I just came out as trans. Why am I suddenly so angry?
Imagining a better life can make you hyper-aware of all that you're missing.
A newly-out trans man living in a highly conservative and gender-repressive environment just wrote in, wondering why coming out to himself has suddenly made him so damn angry. Let’s discuss:
(Note: Anon uses the phrase TMA to describe his girlfriend, which stands for transmisogyny-affected. Trans women are TMA; cis women, cis men, trans men, and nonbinary people who are not trans feminine are TME, or transmisogyny-exempt. For a primer on what transmisogyny is, see here.)
Thanks for writing in Anon. I believe a couple of different factors are driving your sudden-onset rage at sexism.
First, because you have finally admitted to yourself that you are a trans man and that you might want to do something about that, your emotions and body awareness have started to come back online following years of repression.
Dysphoric trans people who are stuck in “egg mode” are fantastic at shutting off all feeling, because there is no point in constantly paying attention to a pain that you can’t escape and don’t believe there is anything you can do about.
In fact, closeted trans people are often so well-practiced in neglecting their own needs that they don’t even realize they have dysphoria. They might just think of their body as an object that is completely detached from their mind, and not consider themselves a real person who is capable of having their own preferences or the ability to be harmed. They may exude a casual apathy toward their own well-being, using substances with abandon or putting themselves in positions of physical risk that they wouldn’t tolerate if they saw themselves as fully alive. They also tend to put off any thoughts of gender transition for a very long time, because they don’t believe they truly “need” it — having never allowed themselves to need anything.
When at last you admit to yourself that you are transgender, all those suppressed pains and longings come suddenly rushing to the fore. A lifetime of quiet suffering has now been made conscious all at once! The intensity of all that has now been let loose will often register as high-arousal emotions, such as anxiety, impatience, frustration, panic, or even rage. When you were closeted you probably felt a number of low-arousal, negative emotions such as boredom and depression, but now that you can see the possibility of your life improving, you are energized, and desperate to get there as soon as possible and to leave the painful past behind.
Unfortunately, the process of transitioning isn’t usually quite so sunny. We have to fight to become ourselves, so we have a lot to be angry about.
You said that you’ve been a feminist for a long time, Anon, but the sudden burst of anger that you are experiencing is quite similar to a great feminist awakening in a lot of ways. In the course of your life, you have probably met a lot of women who treat the patriarchal organization of society as if it were natural, and who try not to think too much about why it is the (white, abled) men who get the high-paying jobs while women are expected to caretake for others and maintain a sexually appealing appearance. Some women spend their whole lives avoiding any questions about this social order, because to admit that the entire world is turned against them would be too much to bear — and too much for them to fight.
But have you seen what happens when a repressed, patriarchy-justifying woman finally gets ahold of some good feminist theory and really lets it in? Suddenly she can’t help but recognize the misogynistic messages embedded into every commercial, influencer post, TV show, and textbook. She replays all the fights in her relationships and sees the toll that weaponized incompetence and emotional labor have extracted from her. Her skin crawls when she thinks of the creepy male teachers who touched her and the leering way that her father and uncles tried to guard her virginity as if it were their own private treasure trove. And she becomes so angry she can barely tolerate being in the normal, patriarchal world anymore.
If you have no social power, no understanding of where your suffering comes from, and no connections to people that respect you, then falling into despair is emotionally sensible. It reflects your lack of options, and how unsafe and aimless any attempt at rebellion would be. But once you are armed with enough self-awareness to realize that you are being oppressed, and can find other people who are also oppressed and want to claim some of their power back, then suddenly high-energy emotions like anger become useful.
The anger that we feel as marginalized people is protective, because it gives us the energy to fight back against oppression, and the motivation to combat our enemies. Anger is what some psychologists call an approach-motivated emotion: it drives people forward and facilitates conflict. When you are first discovering that you are a trans man (or awakening as a feminist) you need a lot of energy to make dramatic life changes, learn new skills, confront mistreatment, and claim for yourself the life you really need. Turning your back on the entire culture of your upbringing and nearly every close person in your life is risky, socially unpopular business, but when we become angry at everyone who has abused us in the past, we’re able to detach from them a little more easily.
You’re only going to be able to access this massive store of emotional energy when you feel pretty sure it’s possible for you to make a change. When you feel stuck, or don’t see any other options, you’re more likely to feel despairing and detached instead. According to polyvagal theory, depression is a great energy-saver; it keeps us still and conserves resources while we wait for the right moment to act.
