From Self-hate to Self-love

An adult detransitioner’s journey. By Jonathan Blackwell

Photo by Serhii Tyaglovsky on Unsplash

The Wedge

After decades of unbearable gender torment, I transitioned from male to female so that I could finally have enough peace and sanity to continue to live. I went all the way to surgery to feel complete as a woman. For me, the operation was also an act of defiance towards the male part of me. In my mind, it was the crowning affront to the maleness I had been born with that I despised with the greatest disdain. Yet even though surgery removed the male genitals of my birth, the six hours in the operating room did nothing to remove the wedge of hatred of everything masculine that was still deep within my psyche. It could not be removed with a scalpel, and I couldn’t hate it out of existence, no matter how hard I tried.

And so, I did the only thing I could think to do. I buried my hatred of the masculine part of me as deep inside as I could, and I grew my happy new female life around it. It was like the ax that had been left in the trunk of a tree decades before, and in its best effort to heal over the years, the tree had encased the ax by growing up around the pain. That was me. After surgery, I moved on to create a beautiful new life, and I completely ignored the wedge of hatred that I had buried into forgetfulness—where it wouldn’t intrude in my new female life…Or so I thought. The reality was that it showed itself everywhere.

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Just In a Pretty Box

As I began living my life as a woman, I took the hatred I had for everything masculine, and I continued to embody that intense disdain, just from a female perspective. I had gone from being a man and despising every aspect of my male life to living as a woman and still rejecting everything masculine. I wanted every facet of my existence to express my new female claim on life. I didn’t just want everything in my world to be distinctively feminine. I wanted nothing masculine in my life.

That extreme imbalance on the side of the feminine made its way into every aspect of my world. I wouldn’t even do a simple household repair job unless I used my “girly” screwdriver with purple and pink flowers on the handle. On the surface, it was no big deal that I had a tool that only a woman would use. Beneath the surface, it was symbolic of the fact that I harbored such a hatred for everything masculine that I was simply unwilling to use the regular version of the tool. It extended into every facet of my life as I wouldn’t even buy a toaster, a garbage can, or a bathroom towel if it was in a color or style that a guy would buy.

In terms of what was inside of me, I hadn’t solved anything with my gender transition. I had simply taken how revolted I was at all things masculine and had re-packaged it in pink wrapping and fancy bows. I still carried around the same deeply unhealed part of me. It was just wrapped in a pretty box. I naively thought I was on the path of healing when I transitioned from male to female. All I had done was run away from the hurt by escaping the part of me that I couldn’t bring myself to love. I had simply shifted my life to the feminine world where the masculine that I so deeply despised could not intrude.

I learned the hard way that a gender transition doesn’t bring healing. I simply took the deep wound inside me into my new female life. I took the pain I had felt from living a male life and turned it into a toxic attitude towards anything masculine in my new female world. All the way through my transition journey, I brought the same deeply hurting part of myself right along with me. The unhealed ugliness was still inside. I had just given it a new wardrobe. The part of me that was crying out to be healed still needed to be loved back into wholeness.

Changing genders had not healed me. I had simply turned my back on and run from a part of me that I didn’t want to own and that I was unwilling to love. I told people my transition had been a beautiful thing. Privately, I was harboring a venomous hatred inside me that all but guaranteed that I would never really heal.

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Balance

And then I was doing some reading that completely changed how I viewed the complicated and hurtful feelings I had inside me. I was reading about yin and yang — the Taoist symbol of energies in balance. What I read referred to masculine and feminine not as gender—not as male or female—but as different kinds of energies. It was like an idea sneaking into my consciousness through the back door that avoided my front line defenses that would have otherwise outright rejected anything masculine before I had a chance to think about it. What I read referred to forces or energies in balance, and it was different enough from my conflict with my birth sex that I actually let it into my head and gave it some space.

What I read described masculine and feminine as two different ways in which things are expressed in the world. The feminine aspect was inwardly focused. It was characterized as creative, incubating, nurturing, supporting, receptive, healing, sensitive, intuitive, etc. The masculine aspect was the complement of the feminine. It took the creation of the feminine and built upon it. The masculine aspect was outwardly focused and expressed as being action-oriented, decisive, powerful, focused, determined, linear, logical, etc.

It was a teaching that planted a seed in my head and caused me to look at masculine and feminine in a whole new way. Yes, male and female were genders, but masculine and feminine were that — and also so much more. They were ways that energy expressed itself. I began to see all of this in a way that completely transformed my own experience with gender—as inward and outward energies that created a beautiful partnership and made everything work when they came together. I saw feminine energy as the inward process of inspiration and creativity, and masculine energy as the outward effort that took the plans created by the feminine, grabbed a toolbox, and began to build.

It was a concept that I had never looked at deeply—yet once I did, I began to see the beautiful dance of these two energies everywhere around me. I could see it at work in the cycle of the seasons as growth was outward in the spring and summer and inward in the fall and winter. At the shore, I saw it as waves powerfully rose and crashed upon the sand, and then receded and gained momentum for the next wave. The dance of these two energies—masculine and feminine was everywhere.

I saw this complex and beautiful exchange and balance in the sun and the moon, our daily cycles of sleep and wake, and in a thousand places where we watch things grow, repeat, or renew. I saw that the energies or forces behind these displays were not opposites but perfect partners in an elegant interplay that went far beyond what either could do alone. And finally, after seeing this beautiful dance of masculine and feminine energy everywhere in nature, I was finally open to the possibility that it just might exist in me.

