I am beginning to believe I made a mistake by ever taking transgender ideological norms seriously. I have been half-committal in my doubts for a while now, but recently I had a handful of epiphanies that are solidifying those doubts. I have been thinking about how my introduction to transness came when I was a very lost and insecure teenager without much sense of self, and how desperate I was for belonging. I have also been thinking about how in childhood I was raised purely by women, feeling the absence of deadbeat men who walked out of the picture, and raised on stories from the matriarchs of my family about the evils of men. And none of this is to insult my having been raised by women. But it did instill an antipathy in me towards manhood, because I only had negative impressions of it, and it made me a paranoiac about the possibility of ending up like the men in those stories. I wonder now if a large part of my entry into transness was a slipshod attempt to escape that paranoia.
