountain to climb because they were having to adjust and cope with memories of how my clients were before the revelation as well as achieving what amounted to rewiring their entire relationship with them if it were it to continue. On top of that, they had to complete the task the 'after' group was faced with, which was that every trans person who presented to me was having issues aligning their gender to their post SRS self. Their SOs struggled as much as my trans clients did with this.

Learning and unlearning gender

Gender in the WHO sense takes at least a decade of constant drip feeding and practice to learn even when it is congruent with our sex and we are growing up. No surprise it takes a similar length of time to unlearn one gender and learn another, even if the other gender is an identity you've held much of your life. Guess what? SOs can take as long to adapt.

Some of my clients had had very successful surgery and hormone treatment, but were only part way through reprogramming their gendered behaviours. Even those who had completed the reprogramming (and a lot hadn't even realised the vast extent of the behavioural changes involved) were still having to cope with SOs having frequent WTF experiences because of frequent episodes where their instinct and experience was expecting different gendered behaviour.

WTFs were more frequent in 'before' SOs of clients who had previously overcompensated on gender (either masculinity or femininity depending on which they were going). All SOs were having to adjust gendered responses they thought were baked into a valued relationship and stressing out trying to adapt to the new rules and responses, but if overcompensation had been involved, the adjustment became doubly challenging.

If the trans person an SO had any kind of relationship with had previously gone through a period of hyper-masculinity or hyper-femininity it could turn into a battleground. At times it was because the hyper phase had attracted the SO to the trans person in the first place, at others it was because the scale of the adjustment needed was too great for them to swallow.

Three tasks

The tasks trans people like you and I go through might be laid out as acceptance, transition, and re-aligning of gender (that is, gender as in the WHO defined sense). The three don't have to be completed in that order, and for some the second doesn't have to be completed, but the first and third have to be addressed. What often gets left out is there will be an additional delay after we complete our tasks 'before' SOs can adjust, as they too complete the first and third tasks.

It was within the first task things were and are most likely to go wildly wrong, though within the modern approach of what is now called Gender Affirming Care the process is vastly better than it was the SRS days. SRS was perhaps a necessary step along the way, but ultimately proved  a fire and forget solution and I'm personally glad it didn't last long. As an approach it was fatally flawed because it reduced trans care to a two card deck in which one card read 'sex' while the other read 'gender identity' and the only possible play was laying one card on top of the other.

That's the basic mechanics, how do we deal with them?

Some who are trans have been so traumatised during childhood they react strongly to the slightest raising of the emotional temperature, pushing everyone away without realising it's happening or why they are doing it. I empathise and don't find it surprising in any way, knowing what some have been through, but this avoidant and often hair triggered response can prove catastrophic where relationships are concerned. It is in itself worthy of therapy if you can identify the behaviour in yourself (or your SO for that matter).

Others had never had any dialogue with their SOs because the SOs hadn't wanted to start it, or my client had avoided it (more empathy, been there, done that, just because you know what should be done doesn't mean you do it etc). Or both sides wanted to engage but lacked the words, or both were jointly afraid of the risk of tearing off whatever bandaid kept their relationship together.

This is a road block that must be overcome because it's only by understanding each other's feelings and motivations a relationship can move forward and adapt to future stresses of GAC. Yet the risk of losing the relationship tempts people to avoid sharing even when they know those stresses have the power to blow the relationship apart.

People who aren't vested in us through friendship or love may bail  early on because it's too much effort and if so we must accept it's the right judgement for them. They lack skin in the game, or put another way, share no risk. But people who are vested in us won't find navigating the road block so easy and instead may resort to denial of what's happening to us and to them.

When I read stories here of how adjusting to being trans is tearing members and their relationships apart, I remember how the SOs I met coped and how people I've interacted with in my own life were affected. I'm more understanding now of SOs who think we must be 'going through a phase' or whatever story they create to avoid looking at the roadblock. The stories are created to protect themselves and avoid confronting risk and I get that, because it's what most of us have done at some stage too.

Except, you just can't get away with stories like that forever, anymore than the Titanic could have continued making high speed North Atlantic crossings in thick fog. Sooner or later, an iceberg turns up in the wrong place and when you hit it, the consequences must be dealt with there and then, even as all around you lose it. Which is why it's better to tackle the issue on your own terms, accepting that while there's never going to be a good moment, there will definitely be some bad ones. Timing is all about avoiding icebergs.

Through catharsis, synthesis

I've learned that sometimes we need to help our SOs as much as we need them to help us, making many, if not most trans journeys a multi-ticket purchase. One purpose of therapy involved in our journey with SOs is to help us and those in relationships with us to identify we've applied a bandaid when instead stitches are needed. That's the easy part. The challenge is helping both parties accept that deep down, they know it's not a long term solution and isn't even a good medium term one.

