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Transitioning: But Not The Kind You Think
I’m in the middle of transitioning from MF to FF.
No! Don’t worry! I’m in no way thinking that my brain would be happier if I had balls to scratch and I could pee standing up.
My transition doesn’t involve taking dangerous hormones or denying mental illness or cutting up my body. And it is not rooted in woman-hate. No, that would describe the transgender kind of transitioning.
The kind of change I’m talking about is health-oriented and woman-friendly and doesn’t require me to erase myself or my lived reality. It is just a refocusing of energy, a streamlining of behaviour to remove unnecessary actions, and cutting a swathe through the hard, impacted bullshit that is Patriarchy.
I’m transitioning from Male-Focused to Female-Focused.
Whether women are aware of it or not – and I’d argue that it’s mostly unconscious – we are trained to serve male ‘needs’. In reality, men don’t ‘need’ anything from women, but over time, desires and a sense of entitlement have created a whole host of needs that cannot be realized without one or more female slaves. And the needs are uncountable. They can be the obvious and universal: “I need my dick serviced when, where and how I want” or “You will prioritize my words and ideas – I can interrupt you and any girl/woman no matter what you are doing, everything I say is right, etc.” But the needs can be sub-group-, geography-, or man-specific. It is elaborate, but has one simple rule. Woman caters to man to her detriment.
I lament the female energy, talent, and intelligence that has long been and continues to be wasted on catering to the weaker sex.
Back to my personal transitioning.
It is hard. I can imagine it would be next to impossible if you lived with a man in a heterosexual relationship. You just wouldn’t be allowed not to cater. I don’t really have any advice for women in this situation other than: leave. That simple, but really key, suggestion can inspire angry reactions (my Dick isn’t like that! He caters to my needs too!); sad reactions (I wish I could, but I can’t for X, Y, Z reasons); and the sacrificial lamb reactions (He would be lost without me – I can’t leave him. He can’t help it.) And I’m sure there are other categories.
In addition to romantic relationships, it is hard when you are forced to work around males. Most of us can’t work in a man-free environment. Most women have male bosses, colleagues and clients. Myself, I seldom have to deal with supervisors – male or female – which is awesome. But as a university instructor in science and engineering in China (the land of propaganda and conformity to rigid Patriarchy in a way I’ll write about in the future), almost all my students are male. That sucks. They demand so much more of my energy than female students because they act like 5-year-olds, can’t focus, don’t listen, don’t follow instructions, and wear misogyny like a bad perfume. [I have a whole post on dumb boy-children in education.] I find I dissociate almost completely when I teach in order to stay Female-Focused. I have a completely separate persona/identity/mask/hazmat suit that I put on when I enter the classroom. I do help some of the more enthusiastic students outside of class, though – that is the teacher in me, and I’d feel like I wasn’t doing a good job if I trampled on natural motivation to learn/improve. Unfortunately, female students with ambition in China are few and far between. Women are not supposed to help themselves, or pursue goals other than finding a husband and an acceptably low-level job and popping out a preferably male kid and catering to its every need. So most of the students I help are male. To deal with the obvious male-focus, I try to de-sex them and just see them as ‘youth’ or ‘student’. It goes better if I tell myself, “I am helping a student.” If I do get an ambitious female student, I try to help them as much as possible. This semester, for example, a 17-year-old, first-year, female law student crashed my class (it was a class for Masters-level Management/Finance students). Afterwards, she came up to talk to me, and she told me she was reading “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir. I think my jaw hit the floor. Most Western woman have never read it, and feminism is very frowned upon in China. Anyhow, I’ll nurture this one as long as she wants it. She is highly unusual in her self-confidence and thirst for forbidden knowledge.
Finally, it is hard to evaluate friendships with men. Once I started transitioning, I realized that most to all of my friendships with men were ones from which I got very little and sometimes had to put up with a lot of bad stuff I wouldn’t have to with most women. There are weird abuses, confusing insult-compliment combos, the inevitable sexual intrusions, the demands on your energy, and having to overlook a whole lotta misogynistic behaviour that wouldn’t be acceptable if you were honest with yourself. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been shedding many of these male parasites over the last few years. One of the things that becomes really hard – and I think this is true of friendships as well as romantic relationships – is seeing one’s investment (time, money, emotion) as a waste or a loss and then letting it go instead of using it as a reason to stay. It doesn’t help that relationship-building isn’t easy, and it gets harder to make friends as you get older. But ultimately, breaking an unhealthy tie is better for you than allowing a parasite to feed and drain and ultimately kill you.
Transition periods can be very, very difficult. You often question what you’re doing. You often feel alone and lonely. You worry about what your future will look like. You wonder whether you deserve to have a better life and whether you are being selfish for taking care of your own basic needs. You may find yourself insulted in a variety of different, but standard ways, but that will just show you how right you were about leaving.
But what you have to remember is that no one deserves to be second or less important or a slave to anyone else. And that basic belief will sustain you and get you to a better, healthier place.