I was secure in my female life—and still very content to be completely rejecting the masculine part of me. Yet what I had been reading about was like a seed that I had innocently watered and was now a plant I couldn’t ignore. I realized that within each person, these energies were intended to be in balance there too. Masculine energy was meant to be tempered and held in balance by the feminine, and feminine energy brought a host of extraordinary abilities that were to be supported, strengthened, and protected by the masculine in return. Neither of the two energies was meant to act alone, nor could they do very well if they did. A simple bit of reading had caused me to take a hard look in the mirror at myself.

I realized how little sense it made that I wanted to ignore, despise, and completely reject the masculine in me and only express the feminine side. I could see that it made about as much sense as a woman trying to do a waltz by herself—trying to prove to herself—and to the world, that she didn’t need a partner. The very idea seemed laughable, yet it was exactly what I was doing. It wasn’t about a partner in real life, but there was a part of me—my masculine nature that I refused to own—that could bring out the beauty of what my life could be—except I stubbornly kept the door slammed and bolted shut to keep it from intruding in my female life.

I was living in a delusion—thinking that I had no need of the masculine part of who I was, and even thinking that I was far better off for having it shut out of my life. Instead, partnership was the whole point, and I just wasn’t getting it. I finally realized that I didn’t want my life to be just half of a beautiful performance. I no longer wanted to be just half of who I could be. I wanted to express all of myself. And then with that inner epiphany, with my eyes more wide open, and with my heart softened towards the part of me that I had so long hated, I began to see what I had been blind to before. There was already a lot of masculine expression in me, and I had never allowed myself to see it that way.

I was an engineer at the time. I spent my days in grueling mental activity—analyzing data and solving very complex problems—all things that were “masculine energy”. The thing was that I was proud of the problem-solving skills I possessed and the things I could accomplish with my mental ability. Once I realized what was going on, I saw the irony and even the hypocrisy in what I was doing. I was a female engineer in my exclusively feminine world, believing that I had blocked the masculine out of my life. And here I was, in a very mental (masculine) occupation, and taking pride in that part of me.

I would even go home and quilt in the evenings, which I loved, and realize that even there, too, I used plenty of math and problem-solving to work out the details of my intricate quilt designs. I finally realized that I couldn’t hate and despise everything masculine, and at the same time love expressions of masculine energy in me.

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That finally broke it all open for me. I realized that no matter how much I thought I hated my masculine nature, I was expressing it everywhere in my life. I realized once and for all that I was the expression of both masculine and feminine energy and always had been.

I realized that I already was gentle and strong. I was decisive and contemplative, logical and intuitive. The feminine in me was highly creative, and the masculine part of me was rigidly structured. Each had its place, and I drew upon them both. There were times when I wanted to design with my head and build with my hands, and other times when I just wanted to lie in the grass. I loved that as an engineer, I had the mental ability to solve complex problems. Yet I also loved that I was such an unrestrainable free spirit and so far outside the lines that often I was the problem. At long last, I finally loved all of me.

I realized that I already was that beautiful dance of the masculine and feminine all rolled into one. I had just been so shut out in my heart that I couldn’t—or wouldn’t see the truth about myself. I realized that I was both, and finally, I wanted to be both. It was time to heal and come back home. It was time to dissolve that wedge of hatred of the masculine once and for all—as if it had never existed. It was time to finally welcome that part of me that I had long disowned and left out in the cold—back into the warm embrace of my loving heart.

I could see that it wasn’t about being male or female after all. It wasn’t about masculine or feminine like I had been so convinced it was. It was about something far greater and far more important. It was about balance. It was about realizing that both masculine and feminine aspects were inseparable, necessary, and even beautiful parts of me. It was about coming to understand that I was not whole or complete, and especially not healed, until both the masculine and feminine aspects of my nature were so present in my life that they were like partners in love.

It was about accepting and embracing that I couldn’t accomplish anything meaningful in my life until the feminine and masculine were so intertwined that they were one instead of two. And with that, it was finally time to return—all the way—back to the body and gender role of my birth. It was time to walk away from the female life that I had given everything to have—and that I had lived for 23 years. It was time to return—and joyously so—back to the male life I had been born into. Not because I was disillusioned with my transition, but because I was healed.

Jonathan Blackwell is an adult detransitioner who underwent an extraordinarily tumultuous transition as an adult and then spent 23 years living as a woman before a series of unexpected events brought clarity and understanding to the transgender experience. What he learned made it possible to heal from all the former pain and happily return to his male life.

He is an advocate of how peace and happiness can be found in the body of one’s birth, even amid the torment and anguish of feeling in the wrong body. He is the author of “From Transgender Pain To Inner Peace: An Extraordinary Journey From Gender Suffering To A Healed And Beautiful Life”.

He can be reached at: Jonathan@SoulEmpoweredLife.net

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Life Beyond Trans

Inspecting Gender is proud to feature the voices of detransitioners like Johnathan who are willing to share their rich stories and insights to share. We hope you’ll join Genspect at the Bigger Picture Conference in Albuquerque, September 27-28, to listen to Soren Aldaco on Digital Influence on Trans Identities, Cori Cohn on the Activist turn to Authenticity Over Evidence and Jonni Skinner on Detransition in Adulthood. Register now at genspect.org

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