Part of the art of therapy is keeping a working relationship with your client operational at the moment they realise that, because they'll often dump on you all the things they wanted to avoid and must now confront because of discovery.

It can be extremely hard motivating yourself through therapy when you are trans, but it's also tough for SOs because of the investment of time and emotion they have in you. If a valued relationship is to thrive, you're asking them to travel part way with you through the tasks. If they are 'before' SOs, this is something which wasn't part of the original deal and furthermore, may have been quite impossible for them to foresee. When we've been living for years with something gnawing away at us on a daily basis it can be easy to forget that, but it'll make life for you and for your SOs much easier if you don't.

One last thing. This is an approach with some suggestions and it's in my blog because it is part of me. Dip in and out because you'll find some of it relevant and some of it less so, but if it covers ground you've not considered before, then it will have been worth me writing it.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 05, 2025, 03:07:37 AMwhat turned her head on this?

Yep. I waited until she was in a good place before initiating the conversation. I also explained that whether she fully accepted the validity of my asserted self, my wearing a dress was at least as acceptable as Robin Williams donning female attire in 'Mrs. Doubtfire' (she loves the movie). Also, I'm working on a project where it is essential I present myself as the woman I claim to be. Since my daughter supports the project, she realized she needed to support me. Thanks again TanyaG. Our discussions inside this forum gave me the necessary insight to successfully broach this topic with my daughter.

I enjoy your writings Tanya.

Chrissy

Overcompensation or hypergendering

Have you ever found yourself at a party, or in a bar, or a gym, or maybe in the military, and some topic of discussion has come up which quickly spirals away into a group agreement you don't share? Perhaps you know the others well and perhaps you don't, but comes a moment when they all look at you and you find yourself saying something you don't agree with.

Why did you do that??? To avoid being the odd one out.

We've all been there because it's basic survival to go with the pack's decision. Packs are protective, they look after their own and it takes a courageous or foolhardy individual to stand alone against the majority. Especially when the pack might literally kick you out.

That's the risk. If a pack feels its values are threatened, it may go into attack mode, up to and including bullying and assault, so there's every encouragement from the earliest age not to stand out. Equally, there's so much pressure to conform, or, to 'be normal'.

Gender as a team event

Which raises immediate issues, because we all have different preferences in different areas. Sport teams and their fans are a great example, there are hundreds if not thousands of teams, all with a group of passionate supporters. Walk into the wrong bar wearing your team's shirt and sparks may fly as pack mentality engages.

Imagine growing up in a town which has a single team, with a long history and complicated lore, which everyone passionately supports, including your own family, but when you are ten years old you move to another town, which also has a single team, also with a long history and complicated lore, which everyone there supports, equally passionately.

You can do the math as well as I, just how long are you going to last at school if you don't swap allegiance? So you do that, but end up realising must learn the lore of your adopted team too, adding to the task. In doing so, you feel you're betraying your 'old' team and if any friends from the past come to visit, it'll be awkward. On top of which, your parents, who don't have to live in the feral world of childhood, may still support the team you've abandoned.

Perhaps you'll compromise and support the old team when you're home and the new team at school? But what if someone finds out, like your parents, who don't get how difficult it is finding friends when you support a team they don't.

Experiences of pack dynamics like that are one of the many ways growing up teaches us to conform to values society sees as normative. Over time, some of these values have evolved into complex sets of expectations, one of the most complex of all these groups being the norms around gender.

I've been through gender several times in this blog, but it's worth repeating that in this context, gender is a purely social construct. Society as a whole (clearly, I don't support this, but it is the way) regards gender as a two team choice between masculine and feminine, with the masculine team's stadium in a town called Amab (assigned male at birth) and the feminine team in a town called Afab (assigned female at birth).

Enough already with the team analogy, except to say the masculine and feminine teams have evolved their own lore too. Some of this lore made sense back in the day when might was right and the word of whoever wielded the biggest club was law, but in most 21st century societies, the lore is anachronistic because for most of us, it no longer serves a purpose.

Gender as a social construct is a key concept and if you want to hear it expressed in a single short sentence, think how often you've heard the phrase, 'Behave like a man!' or, the even pithier, 'Man up!'.

By contrast, have you ever heard someone say, 'Behave like a woman!'?

Absolutely no way, because in context, those words would have to be said when a woman didn't burst into tears in the face of a challenge. Even writing them feels ridiculous and if I do a spot of self analysis, I'm catching echoes of a cascade of gendered scripts all of which are spitting out, 'Does not compute.' In other words, my masculine scripts, such as are left, do not include ones written for when a woman needs to be told to be more feminine, in a situation where she's folded in the face of a challenge.