From this perspective, all of the rage you’re now experiencing means that you’re primed to take action, Anon! Schedule yourself an HRT consultation appointment, order some testosterone online, drag yourself to your town’s trans support group meeting, and get ready to cut off your most unrepentantly ignorant relatives, if you want.
For ages, you have been biding your time as a barely-socially-tolerated woman, trying your best not to make waves. But now you get to be a full person who leaves a real imprint on the world, and whose choices will alienate your condescending male relatives and make your gross, joke-cracking coworkers no longer see you as “one of the good ones.” Your former church will turn its back on you and many of your longstanding friends might think you are insane. These were scary outcomes that your (numbed) emotions did their best to help you avoid, when they needed to, but your anger is telling you you’re ready to make a change.
Another reason that many newly-out trans people suddenly become angry is because they feel the enormity of their own desires for the very first time. It is quite natural to become upset about all the time that you lost to stuffing your feelings away, and to feel overwhelmed that there’s so much to change, and no clear place to start.
You have found your capacity to want things again. And wanting things can be painful, because it reveals all that we lack. It is especially difficult to pay attention to our wants when our religious upbringing preached that demanding things for yourself is selfish, and that pleasure will only tempt us into sin. But don’t shy away from the ache of desire, in all its unpleasantness. Listen to it, and let it guide you.
Try to practice experiencing desire by writing down how you’d like your life to look, or making a mood board or vision board of some kind. Where would you live? Who would keep you company? How would you dress or style yourself? How would you spend your time on a perfect day off? What kind of hobbies would you have? Let yourself be a bit idealistic here, rather than holding back with damning practicality. The purpose of this exercise is to articulate what comforts and motivates you, not to worry about the specifics of executing a five-year plan.
You can also utilize Heather Morgan’s Values-Based Integration Process, to help you uncover the values that lay beneath your specific wants. Heather’s exercises were designed for Autistics who are looking to unmask, but coming into oneself as a trans person is highly similar to an unmasking process: you are getting acquainted with the person you were never previously allowed to be. This can be at once terrifying and liberating. Thinking back on the moments in life where you did feel good, present, energized, and excited to be alive is a great place to start.
As you work through this process of finding a life that you can look forward to, you may find that your anger begins to recede. A constant emotional thorn in your side can eventually become a warning bell, alerting you at the specific moments when you’re being pressured or need to steel yourself for an attack. You may become able to redirect some of your high-intensity arousal into more positive emotions, such as excitement, joy, or inspiration with time. These high-arousal positive feelings might be unfamiliar to you at first, if you’ve spent the majority of your life in a low-arousal depressive or dissociated state, or if your hypervigilant, marginalized body defaults to interpreting arousal as a sign of either fear or anger. But it is possible to find things worth getting energized about, and not finding that energy to always be overwhelming.
Stay on the alert for other troubling (yet informative) emotions such as envy, jealousy, and resentment as well — these are also important signals of what you want for yourself, what you’ve been denied, and the ways you might still be silencing yourself.
Some of your anger might also be coming from an increase in gender dysphoria. When a trans person first comes out, it’s quite common for their dysphoria to suddenly get far worse. And that’s due to a phenomenon that I call the dysphoria paradox: because you are taking steps to address how uncomfortable you feel, you are necessarily paying a hell of a lot more attention to that discomfort than ever before.
Rather than living under a shadowy sense of wrongness you did your best to ignore, your suffering now has a name, and specific reference points. You don’t just vaguely hate yourself. You also hate your jawline. Or your boobs. Or the lilting customer service voice you lapse into on the phone. Or the fact that none of your work pants fit you right.
With each step you take toward your correct gender presentation, you will become painfully aware of how far there is left to go, and how much you hated where you were before. And you might find that as one form of dysphoria gets treated and goes down, another pops up, whack-a-mole-style, to claim your attention.
The best way to understand this is to recognize dysphoria as the trauma response of being forced into an incorrect gender. Trauma is not rational; it forms associations with all kinds of random triggers that remind us of a time when we were unsafe, because it aims to protect us from them. So long as you continue being mistreated or misgendered, your mind will keep finding things to be angry about. But it’s better if you can direct that anger outward rather than at yourself and your body.
