By Frances Mulcahy MBBS (she/her)
What particular thing of interest might I have to say about how men think and emote? You may think “not much new, under the sun” about that subject. However, I think the fact that I spent the first 60 years of my womanhood living as a man does give me a novel perspective.
I was born in 1957, and assigned male at birth (AMAB). At this time, the patriarchal, binary, cis-gendered was normal, and the hetero-normative world was in full swing. There were very powerful family dynamics that constantly reminded me I was the first-born son and the protector of my younger sister. In my childhood and adolescent years, there was absolutely no public awareness of gender diversity, that I saw. Even in the late 1970s, at university, I was being taught that males who presented in woman’s clothes for any reason “suffered” a psychiatric disorder classed as a fetish, part of the group of disorders of sexual function (homosexuality had only just been removed from the official list at that time).
This is not a transition story, but I will say my gender awareness was a lightning bolt experience and, once struck, my course was set. I determined to live as my authentic self, and transition socially and medically, and with the huge relief of that freedom came a largely unexpected change in my emotional processing. This change occurred, in part, before correcting my hormone state to match my real gender. Hormones turbocharged the change.
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As an apparently male healthcare professional, I prided myself that I was an empathic listener to my female patients. They reported that I was a good listener. As a professional, the emotional portion of a communication went like this: I listened to the content of a communication, verbal and non-verbal, and tried to identify the emotional tone. I contextualised the emotion against the content, and I would test my understanding by using a piece of empathic feedback to see if I “had the correct drift”. Summary – I would focus on content, not completely ignore the emotion and in a slightly patronising way see if I was “right”.
Now, my lifetime female brain is free to work, and on reflection, oh dear me, as a heritage faux male I had absolutely no idea. At least I did not dismiss emotion but oh, I was so very limited. I had no idea (did I say that already?).
I am about 15 months into my second puberty and my brain is settling down. I hear the emotional content in everything. It flows over me all the time. When I was early in puberty, the emotions ruled absolutely, and my loved ones experienced a mature-aged woman, possessor of a well-trained analytical mind, having wild adolescent mood swings. So much fun (to be clear, while being a roller coaster ride was a given, I have loved every moment of my freedom to be me)!
The only transgender woman I speak for is me. That said, I am not the only transgender woman I know with a similar experience. My non-binary friends have a wide range of roughly parallel stories.
My heritage male experience of emotional communication and processing was of a single track – black and white, and at a soft volume. The content message was white noise, unless an effort was made.
Me, today, a 62 year old woman with the emotional maturity of, I guess, a 25 year old, and my experience of emotional communication is akin to watching the New Year’s Eve fireworks on Sydney harbour. Oh-so-beautiful, yet apt to overwhelm.
My experience of emotional communication is akin to watching the New Year’s Eve fireworks on Sydney harbour. Oh-so-beautiful, yet apt to overwhelm.
My experience is that when a distinctly male mind is confronted with strong emotional tone it will ask, ‘what has caused this?’, rather than the more helpful question – ‘what does this emotion mean to the person expressing the emotion?’