Toxic Masculinity

Toxic Masculinity
Or
Why Being Good Matters To Me

by
Alexander Gordon Jahans

I keep revisiting the guilt over that damned fanfic in my mind. I wake up at night thinking about it and wishing I could apologise. Wishing I could make it right. Everything I write seems to evolve into a reprocessing of my grief and guilt about writing it. Why? At the very time that was going down I was being diagnosed with Kallman’s Syndrome, suffering from depression and nazis, literal goddamned nazis were sending stuff to my house. Even my own father was taking his frustration at being divorced out on me. Yet it’s the fucking fanfic I keep coming back to.

Let me be clear, I am not a saint. At school I was bullied relentlessly and my own desperate frustration and anger caused me to have anger issues that would sometimes cause me to explode at others. In hindsight my naive crushing on women was perhaps expressed so awkwardly at college and university that while I know my actions never harmed anyone they may well have freaked people out. They didn’t know who I was and what I was capable of after all. So I have regrets, serious regrets, but it’s the fanfic that haunts me and I don’t know why. Why this thing? Why is this what causes me so many sleepless nights?

I think it’s because the fanfic is the clearest instance I can think of where my actions caused harm and I knew at the time that the inclusion of THE problematic scene was risky. This is like living with low level anxiety your whole life and one time you ignored it and things went disastrously wrong. Except did it really go disastrously wrong. The fallout certainly feels it but I have no proof that anyone was harmed by what I wrote. Indeed the person who most saw things wrong with what I wrote seemed an impenetrable strong personality that gave no fucks and just decided it was a messed up thing to have written that indicated things about my character. That’s the key though. The thing I wrote was stupid and I felt that was possible at the time and these people proved it then effectively decided that it was proof I was unsafe to be around. That I was unworthy and not a good man.

I regret many things about how I handled those events but I absolutely do not regret championing the cause of trans and/or non-binary people who want a safe space. People deserve to feel safe and if that means shutting me out then so be it. Safe spaces are important even if they are denied to me. I think though that it is the implication that I am unsafe, that I am not a good man that burns with me.

You see at university I went by Gordon Jones to distance myself from my family and my bad experiences art school but when I entered my final year of university I took up the name I had in school as a reminder to myself that I could survive no matter how bad it got. Alex Jahans the boy had survived more than a decade of relentless bullying and I knew I would need that strength when university ended. Becoming Alex Jahans again was a promise to myself that I would survive because it would be tough and I needed that strength so much because I had no idea just how much shit was waiting for me as university ended. The problem is that implicit within that promise was the idea that Alex Jahans is good, pacifist, he does no harm.

You see at school I was bullied by everyone and then I would get home and my father would scare the hell out of me with his shouting. Let me tell you the word ‘Sugar’ is goddamned terrifying when your dad is towering over at you and bellowing at the top of his lungs as he is literally foaming at the mouth with rage over some stupid bullshit. I defined myself as a pacifist and better than other people because I had to be.

The last few years have seen me come to terms with the fact that my memory works such that I can see through the cycle of my father’s abusive behaviour where my sister can’t. She sees the latest bridge of abuse to get past. I see every bridge my father has ever forced me to cross. I am not blind to the complexity of the situation. There are things I miss about him and he isn’t wholly evil and sometimes his actions are understandable. They aren’t justifiable. They aren’t normal. They definitely are not good or acceptable but sometimes I understand how desperation, frustration and anger has driven him to such actions. The problem is that none of the good of my father is worth a damn while his pattern of abusive behavior remains. He is a dangerous man and the bogeyman me and my mother define ourselves against.

One of the quiet joys of recent years has been watching how my mother has bloomed and developed into a different more rounded, happy and productive individual without my dad there to stifle her dreams, confidence and desire to improve things around the house. I am sure that part of my improving mood can be owed to fading scars of his behaviour. Slowly the effects of him upon our lives are being assessed for their worth with the bad parts being discarded and replaced with better stuff. We are healing.