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Why I’d Rather Deal With Women
If we remove from the population all those men and women with unfixable and publicly dangerous mental health problems such as personality disorders (psychopaths and narcissistic personality disordered individuals, specifically), I can easily make the blanket statement that I’d rather deal with women exclusively in all areas of life. I’d even go so far as to say that my life would improve immeasurably, and I wouldn’t shed a single tear, if I never saw another male – adult or child – ever again in my life. Just thinking about it fills me with this wistfulness, this longing, this impression of wings unfurling and endless possibilities and freedom. And then I remember that it’s an impossible dream, and I sink back into the cocoon I call ‘survival mode’ that is what awakened feminists must live in, daily.
I’m sure many people have their backs up, their knickers in a twist, and knives sharpened at what I’ve just intimated. Defensive retorts after a split second of recognition on the lips of women. Threats of violence, misogynist slurs, and haughty, mansplanatory rationalizations in the minds of men. I see you all.
But I don’t care. My fantasy world without men is a safe world. A good world. A sane world. A healthy world. In my fantasy, it is that way. If it were to become reality, I have no doubt it would indeed be safe, good, sane and healthy. Because this fantasy is borne of 43 years of experience of the violence, fear, hurt, damage, threats, filth, disrespect, insanity, cruelty, coldness, incomprehensibility, greed, pride, othering, dehumanizing, and death, death, death that is the male gift to the world. No amount of rationalizing or lies or rare exceptions provided by men or the women who support them in serious denial can controvert thousands of years of evidence, nevermind the evidence of one 43-year-long life.
Again, removing the most dangerous of men and women and looking at the average person, I can say the following confidently. Dealing with the average woman is much different – and better – than dealing with the average man.
The absolute, most important difference between dealing with men and dealing with women is safety. I don’t feel safe with strange men, but I also don’t feel safe with men I know. Anything can and does happen. Betrayal can happen in the blink of an eye depending on how his dick feels that day, how he interprets your non-verbals in relation to his ‘needs’, or how threatened he is by your intelligence, talent, attitude or confidence. Any of these variables can lead to his violence against you. I’ve never felt unsafe with a woman, stranger or known. Men can’t understand this feeling of unsafeness. Men don’t look over their shoulders. Men don’t evaluate options or potential outcomes for travel or just getting from Point A to Point B prior to setting out. Men don’t worry about having their identities or home locations known. Men don’t worry about friendships with women or what it means to accept help from them, whether there is an unspoken or unacceptable price to pay down the line. I’d rather a female delivery person or electrician enter my home than a male. I’d rather have a meeting with a female client than a male. Safety issues touch every aspect of your life. And women are safer to deal with.
Men make everything filthy and dehumanizing. This is, of course, tied to safety – with men, sex and violence cannot be separated. I can contemplate any neutral scenario or even a potentially sexual scenario, and as soon as I imagine a man entering that scenario, it is ruined. I have an automatic pulse of revulsion, of anger, of fear. They sexualize everything, including the unsexual or neutral. And in a potentially sexual situation, the way they sexualize is degrading, humiliating, unequal, and can make you feel dirty. Their presence automatically imposes hierarchy on a situation where no hierarchy exists. If it is a discussion, the entrance of a man changes the dynamic for the worse. He becomes the sun around which everyone orbits. If I think about a roomful of women in a state of undress, it doesn’t have to be sexual at all. Just human. Functional. Natural. It could be sexual – but in a clean, joyous, equal way. I think this is how sex would be between women living without the taint of Patriarchy ‘dirtifying’ everything. As it is, I think many lesbians look for ‘dirty sex’ and that is a marker of Patriarchal conditioning. But anyways, the thought of a man entering any kind of dynamic makes it filthy for me. I’m still trying to analyze this in a way that I can express, but it first struck me tangibly that I felt that way when I was about 30 and still trying to hold onto the idea that men were at least part of my sexual landscape. It’s material for another post.
Women don’t impose insanity or irrationality upon situations. Perhaps it’s because women have natural (yes, I said it – natural!) tendencies to listen, empathize, sympathize, relate and cooperate, but negotiations with a woman (who doesn’t fit into the mental illness categories described above) seldom become ridiculous. It’s actually very easy to develop consensus with women or to work together on a project when the taint of Patriarchy is as absent as possible. With men, on the other hand, things can be crazy. Dominance is always present. There is always a power-play, and the less you wish to be dominated, the more insane, irrational (and violent) a situation with a man can become. Men don’t cooperate – they dominate. If they can’t dominate, they get violent one way or another, and often will abandon or sabotage a project if they don’t get their own way.
Women are concerned with health. I like dealing with women because they think about health in a different way. Men don’t think about health because the women in their lives do it for them. Women will talk about health and problems and how they are related and will share information. I think this is a remnant from older times when wise women and healers and those of their persuasion had some prominence. When men took over (and by took over, I mean discredited and often tortured and killed these women) the health realm, they turned it into a business. It became another field in which to dominate women, and a new realm for greed, profit, sadistic experimentation (power) and prominence/fame. Although I’ve worked in health policy, health research, and worked extensively with and for doctors, I find the whole world revolting and frightening. I truly think there is an opportunity for women to take it back and return to the old ways.
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Our world is currently one where dealing exclusively and authentically with women is roadblocked by men in multiple ways. The effects of this have been serious. With men in the way, we have lost our safety, our purity (not to be confused with the religious bullshit concept of purity), our sanity, and our health. If only fantasy could become reality.
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