Both the masculine and the feminine scripts expect her to fold. Which is irrational, because there's no reason why she shouldn't be as agentic and decisive as any man, as an increasing number of women are.

The masculine/feminine gender binary society built

The masculine/feminine gender binary and all the complexity of its associated traits endures long past it's sell by date because normativity is a powerful force. It is also a conservative one, in the sense normative gender works against change and in favour of hierarchy, even if that hierarchy no longer has any rational base.

Masculinity

Masculinity is a cultural/social model defined by agentic traits and behaviours including independence, assertiveness, courage, ambition, leadership, rationality, dominance, emotional control and willingness to take risks. Masculine dress style is heavily influenced by these traits and often emphasises control, power, and readiness for action.

Femininity

Femininity is a cultural/social model defined by communal traits and behavior including dependence, docility, empathy, sensitivity, modesty, humility, unselfishness, supportiveness, cheerfulness, emotional lability and a nurturing, yielding nature. Feminine dress style is influenced by these traits and emphasises softness, yieldingness and sometimes so impractical that quite normal actions like walking are a challenge.

One cue that masculine and feminine values (again, gender in the context we're using here) run deep is you probably smiled at the idea of anyone saying, 'Woman up!'. But even if you are a naturally effeminate man or a naturally masculine woman, or any combination in between, there's a close to 100% chance you've been brought up to subconsciously absorb all the traits and behaviours above.

It's becoming more permissible for AMAB people to be more sensitive and emotional, but there's no lack of pressure to be the opposite. It's become very acceptable for women to wear men's clothes, but even that took close on a century to stick. Except within very controlled conditions (as in performances) it's not acceptable for men to wear women's clothes and the only way someone AMAB can get away with it on a street is to try to 'pass'. Even then, members of the gender police will be hair triggered on other gendered cues like voice or facial hair, so there's no predicting what reactions you're likely to encounter.

Why is this so? It's because people aren't very flexible and feel unsafe if everything isn't predictable. Put another way, if they know you were born in Afab, they know you'll enjoy talking about the last feminine team game etc. It sounds trite, but one reason gendering became a powerful social construct was because it stops folk having to think too much.

What gender makes us do because of how it makes us think

Let's go back to the party where the conversation went feral. If the participants are gendered masculine, enough beer and A might dare B. Even if that dare is stupidly risky for B, someone who's strongly gendered masculine may feel unable to back out, despite knowing if anything goes wrong they could suffer life changing consequences. B's gendering makes them feel they should be courageous and willing to take risks and also if they chicken, it tells them they aren't a 'proper' man.

If we swap in a group of women instead of a group of guys, different gendered values come into play, but while challenges will be less common and ones involving physical risk even less so, failure to pass normative judgement will usually have social fallout with equally dire effects.

The only reason these situations don't happen more often is most of us are able to spot the early warning signs and also because once a functional pack is sure of our allegiance, it won't waste time testing it repeatedly. A dysfunctional pack with unstable leadership might test it over and over, though, as will the gendering we've been brought up with should our gender identity be different.

How learned gender punishes us for non-compliance

One way those words in italics play out in real life is when someone's first glimmering they are trans dawns on them. If you've read earlier posts in this blog, the growing realisation pulls up all kinds of scripted responses we can't do much about to begin with, assuming we even recognise them for what they are.

This is part of gender dysphoria and comes out in feelings of disgust at our own trans thoughts and behaviours, all of which, I stress, would have been normative had we been raised in the gender with which we identify. In other words, all the lore we've absorbed about our home team (as in the gender we were brought up in) tells us the pack is going to eat us alive if we support the other team.

I'm leaving out non-binary people for this round, because, clearly, this situation is different for them. But for the rest of us, the instinctive solution is to prove to ourselves we deserve to belong to the gender we were brought up in to avoid being cast out.

If the gendering we were raised with was masculine, the moment we start getting thoughts to the contrary, we'll do everything we can to prove to ourselves we're stereotypically masculine, and if we're feminine, we'll opt for being stereotypically feminine.

That's a problem, because basic masculinity and femininity are already stereotypes which leave little room for manoeuvre, so when someone goes hyper, it's noticeable.

What is 'hyper' gendering and why does it happen?

Hyperfeminine women often tend to view themselves as sexual objects, rather than actors. Typically, they see success as being determined by developing and maintaining a relationship with a man and their primary value in a romantic relationship as their sexuality.