So that’s why not being a good person cuts so deeply. That’s why the possibility haunts me. That’s why it used to madden me that I had no explanation for what they accused me of. Without an explanation of what I did wrong I can’t stop doing those wrong things, I can’t become safe again, I can’t become good again. Except maybe I never can. Not to some people. After all if you knew a man murdered someone once it wouldn’t matter how reformed he was you wouldn’t feel safe around him so why should a trans person feel safe around someone who once wrote transphobic things?

Even if there was some simple explanation that I could easily work with they don’t owe me that. Victims of oppression don’t owe their oppressors compassion and explanations, even if those oppressors did so accidentally. I fucked up and this is my mess to deal with. The problem is that I still don’t know how to deal with it. That cis privilege comes with ignorance of the perspective of a transgender person. I can do research but I can never truly know how it feels to be trans and/or non-binary so now every time I am around them I have anxiety that I am going to fuck up again and cause my social life to disintegrate and I know that sometimes when I ignore my anxiety things go very badly wrong.

This incidentally is why disagreements on twitter have caused me actual panic attacks before and why I have withdrawn from it. My autism means I am playing a continual game of Russian roulette whenever I talk to people online. If you fuck up and say the wrong thing in person you can apologise and learn from the experience. You fuck up and say the wrong thing on twitter or facebook and people will be sharing screencaps of it decades later.

Maybe that’s right? Maybe it is better this way but what the fuck do you do if your past is littered with such literary landmines of stupidity? I know myself and I know what I have or have not physically done but my autism means I can never be sure what I have said will be taken how I intended it. I have had other autistic people say they would not have made the mistakes I made. Has it been codified somewhere medically that autism causes a lack of social skills but always leaves someone mentally cognizant of any and all possible ways they might unintentionally be discriminatory or bigoted so such actions are definitively due to wilful bigotry and not unintended misunderstanding?

Heck there is another complexity to this that sometimes I have called women out for bigoted statements and they have called me sexist for daring to say a negative thing to a woman. How the fuck do I take that? What is the response to that? I am an autistic person with Kallman’s Syndrome and Growth Hormone Deficiency who has been bullied, abused and stalked by nazis. Surely I have a right, a duty, to call people out for being bigoted? At the same time I am a cis white man who likes women and was raised under the patriarchy so I am privileged and probably have some latent sexism, racism and heteronormativity to fight against.

This isn’t easy. Which is why I think the deconstructivist era of the 90s sticks with me. I don’t get to pretend I am definitively a good guy anymore. I have a black mark against my name and I have to live with that and the possibility that I might fuck up again. Women get to have golden age superheroes who are beacons of hope and love. Cis white men have to live with the complexity of being part of the patriarchy whether we like it or not and how we fight against that toxicity within ourselves and within our communities.

Right I’m going to get some tea.

Acceptance

Acceptance. It was my yearly theme. The thing I knew I had to work on this year. There are problems in my life, things I can’t change, they prevent me living a life I wish I had. I am alive and I have happiness in this life but with this happiness is always frustration at my inability to make things better. So this year I resolved to leave that frustration behind. There are still problems that I have to deal with as and when they come up, little things I need to work on but that’s fine. It’s the things I can’t change that hurt the most.

So much of growing up as a cis boy is to do with the myth of the heroic knight slaying monsters. Goodies defeating baddies. There is something ironic about a nation of boys with daddy issues growing up watching stories about heroes with Daddy issues. At university I wrote that TV raised me and my lecturers could not fathom what it meant. My parents weren’t neglectful about the physical stuff, not generally, but everything I learned that made me I learned from TV.

This is why I think it has been so hard for me to realize the extent of the complexity of the world. I grew up on narratives about heroes and villains. About monsters and victims. I grew up a victim of bullying and abuse therefore I could not be culpable of bad acts and did not have to examine myself because I had to be in the right as others had hurt me. That’s why I had that anti-feminist phase at university. The feminists hurt my feelings therefore I was the victim and they were the bullies, therefore all feminism was bad. The possibility that good people could do bad or stupid things, that bad people could have elements of decency or even that individuals could be complex and not so easily defined or predicted wasn’t within me.

