A friend and reader of mine asks: I’m accepting of people’s sexuality, but Bruce Jenner… There’s something psychologically off with him, right? He revealed his new self today, and it just seems fishy to me. I don’t believe he’s actually happy. Do you?
Is Jenner happy or unhappy? I honestly don’t know. When a person says he’s profoundly and fundamentally unhappy about being a man rather than a woman (or vice-versa), we have no choice but to believe that person. If Jenner is telling the truth, then we’re talking about living six decades in a fundamentally unhappy way. There has to be quite a strong residual effect from that, in that it’s difficult if not impossible to “snap into” happiness overnight. At the same time, if there truly is a sense of liberation at finally being able to function as oneself, it is possible that a shift into happiness could occur.
What I do know is that being a victim is not a healthy way to approach life, or the way to attain serenity, happiness or noncontradictory joy. When you’re psychologically serene, you accept what you cannot control; and you do all you can to attain full mastery over what you can control.
Many of the people speaking up for Jenner focus on his status as a victim, while implying that this victim status is the most important feature of his (or anyone’s existence), if not a virtue.
Here’s an example. A transgendered person by the name of Darya Teesewell, writing for huffingtonpost.com on 5/4/15, talked about the recent Diane Sawyer interview of Jenner:
This [Jenner’s interview with Sawyer] was not about genitalia, but about identity and transformation. I can’t remember the moment, or what Bruce said, but I burst into tears. His story was so close to mine; I felt like he was telling the world my story for me.
My wife clasped my hand, tightly. “We have to take care of you,” she said. She saw the same thing.
In the next few days, my social media feed was loaded with posts and opinions about the broadcast. To our collective amazement, consensus began to grow that it had been, on balance, a good thing for all of us. I began to think that others had seen the same thing that I saw.
There were a few outliers, as always, and one of them from the heartland typified the most common theme: “Jenner is part of the oppressor class.”
There’s something in some of the trans blowback I’ve seen about the Jenner story that reveals something deeply human. Here in the Land of Plenty, there are people who go without on a daily basis; they lack health care, nutrition and shelter. If they are trans, they often go without a kind word or a family to love them. That said, we are all products of our environment; “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” as John Steinbeck once wrote about the way Americans see themselves, when asked why socialism never took root in the U.S.A.
I was with Teesewell in the first line only: It’s not about gender, but identity. My take on this? Wanting the biological parts to match the inner identity. Wishing to make one’s physical status consistent with one’s psychological or inner identity.
If you’ve spent much or most of your life as a man when you really feel like you’re a woman, then the wonders of modern technology allow you to change your biological identity to match your psychological one. Prior to such technology — not that I’m assuming it’s perfect, but it’s credible — no such choice was possible. No matter how much you felt like a woman when you’re really a man, you’d have to accept it. Technology and science enable us to change that, if we wish and if we choose.
After that first line, Teesewell lost me. She got into themes of victimization and, of course, socialism over capitalism — when it’s actually rational technology developed by capitalism that makes the very scientific methodology of gender alteration possible. Transgendered people should get down on their (metaphorical) knees and thank reason, science and the for-profit motive of capitalism for making their desired gender transformation possible.
Another example of the victim mentality and transgenderism is from psychotherapist Mark O’Connell, who writes at psychologytoday.com:
The more we understand our own relationships to gender, the less we scapegoat our marginalized sisters and brothers who are targeted, discriminated against and attacked. By better understanding the fears we harbor about gender nonconformity in our own bodies and souls, the better we can answer the question, What is more frightening, the sight of a gender nonconforming person, or getting beaten to death?
Too many transgender people are regularly stigmatized, discriminated against, assaulted and murdered. They need our advocacy, support and protection. But fear of the unknown too often sways our thoughts toward the known instead, toward the majority of cisgender people — those who feel a match between their assigned sex and the gender they feel they are. Too many of us empathize more with the “normals” who get startled, flummoxed or bothered upon spotting transgender folks in restrooms, rather than the transgender persons themselves. (BTW, when trans people enter bathrooms, like you they most likely just want to pee).
Throughout the article, O’Connell correctly suggests that when you have an emotional reaction about something for which you have little or no facts, it can be enlightening to examine your own thoughts, ideas, assumptions and hidden premises about yourself, particularly in a taboo or often undiscussed area like sex. I don’t agree, as he might be suggesting, that there’s some kind of selfless duty for doing this. One should only do this when it helps you better understand yourself.
However, O’Connell makes more out of the transgendered person’s perceived or actual victim status than about the only question that really matters: Does changing one’s gender add to the happiness of one’s life, or take away from it? In the end, that’s what really matters.