Hypermasculinity is called machismo. Mosher et al came up with a long list of characteristics macho men adopt, which are worth quoting here:

...spends a good deal of time participating in games, sports, social activities, and other amusements; does not want to understand many areas of knowledge and does not value synthesizing ideas or logical thought; tends to act on the "spur of the moment," without deliberation, giving vent readily to feelings, wishes, and volatile emotions; wants to be the center of attention and engages in behavior which wins the notice of others; enjoys exciting activity, especially if danger is involved, and does not avoid risk of bodily harm; does not want the uncertainty of decisions removed by definite knowledge since he prefers to rely on guesses or probabilities; enjoys combat and argument and is sometimes willing to hurt people to get his way or to "get even"; attempts to control or influence his environment and to influence or direct other people; does not give sympathy and comfort or offer others a "helping hand"; is not concerned with keeping personal effects and surroundings neat and organized; and does not describe himself in terms judged as desirable.

Most of the qualities Mosher lists are the opposite of being feminine and it's a long list. The length of the list and its polar nature explains the reactions AMAB trans people experience when they first discover their trans nature. Fear often lies at the core - fear of the pack turning against you.

Fear and self-loathing

Self-loathing is more complex, but can be intense in AMAB people who find they feel better wearing women's clothes to express their gender identity. The gender they were brought up in triggers scripts which spit out a 'failed man' output, with disgust the result because you aren't behaving like a man.

The 'failed man' output computes because masculine men don't like soft flowing clothes, so it's not surprising this kind of self-loathing is much less common in AFAB people, because the feminine scripts they were brought up with allow wearing masculine clothes.

Both AMAB and AFAB people who have fully accepted their trans gender identity often also experience intense self-loathing directed at their own bodies, particularly sexual characteristics, such as breasts (or lack of) and whatever nature gifted us below the waist.

They say it isn't the emotions, it's what you do with them, but fear, disgust and self-loathing is a tough combo to deal with. What many do do with them is become depressed, angry, or both... but there's a tempting escape route.

Why not double down on our home team values?

This route is tempting because we all know how we get caught up in the enthusiasm of crowd on its feet shouting the team on, so it's got to work with gender too, right? Maybe if we're more feminine than feminine, or more masculine than masculine, the cheers of approval will drown out the dysphoria caused by our trans gender identity?

This is where the gender being a social construct becomes really clear. When trans people go through a 'hyper' phase, we do it by turning up the volume on the gender we were brought up in (which is the gender we can't live with) and we do it for two reasons. The first is to send the clearest possible signal to others that we belong to the gender we are amping up and the second is to send the clearest possible signal to ourselves that we do, in the hope the noise drowns out that worrying signals we do not. It's the equivalient of buying the home team strip and and making it luminous.

We can do this because as we grow up, we subsconciously learn, through a process of trial and error, how to send gendered signals. It's a powerful form of non-verbal communication we use to send messages ranging from 'don't mess with me!' to 'I think you're cute, but I'm too shy to say it!' Even if the signals we learn belong to a gender that makes part of us dysphoric, we understand at least some of them. People in a hypermasculine or hyperfeminine phase are acting out the strongest, most commonly understood signals core to masculinity or femininity, so what better way for someone who fears they are trans than to send out a deluge of signals to the contrary?

It would be a 'better way', if it worked, but the end result is to lock us into the same loop of denial and disgust we get into when we throw out wardrobes. Sooner or later, the gender identity hyper is struggling to suppress will reassert itself. Although some people go through repeated cycles of hyper, they only repeat because at the end of each cycle they experience a flip back to the gender identity they are trying to escape. If you've been through one complete cycle, it's a hint you need therapy, if you've experienced two, you should book an appointment and if you've experienced three you needed to do it yesterday.

You'll know if you've been to either 'hyper' destination, but within the trans population, my impression is it's more commonly people assigned male at birth who end up 'going hyper', if you want to call it that. I'm writing this because I'm not reading about AFAB trans people going hyper, but that's not to say it doesn't happen.

There's a logical reason why people assigned female at birth won't, because often the last thing they want is to become pregnant. Also, because people assigned female at birth are less strongly subject to gender policing, it's may be easier for them to accept they are trans at an earlier age, and finally, trans people who are AFAB are much more likely to be non-binary. That still leaves all the issues with body related gender dysphoria, but those would be made worse by an excursion into hyperfemininity. I'd stress how little is known about AFAB trans people, which is shocking, because they are common.

Blogs and intros here often mention phases where members have gone through hypermasculine phases. I can't write about hyper from personal experience, but at a guess, the reason it didn't happen to me was because of my friendship with Ginny. That rewrote some of my gendered expectations at a crucial age, so I believe I have her to thank for that as well as so many other things. For me, it was maybe an accident I never went hyper.

Does it matter if you went through a hyper phase?