Do your best to address the sources of dysphoria that you have control over, using things like hormones, surgery, voice training, and personal styling decisions — but also remember that if you feel out-of-place and unsafe in your body, it is because you are a gender minority in a world that hates and kills gender minorities. Nobody is blessed with enough self-confidence to inoculate themselves against society.
This brings me to the reason that your anger seems to have latched onto sexism in particular. Your unfair treatment as a ‘woman’ is now completely intolerable to you on multiple different levels. For the longest time, the sexist way that people treated you might not have felt personal, because your body and identity were not really you. All of the sexism that you encountered — from objectifying comments about other women’s bodies, to the assumption that being a woman inherently made you physically weaker — were just aspects of how the world worked that you were already skeptical of.
But now each moment of casual misogyny is a glaring reminder that you’re not really a woman, but are trapped within a woman’s unfair social position nonetheless. Before, enduring sexism was a plight that you shared with all women, and you could maybe intellectualize it and get some distance from it by reading feminist theory. But now, sexism is a blade you are continually stepping on, reminding you each time that you aren’t really accepted in the worlds of women or as men.
Positioning yourself as a gender-nonconforming woman who was “just like one of the guys” was a subtle act of self-negation. When you were the lone women out at your job, separating yourself from how other women were seen and treated likely felt that it was enough, because it was better deal than what the other women were getting! You were dodging a bit of the sexual harassment and surveilling attention that women typically get, which probably felt safe, because it allowed you to fly under the radar.
But now you are wanting more than to just disappear. You want to be seen, and accepted fully, as a man. You want to do more than just settle for less-bad treatment. You actively want to be treated well. But you’re not, and so you can’t stop thinking about all of the ways in which you were never really “one of the guys” at all.
There is a sense of entitlement that often comes with being a man. I don’t say this to disparage you or your desire to be accepted as one, but to point out a crucial part of how maleness is defined. In our patriarchal society, to be a man is to hold power over other people and to have that power respected. Any man who is incapable of lording power over others — particularly over women — is viewed as less of a man and consequently, as less of a respectable human being.
As a trans guy who is new into his transition, and an avowed feminist and queer person, you have never possessed the power necessary to fully be a “man” in society’s eyes. You almost certainly make less money than your male colleagues and hold a position with less influence. You might be stronger and more skillful with your hands than the women who get passed over for your job, but once you stop positioning yourself as a “strong woman” (relatively speaking) and start being evaluated as a man, all of your potential weaknesses will stand out and be used against you. I can’t tell you how many trans guys I know who transitioned from being seen as an incredibly butch and masculine woman, to being seen as an equally fruity and effeminate guy, all without changing a thing.
Once you aspire toward manhood, you cannot help but be aware of all the little slights and mistreatments that show you aren’t fully accepted as the right kind of man. As soon as I started presenting male, I suddenly got super enraged with anybody who crowded me on the dancefloor or cut me in line at the grocery store. Couldn’t they see? I was a man! Wasn’t I supposed to be deferred to?
All my life I’d been ignored and pushed around in physical spaces, because I am 5’5’’, slight, and prone to anxious flinching. But it was only after I started comparing myself to the idealized man, in all his broad-shouldered swagger and boorishness, that being passed over started to make me angry and dysphoric. Like a great many trans guys, I felt subconsciously that I deserved all of the privileges and ease that “men” got. But really, the only men who ever enjoyed those privileges were cisgender, masculine, non-disabled, and white. I was never gonna meet all those ideals.
The only way to overcome my sense of frustrated entitlement was to accept that I was a man, yes, but one who would forever dwell within the Faggot-Subaltern alongside all the other fruity, flinchy, weakened male failures of the world, and to replace my longing for masculine privilege with an appreciation of queer community power.
If you are comparing yourself with the privileged cis men in your life, Anon, I would encourage you to rethink your expectations similarly. You will continue to experience misogyny, no matter how successful your attempts at conventional manhood are — because you are trans, because you are queer, and because each of us who is not the idealized picture of white, wealthy cis manhood teeters on the edge of the Faggot-Subaltern at the “best” of times. But we can accept our permanent gender minority status and see it as a crucial part of our identities and our gender politics. In our vulnerable faggot-hood, we share a bond with all of the queer people around us.
This brings us, finally, to the transmisogyny piece. Why does your trans girlfriend have problems with your anger and how it is manifesting? I have my guesses, based on a recurring pattern I have seen within newly-out trans guys.