The premise of the transgendered person is: “I’m really of the opposite sex. If I can change my biological make-up, then my psychological states and physical status will be in unison.” The proof will be in whether or not that ultimately happens. You can only ask the transgendered person who makes the transition, and you’ll have to take his or her word for it.
Many people are thinking and writing that Jenner just wants attention. Decades ago he was a world famous Olympic athlete. He’s tired of being out of the limelight, so now he has manufactured an issue to get back into it, some say. While it’s possible Jenner might miss being in the limelight, I doubt very much he would go to the trouble of changing his gender merely to do so. Most of us would not take that kind of a step in order to attain any goal. It seems unlikely if not preposterous that Jenner would become a woman solely to get attention, fame and money. Also, there are other people who feel a need to change their gender, and it has nothing to do with being in the limelight, since they never were (on the scale of Jenner, at least) in the limelight in the first place. There’s got to be more to it than that.
Then there’s morality. According to most conventional or traditional approaches to morality, you must accept yourself as God or Nature made you. On this premise, it’s wrong to even consider something like a gender change, even if it were even easier to attain than it currently is.
I reject this premise, as must anyone who benefits from tampering with nature as we know it. Human beings alter their bodies and their environments in ways to achieve better results for themselves all the time. That’s the whole point of both science and capitalism: to enable personal growth and human advancement, for the sake of human beings and the things that they value. We utilize fossil fuels, despite the disadvantages, because on the whole it makes life immensely safer, longer and more comfortable than the alternative of going without fossil fuels. We fly on airplanes despite the risks because, on the whole, it makes life far more efficient, enjoyable and comfortable than would otherwise be the case. More personally, some of us engage in plastic surgery (rationally and responsibly), wear makeup, get hair transplants and do other things to alter our body and/or bodily processes in order to attain more personal happiness. If you do such things out of anxiety or mindless compulsion, they won’t bring you happiness, and the same applies to something more dramatic such as gender change. But I see no reason to rule out gender change on principle, any more than to rule out any of these other things, which I have seen, many times, can and do contribute to a person’s sense of well-being and happiness.
Also, we have to make a psychological distinction here. Sexuality (in the sense of sexual orientation) and sexual identity are two different things. If you talk to a gay or lesbian man or woman, you’ll generally find someone comfortable with his or her gender identity. The gay man does not wish to become a woman; and the lesbian woman does not wish to become a man. A gay man wants to be a man, and wishes to be sexually with other men because they are men. (Ditto for lesbians.) The specifics will vary from individual to individual, but that’s the basic psychological essence of it.
A transgendered person, on the other hand, does not wish to retain the gender he or she has. We’re not talking about someone who’s a man and who is sexually and romantically attracted to the same gender; we’re talking about a man attracted to other men because he feels he’s actually a woman (and vice-versa).
Could this be based on erroneous thinking? Possibly. Maybe the woman struggling to become a man should simply accept that she’s a lesbian, work with it, and strive to establish sexually fulfilling romantic relationships with other women. Maybe the man who thinks he’s really a woman has unnecessarily rigid ideas about what constitutes masculinity or femininity, and is trying to force himself into that box. However, in the few cases I have met or worked with transgendered individuals, this is not what they say. In fact, they will sometimes say they try this approach, of simply accepting oneself as is, but there’s something hollow and wrong about it to them, not because they have any objection to being gay or lesbian, but rather because they’re a “woman trapped in a man’s body,” or vice-versa.
Is Jenner happy or unhappy? I honestly don’t know. I don’t believe all the media attention is a net positive for Jenner. Whenever someone becomes a celebrity in some context (regardless of the scale), there is a lot of phoniness surrounding the person. People attain a sense of self-worth and self-esteem merely from being around someone who is of celebrity status. A lot of people likewise gain a sense of faux self-esteem from being seen as liberal, compassionate, open-minded and so forth. In these two contexts, people fawning over Jenner and talking about what a victim she is, and how evil (capitalist, American, materialistic) forces have prevented her from being her real self, are really doing this just to be acceptable in the eyes of their like-minded friends, because those are the socially acceptable and “cool” attitudes to be seen as having. I expect that a lot of this celebrity upheaval could be a very lonely experience for Jenner, rivaling anything he/she might have gone through in the years of loneliness and unhappiness over being the wrong gender.
Time will tell. I wish Caitlyn Jenner (once Bruce Jenner) the best, because happiness is the central purpose of life. To cite an old quote (source unknown), “Take what you want … and pay for it.”
Be sure to “friend” Dr. Hurd on Facebook. Search under “Michael Hurd” (Rehoboth Beach DE). Get up-to-the-minute postings, recommended articles and links, and engage in back-and-forth discussion with Dr. Hurd on topics of interest. Also follow Dr. Hurd on Twitter at @MichaelJHurd1