Not unless it's left you dealing with the fallout today and in some cultures, machismo is almost normative, which isn't to say it's healthy. Where it can be extremely unhealthy is when you form a lasting sexual relationship during a hyper phase, because if you subsequently flip a 180 on gender identity, chances are the relationship won't survive. That's too much change for a partner to digest.

Are all hypermasculine or hyperfeminine people trans? Definitely not. Many are either what is called anxiously attached or avoidantly attached (or both), which is something else entirely, but of the rest, a few will be trans, just not yet ready to accept it.

In the context of trans, periods of hyper-gendering are understandable, so if it's happened to you, don't kick yourself over it. Within the path of your self-discovery, there may have been no viable option but to go there, allowing for what you knew then. What you can do is unpick what motivated you to 'go hyper', which could be a useful sub task for therapy, because in completing that task, you'll likely gain an insight you might never have got otherwise.

When sex and gender don't mean the same thing

One of the cultural splits on Susan's is between members who believe strongly that sex and gender are the same thing and members who don't. This post is for those who wish to understand why the 'other' group sees the situation as they do and for people who are trying to work their own situation out before they begin gender affirming care (GAC). It should also help explain why GAC works the way it does.

The argument that sex and gender were synonymous lay at the heart of transsexualism, a model which held sway for roughly thirty years between the mid 1960s and the 1990s. Advances in plastic surgery during the second world war had made offering sexual reassignment surgery practical, especially when hormonal treatment became available. For the first time it was possible to offer something approaching a routine solution and in a nutshell, the solution was, 'You feel trapped in the wrong body? So? We'll change your body.'

Transsexualism as a treatment philosophy worked for a lot of people, especially in the seventies and eighties, but by 1990s, some rough edges were showing and in retrospect it's clear why. Transsexualism only worked if you were assigned male at birth (AMAB) and wished to be female, or if you had been assigned female at birth (AFAB) and wished to be male.

At the time, the latter were a much smaller group and perhaps no-one could have appreciated how material that would turn out to be.

As an approach, transsexualism still works well for people who are gender binary, because the solution on offer is changing your body to the 'opposite' sex. For people who are gender binary it's natural think of sex and gender existing in two paired states, the first being male and masculine, the second female and feminine. It feels natural for them because gender binary is normative, which is why people for whom that norm is appropriate will often, without thinking, refer to those pairings as 'opposites'.

Transsexualism doesn't work for people who are not gender binary. By the mid 1990s this was becoming an increasingly urgent problem because gender clinics were experiencing the beginning of a sharp rise in referrals of clients who had been assigned female at birth (AFAB) up to half of whom were not gender binary. That trend accelerated so much that today, AFAB people form the majority of new referrals, and non-gender binary trans people have become as numerous as the two other groups.

Why doesn't transsexualism work for people who are not gender binary?

Because there isn't an 'opposite' sex/gender pairing for them to swap to. People who are non-binary present in a variety of ways, but at the core for many is they are distressed by the sex they were assigned at birth in the same way that binary trans people are distressed.

There's a saying if you have a hammer in your hand everything looks like a nail and some non-binary trans people ended up being treated as if they were. They completed the transsexualism pathway and went through sexual reassignment surgery (as the process was then known) only to find their dysphoria no better. What had been a good solution for the pioneering groups during the transsexualism period proved too simplistic to cater for the groups who followed, because the nature of their gender identities was more diverse.

Why is offering someone who is non-binary a change to a sex they weren't assigned at birth not a solution?

To what sex do you propose changing them?

Some of the people the system failed by being too binary are coming back now, asking challenging questions. Their anger is being fuelled by conservatives and that's a problem for us all.

In splitting sex assigned at birth and gender asunder, the transgender era of treatment which began in the 1990s acknowledged the plurality of possibilities. Those who prove to have binary gender identities can still be offered treatment similar to anything they might have received in the 1980s, the crucial change being that those who don't have binary gender issues can be identified and offered different pathways appropriate for them.

Few things are worse than watching someone who has been fed down the wrong pathway filled with anger at irreversible changes made to their body in the name of a resolution they could never have found. In recognition of their experiences and because we know the number of non-binary people is rising I believe we should become comfortable with the idea that sex and gender mean different things.

Yes, for most of the human race, sex assigned at birth and gender do correlate. But for trans people, the situation varies from one where our SAB and gender identity lie at different ends of the spectrum (triggering binary gender dysphoria) to one where the answer lies somewhere in between (as in non-binary gender dysphoria).

Healthcare organisations from the WHO downward have accepted there's room for everyone, which is why they've moved to different definitions for sex assigned at birth and gender. Following their example doesn't stop post transition people being happy their reassigned sex and gender identity are now congruent, that's awesome. What the split creates is space for us to understand, welcome and empathise with members for whom the solution is not that simple.