A lot of trans men experience resentment early on in their transitions, because they can’t help but draw a contrast between the life they’ve lived under misogyny, and the one they think that might have been, had they been assigned male at birth. It is so easy for a newly-out trans masc to get absolutely fixated on their gender assignment as the one barrier to enjoying a cushy, privileged male life, and to form an entire, confused understanding of gender politics shaped by that longing. This thinking almost always leads to bioessentialist places, and to the erasure of trans women’s experiences of misogyny.
I remember that when I was first exploring my own trans feelings back in 2016, I was constantly thinking about the kind of person that I would have gotten to be if I had been assigned male at birth. I was so certain that having been AMAB would have solved all my problems. I was in a comedy troupe at the time, and there was this outgoing, hyper-confident male performer that I worked with who was always quick to cut people off in conversation and never failed to get a huge laugh for his jokes.
I seethed thinking about how easy his life was, would spend untold amounts of time zoning out in the shower scrubbing the boobs that I hated and imagining how my life would have played out if only I’d been “born a guy,” just like him. I became convinced that if people had always respected and valued me, the way they did cis men, then I would have been exactly as charming and popular as this one guy.
At that point in time, I started forming an identity around my lesser “female” status, because I thought it was so integral to how I experienced the world. I wrote a lot of really bad comedy sketches about vaginal discharge and menstruating creatures and cutting off penises that read as thoughtlessly transmisogynistic nowadays. I also used to hate-read a lot of blogs by TERF detransitioners that had me absolutely convinced I could never really escape my “AFAB” status, no matter how much I tried to change my appearance. I was perpetually angry at my lot in life, and at everyone who I thought had it easier than I did.
Thankfully this rabbit hole didn’t take me too far, because I was already in community with trans women who had taught me a lot about their experiences and cheered me on as I transitioned. But I can see how my own discomfort with having been assigned female at birth could have festered into an ideology that left my trans sisters behind and prevented me from ever starting hormones, if I had not been so lucky.
I thought that my gender assignment was the thing keeping me from attaining the easy life I imagined for myself as a man. But this was entirely the wrong way of thinking about it. I was never a temporarily-embarrassed cis man doomed to an “AFAB” body. I was a gender-noncompliant trans person and was always gonna be, regardless of what kind of body I had or what a piece of government documentation said about me.
There is no separating the person that I am from my trans status. The AMAB version of me with the easy life that I kept imagining never existed and never would. If he had, he would have been a completely different person from me. Hell, even the confident comedian guy that I envied didn’t really have it so easy! Years later, he would open up to me about his own traumas and neurodivergences and I’d realize all his chatty bluster had been a desperate attempt to escape the Faggot-Subaltern, too.
Who I was really in community with was all the other gender-minority people who never enjoyed the rewards of white cis maleness — especially trans women, whose very lives proved that accessing privilege was not as simple as having been assigned male at birth. By joining forces with other trans people to fight against the structures of society that imprisoned and punished people like me, I could do a whole lot better than just “pass” fleetingly as the right kind of guy, and stop fixating so much on cutting my expansive, radiantly-hued self down into a drab masculine shape.
I still find it difficult to be a man sometimes, and to quell all of my anger at injustice and the life I never got to live because of transphobia. But this anger is not a bad thing. My fury is my most stalwart self-advocate; it is there even when I believe that what I want is too stupid to speak of, when I am mistreated once again in the ways society has told me to simply lay back and get used to.
Consider for a moment, Anon, that your anger is not a problem to be solved, but a form of principled defiance of the kind that is always punished in women and other minorities. For all of your feminist bona fides, you still had a conservative, Christian upbringing that in all likelihood taught you it was your feminine duty to be meek and mild. And so perhaps you still have trouble simply allowing your anger to exist, and don’t express it until it’s exploding out of you.
What matters most is that your anger gets nurtured, and then directed toward a suitable goal. One of the great gifts of anger is that it can be so externalizing; it takes all your frustrated energy and directs it outward, rather than firing itself back upon you. It sounds to me like you have plenty of suitable targets to be angry at, and we both know there are things about your life in the world that you want to see changed. So be angry. Love your anger for being there for you. And love all the other angry gender minority people in your life, and give them plenty of room to express their white-hot rage at injustice, too.
If you enjoyed this piece, I recommend reading this excellent essay on Sizhen System’s Faggot-Subaltern theory of gender-based oppression:
this really echoes Audre Lorde's "The Uses of Anger: Women responding to racism"
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