Oh I thought it was. I thought I understood. I knew to be careful about not being violent myself in school. I said pointedly that I judge actions, not people, back before the shattered facebook group disintegrated. I thought I was so smart. When that group disintegrated I was scarred because how it broke apart left me irrevocably confronted with the fact that people are not so easily predictable. I felt hurt and betrayed by people who acted out against me for reasons they clearly thought were just and how things spiralled from then outside my control leaving me with no place to go. Someone had to be the bad guy and over the last few years I have oscillated back and forth because if I’m the bad guy then surely I should be dead. That is what happens to bad guys in fiction. Or they were oversensitive and cruel traitors in which case they were the bad guy so fuck what they think.

I was so convinced I was the victim after school and then I got bullied in college and university, nazis stalked me online and my own father gave me nightmares. I defined myself as the man who is moral in the face of abuse. I could not be wrong. I could not have acted immorally. I still don’t think that - knowing what I did then - that I acted immorally. Yet I demonstrably made the wrong decisions as enough people left me that they were presumably negatively affected and considered my actions immoral. They don’t write stories about the heroes offending people because of their ignorance online. I had no frame work for how to deal with this.

In a way this situation is typical of the problems I faced. A complex mess where I was hurt but I had no idea of how to proceed. My very apologising led my nazi stalkers to target the victim of my terrible writing. What little action I could do made things worse. I am still apologising to the air years later because of the negative consequences my writing caused. There is something bitterly, horrifically, ironic about how an incident where people accused me of being transphobic has led me to literally be anxious and afraid of trans and non-binary people. The person I wrote a 50k fanfic to I now avoid for fear of the memories and regret.

The reason I actually wrote a magic potion to make the body fit how you perceived yourself was because around the time I wrote that fanfic I had been diagnosed with Kallman’s Syndrome and had just been beginning treatment. I am a cis man with tits who needs regular painful testosterone injections. I have been misgendered and I know how deeply that cuts. I also have what the medical community has helpfully termed a micropenis. It’s like they named it for maximum stigma. I would gladly drink a potion made from shit, piss, vomit and jizz if it meant my body looked like it’s supposed to and worked like it’s supposed to.

I actually looked into penis enlargement and with current technology and medical experience you basically have to choose: Do you want a functional dick that feels everything or do you want a pretty, normal sized dick? So I’m sticking with what nature gave me.

I am not trans or non-binary (probably) but I have been misgendered and I do experience what I think is dysphoria. My experience is different. I wasn’t assigned the wrong gender at birth. I was assigned the right gender, my pituitary gland just didn’t work right so my body got confused and decided to present me with a feminine physique. The testosterone injections have massively helped course correct things but they can’t fix everything and I am still left with the mental scars.

Then there is the economic issue. So many of us are trained to think of disability in big simple obvious ways. Can you get up the stairs or can’t you? Can you walk? Can you physically do stuff? The thing I have realized is that my autism and low energy from Growth Hormone Deficiency (Another problem due to a bust pituitary gland.) have left me intellectually able to do some stuff but not psychologically able to do other stuff. It seems counter intuitive. I went to college and university. I clearly can do intellectual work to some degree. The problem is that college and university want to accommodate you ability to get the work done. Jobs aren’t. I just cannot compete in the current work environment because I can’t do phone calls, I can’t stick to schedules and I suck at bureaucracy and social skills. These are things I cannot do due to my disabilities. I am thus stuck on Universal Credit, unable to claim disability pay, unable to get a job.

If you have read any of these paragraphs and are thinking to yourself “Yes but what if...” then understand that such questions have been plaguing me for years. This is my life now. It may be fragile and it may be temporary but this is it and I think as the year draws to a close that I am accepting it at last and finding peace.