This is fantastic!  Stupiphying!  Eye opening.  We all know this but I for one could never articulate so well!
Thank you.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 06, 2025, 05:41:49 AMOvercompensation or hypergendering

Have you ever found yourself at a party, or in a bar, or a gym, or maybe in the military, and some topic of discussion has come up which quickly spirals away into a group agreement you don't share? Perhaps you know the others well and perhaps you don't, but comes a moment when they all look at you and you find yourself saying something you don't agree with.

Why did you do that??? To avoid being the odd one out.

We've all been there because it's basic survival to go with the pack's decision. Packs are protective, they look after their own and it takes a courageous or foolhardy individual to stand alone against the majority. Especially when the pack might literally kick you out.

That's the risk. If a pack feels its values are threatened, it may go into attack mode, up to and including bullying and assault, so there's every encouragement from the earliest age not to stand out. Equally, there's so much pressure to conform, or, to 'be normal'.

Gender as a team event

Which raises immediate issues, because we all have different preferences in different areas. Sport teams and their fans are a great example, there are hundreds if not thousands of teams, all with a group of passionate supporters. Walk into the wrong bar wearing your team's shirt and sparks may fly as pack mentality engages.

Imagine growing up in a town which has a single team, with a long history and complicated lore, which everyone passionately supports, including your own family, but when you are ten years old you move to another town, which also has a single team, also with a long history and complicated lore, which everyone there supports, equally passionately.

You can do the math as well as I, just how long are you going to last at school if you don't swap allegiance? So you do that, but end up realising must learn the lore of your adopted team too, adding to the task. In doing so, you feel you're betraying your 'old' team and if any friends from the past come to visit, it'll be awkward. On top of which, your parents, who don't have to live in the feral world of childhood, may still support the team you've abandoned.

Perhaps you'll compromise and support the old team when you're home and the new team at school? But what if someone finds out, like your parents, who don't get how difficult it is finding friends when you support a team they don't.

Experiences of pack dynamics like that are one of the many ways growing up teaches us to conform to values society sees as normative. Over time, some of these values have evolved into complex sets of expectations, one of the most complex of all these groups being the norms around gender.

I've been through gender several times in this blog, but it's worth repeating that in this context, gender is a purely social construct. Society as a whole (clearly, I don't support this, but it is the way) regards gender as a two team choice between masculine and feminine, with the masculine team's stadium in a town called Amab (assigned male at birth) and the feminine team in a town called Afab (assigned female at birth).

Enough already with the team analogy, except to say the masculine and feminine teams have evolved their own lore too. Some of this lore made sense back in the day when might was right and the word of whoever wielded the biggest club was law, but in most 21st century societies, the lore is anachronistic because for most of us, it no longer serves a purpose.

Gender as a social construct is a key concept and if you want to hear it expressed in a single short sentence, think how often you've heard the phrase, 'Behave like a man!' or, the even pithier, 'Man up!'.

By contrast, have you ever heard someone say, 'Behave like a woman!'?

Absolutely no way, because in context, those words would have to be said when a woman didn't burst into tears in the face of a challenge. Even writing them feels ridiculous and if I do a spot of self analysis, I'm catching echoes of a cascade of gendered scripts all of which are spitting out, 'Does not compute.' In other words, my masculine scripts, such as are left, do not include ones written for when a woman needs to be told to be more feminine, in a situation where she's folded in the face of a challenge.

Both the masculine and the feminine scripts expect her to fold. Which is irrational, because there's no reason why she shouldn't be as agentic and decisive as any man, as an increasing number of women are.

The masculine/feminine gender binary society built

The masculine/feminine gender binary and all the complexity of its associated traits endures long past it's sell by date because normativity is a powerful force. It is also a conservative one, in the sense normative gender works against change and in favour of hierarchy, even if that hierarchy no longer has any rational base.

Masculinity

Masculinity is a cultural/social model defined by agentic traits and behaviours including independence, assertiveness, courage, ambition, leadership, rationality, dominance, emotional control and willingness to take risks. Masculine dress style is heavily influenced by these traits and often emphasises control, power, and readiness for action.

Femininity

Femininity is a cultural/social model defined by communal traits and behavior including dependence, docility, empathy, sensitivity, modesty, humility, unselfishness, supportiveness, cheerfulness, emotional lability and a nurturing, yielding nature. Feminine dress style is influenced by these traits and emphasises softness, yieldingness and sometimes so impractical that quite normal actions like walking are a challenge.

One cue that masculine and feminine values (again, gender in the context we're using here) run deep is you probably smiled at the idea of anyone saying, 'Woman up!'. But even if you are a naturally effeminate man or a naturally masculine woman, or any combination in between, there's a close to 100% chance you've been brought up to subconsciously absorb all the traits and behaviours above.

It's becoming more permissible for AMAB people to be more sensitive and emotional, but there's no lack of pressure to be the opposite. It's become very acceptable for women to wear men's clothes, but even that took close on a century to stick. Except within very controlled conditions (as in performances) it's not acceptable for men to wear women's clothes and the only way someone AMAB can get away with it on a street is to try to 'pass'. Even then, members of the gender police will be hair triggered on other gendered cues like voice or facial hair, so there's no predicting what reactions you're likely to encounter.

Why is this so? It's because people aren't very flexible and feel unsafe if everything isn't predictable. Put another way, if they know you were born in Afab, they know you'll enjoy talking about the last feminine team game etc. It sounds trite, but one reason gendering became a powerful social construct was because it stops folk having to think too much.

What gender makes us do because of how it makes us think

Let's go back to the party where the conversation went feral. If the participants are gendered masculine, enough beer and A might dare B. Even if that dare is stupidly risky for B, someone who's strongly gendered masculine may feel unable to back out, despite knowing if anything goes wrong they could suffer life changing consequences. B's gendering makes them feel they should be courageous and willing to take risks and also if they chicken, it tells them they aren't a 'proper' man.

If we swap in a group of women instead of a group of guys, different gendered values come into play, but while challenges will be less common and ones involving physical risk even less so, failure to pass normative judgement will usually have social fallout with equally dire effects.

The only reason these situations don't happen more often is most of us are able to spot the early warning signs and also because once a functional pack is sure of our allegiance, it won't waste time testing it repeatedly. A dysfunctional pack with unstable leadership might test it over and over, though, as will the gendering we've been brought up with should our gender identity be different.

How learned gender punishes us for non-compliance

One way those words in italics play out in real life is when someone's first glimmering they are trans dawns on them. If you've read earlier posts in this blog, the growing realisation pulls up all kinds of scripted responses we can't do much about to begin with, assuming we even recognise them for what they are.

This is part of gender dysphoria and comes out in feelings of disgust at our own trans thoughts and behaviours, all of which, I stress, would have been normative had we been raised in the gender with which we identify. In other words, all the lore we've absorbed about our home team (as in the gender we were brought up in) tells us the pack is going to eat us alive if we support the other team.

I'm leaving out non-binary people for this round, because, clearly, this situation is different for them. But for the rest of us, the instinctive solution is to prove to ourselves we deserve to belong to the gender we were brought up in to avoid being cast out.

If the gendering we were raised with was masculine, the moment we start getting thoughts to the contrary, we'll do everything we can to prove to ourselves we're stereotypically masculine, and if we're feminine, we'll opt for being stereotypically feminine.

That's a problem, because basic masculinity and femininity are already stereotypes which leave little room for manoeuvre, so when someone goes hyper, it's noticeable.

What is 'hyper' gendering and why does it happen?

Hyperfeminine women often tend to view themselves as sexual objects, rather than actors. Typically, they see success as being determined by developing and maintaining a relationship with a man and their primary value in a romantic relationship as their sexuality.

Hypermasculinity is called machismo. Mosher et al came up with a long list of characteristics macho men adopt, which are worth quoting here:

...spends a good deal of time participating in games, sports, social activities, and other amusements; does not want to understand many areas of knowledge and does not value synthesizing ideas or logical thought; tends to act on the "spur of the moment," without deliberation, giving vent readily to feelings, wishes, and volatile emotions; wants to be the center of attention and engages in behavior which wins the notice of others; enjoys exciting activity, especially if danger is involved, and does not avoid risk of bodily harm; does not want the uncertainty of decisions removed by definite knowledge since he prefers to rely on guesses or probabilities; enjoys combat and argument and is sometimes willing to hurt people to get his way or to "get even"; attempts to control or influence his environment and to influence or direct other people; does not give sympathy and comfort or offer others a "helping hand"; is not concerned with keeping personal effects and surroundings neat and organized; and does not describe himself in terms judged as desirable.

Most of the qualities Mosher lists are the opposite of being feminine and it's a long list. The length of the list and its polar nature explains the reactions AMAB trans people experience when they first discover their trans nature. Fear often lies at the core - fear of the pack turning against you.

Fear and self-loathing

Self-loathing is more complex, but can be intense in AMAB people who find they feel better wearing women's clothes to express their gender identity. The gender they were brought up in triggers scripts which spit out a 'failed man' output, with disgust the result because you aren't behaving like a man.

The 'failed man' output computes because masculine men don't like soft flowing clothes, so it's not surprising this kind of self-loathing is much less common in AFAB people, because the feminine scripts they were brought up with allow wearing masculine clothes.

Both AMAB and AFAB people who have fully accepted their trans gender identity often also experience intense self-loathing directed at their own bodies, particularly sexual characteristics, such as breasts (or lack of) and whatever nature gifted us below the waist.

They say it isn't the emotions, it's what you do with them, but fear, disgust and self-loathing is a tough combo to deal with. What many do do with them is become depressed, angry, or both... but there's a tempting escape route.

Why not double down on our home team values?

This route is tempting because we all know how we get caught up in the enthusiasm of crowd on its feet shouting the team on, so it's got to work with gender too, right? Maybe if we're more feminine than feminine, or more masculine than masculine, the cheers of approval will drown out the dysphoria caused by our trans gender identity?

This is where the gender being a social construct becomes really clear. When trans people go through a 'hyper' phase, we do it by turning up the volume on the gender we were brought up in (which is the gender we can't live with) and we do it for two reasons. The first is to send the clearest possible signal to others that we belong to the gender we are amping up and the second is to send the clearest possible signal to ourselves that we do, in the hope the noise drowns out that worrying signals we do not. It's the equivalient of buying the home team strip and and making it luminous.

We can do this because as we grow up, we subsconciously learn, through a process of trial and error, how to send gendered signals. It's a powerful form of non-verbal communication we use to send messages ranging from 'don't mess with me!' to 'I think you're cute, but I'm too shy to say it!' Even if the signals we learn belong to a gender that makes part of us dysphoric, we understand at least some of them. People in a hypermasculine or hyperfeminine phase are acting out the strongest, most commonly understood signals core to masculinity or femininity, so what better way for someone who fears they are trans than to send out a deluge of signals to the contrary?

It would be a 'better way', if it worked, but the end result is to lock us into the same loop of denial and disgust we get into when we throw out wardrobes. Sooner or later, the gender identity hyper is struggling to suppress will reassert itself. Although some people go through repeated cycles of hyper, they only repeat because at the end of each cycle they experience a flip back to the gender identity they are trying to escape. If you've been through one complete cycle, it's a hint you need therapy, if you've experienced two, you should book an appointment and if you've experienced three you needed to do it yesterday.

You'll know if you've been to either 'hyper' destination, but within the trans population, my impression is it's more commonly people assigned male at birth who end up 'going hyper', if you want to call it that. I'm writing this because I'm not reading about AFAB trans people going hyper, but that's not to say it doesn't happen.

There's a logical reason why people assigned female at birth won't, because often the last thing they want is to become pregnant. Also, because people assigned female at birth are less strongly subject to gender policing, it's may be easier for them to accept they are trans at an earlier age, and finally, trans people who are AFAB are much more likely to be non-binary. That still leaves all the issues with body related gender dysphoria, but those would be made worse by an excursion into hyperfemininity. I'd stress how little is known about AFAB trans people, which is shocking, because they are common.

Blogs and intros here often mention phases where members have gone through hypermasculine phases. I can't write about hyper from personal experience, but at a guess, the reason it didn't happen to me was because of my friendship with Ginny. That rewrote some of my gendered expectations at a crucial age, so I believe I have her to thank for that as well as so many other things. For me, it was maybe an accident I never went hyper.

Does it matter if you went through a hyper phase?

Not unless it's left you dealing with the fallout today and in some cultures, machismo is almost normative, which isn't to say it's healthy. Where it can be extremely unhealthy is when you form a lasting sexual relationship during a hyper phase, because if you subsequently flip a 180 on gender identity, chances are the relationship won't survive. That's too much change for a partner to digest.

Are all hypermasculine or hyperfeminine people trans? Definitely not. Many are either what is called anxiously attached or avoidantly attached (or both), which is something else entirely, but of the rest, a few will be trans, just not yet ready to accept it.

In the context of trans, periods of hyper-gendering are understandable, so if it's happened to you, don't kick yourself over it. Within the path of your self-discovery, there may have been no viable option but to go there, allowing for what you knew then. What you can do is unpick what motivated you to 'go hyper', which could be a useful sub task for therapy, because in completing that task, you'll likely gain an insight you might never have got otherwise.

Quote from: D'Amalie on April 07, 2025, 08:56:27 AMThis is fantastic!  Stupiphying!  Eye opening.  We all know this but I for one could never articulate so well!
Thank you.

Thanks for the thank you, D'Amalie. It's a long explanation, but I did my best to put it as many ways as I could, knowing how we all differ. If it helps just one person that made it worth writing, so you've made my day!

Thank you, Tanya!

I agree with D'Amalie that you explained this very well.

As one of those non-binary people you so eloquently discussed, TanyaG, all I can say is 'thanks.' Every one of your posts reveals something about myself I never before realized. Because of your wealth of knowledge and experience, your compassion and insight, I am more complete than I was before we met.