I’ve gone through a very strange decade. Most of my childhood was spent within the influence of my grandparents’ love of conservative talk radio. When I was in elementary school, we held a mock election at my local YMCA after-school program, and I voted for George Bush, believing that liberals were slackers and wimps and that it wasn’t fair for them to take stuff away from the honest, hardworking Americans who earned their keep.
At 12, I happened upon 4chan, and ended up developing into something comparable to the alt-right. This was almost 5 years before Richard Spencer promoted the term, and nearly a decade before the 2016 presidential election granted it a platform and a place in the national political conversation, far beyond anything I could have imagined. I spent all my time on 4chan, antagonizing strangers on the internet, throwing out slurs in an attempt to upset people, browsing exotic porn, and reveling in the ways that users on the site, unified by nothing more than a collective resentment and cruelty, could organize quickly and efficiently into insurgent harassment campaigns, doxxing individuals, breaking into their emails, bringing down their websites, and even destroying their livelihoods.
If you’ve been through the certain parts of the internet at a certain moment, you might remember this video.
To us, it was totally ridiculous, of course. We celebrated the notoriety this video granted us, dreaded the influx of dipshits who’d think that we were some kind of actual l33t h4xx0r ring, and laughed at the idiocy of Fox News for portraying us as a terrorist group that would actually resort to explosives. We would have been thrilled if one of our number had actually blown up a van, though, and we wanted nothing more than to see just how much we could upset, scare, or enrage the “normies”. The Internet Hate Machine functioned at a rapid pace and an ironic distance.
Cats like to chase things, and mice just happen to be there.
By 18, though, I had begun to change. As much as I got off on identifying with muh sekrit club, it was also a brutal experience. My only ways of interacting with people were structured as competitions for status, where I was either better or worse than them, and all that mattered was being better. Only thing was, I was still working within the structures that 4Chan valorizes. I made jokes about Jews and black people, used homophobic slurs, and tried to signal that I was edgier than anyone else, more indifferent and unrestrained by political correctness and weak-willed liberalism. And then I had my first girlfriend.
The relationship started quickly, then collapsed within about a month. I was devastated, and couldn’t think about anything else. Why didn’t she like me? I couldn’t figure it out. I kept puzzling why she could have other attractions, and be warm and kind to other people, but not continue to date me — what did they have that I didn’t?
I incessantly googled for dating lifehacks. “How do I become attractive?” “flirting techniques” “fitness tips”, and so on. I didn’t really have it in me to actually, y’know, try any of these things, and became increasingly despondent, and consumed with the idea that I was unfuckable, which was a stand-in for being unlovable.
The difference between incels and myself is that I didn’t process my feelings as a resentment towards women, but as a failure of myself, and a hatred that was directed inwards. I felt like there must be something wrong with me. This began to flower as I tried to learn about feminism. In feminist literature, I thought I began to absorb the actual harsh truths of reality. Not the unveiling that redpill/incels think that they’re getting, but one deeper than that, a structural reorganization that challenges the deepest feelings and expectations I had.
I needed to hate myself, and feminism provided an easy justification to do so. My desires were propped up by the oppression of women, and contributed to its continued enactment. The only thing I could do was to own my failings, confess my complicity in violent patriarchy, and try to change. The first two parts were easy. All I had to do was continuously apologize, never speak unless it was my place, and neurotically, mercilessly deconstruct each of my actions, looking for possible signs that I had slipped and unconsciously performed one of the endless aggressions that make it more difficult for women to exist in this world. I experienced guilt about many of my decisions and actions, and I believed that these things qualified me to be trusted by others, to be a safe, “woke” person to come to, to be vulnerable with. I started meeting people who would reveal their anxieties, their struggles, their traumas to me.
This was extremely dangerous.
My relationships at this point were extremely fast paced, emotionally dependent, and, when they ended, would completely collapse. We would go from full dependency to a slight disruption in our relationship, to no contact, no communication, and the disintegration of whatever friendship might have existed before. I think that they had probably seen something I didn’t want them to see. Consciously or not, they saw something I didn’t want to see in myself.
What they probably touched was this: Underneath all of the social justice mantras I could recite, underneath all of the mea culpas, anxious pleas for forgiveness, and insistences that, yes, I was fine, and yes, I could handle this, I was still the cat. I still had the same instincts, only sublimated under a different set of signifiers and behaviors.
Eventually, I began to feel it, too. Not consciously, but I could look back at a pattern of behavior, and realize that something was going wrong. I would do everything “right”, until people started to avoid me, or something would happen and I’d snap. I wouldn’t understand what was happening, or what I was doing. I only understood that it hurt, or that I was ruining things that I desperately needed, betraying things that I believed in, and, for all the change I thought I’d undergone, I was still doing wrong. In the depths of these emotions, this unending string of disappointments, pain, and inability to truly, foundationally change, backed by theory that I used to castigate myself, I was at a loss as to what to do. That emptiness, that void was something that I filled with gender identity.
This is a big part of what being trans meant to me. Externally, it absolves me from being a man, and ex post facto forgives the harm I have done — As a TPoC, I basically get a gold medal in the oppression olympics. Internally, I got to believe that this would be a way to guarantee that I would, in fact, change.
If I pull that mask off, will you die?
It would be extremely painful… For you.
Underneath all of the invectives I’d directed at straight, white, privileged, cis men was a fear. I feared being unmasked. I feared that, at some point, I hadn’t done enough to be antiracist or anticapitalist, or feminist, or what-have-you. I feared that my validation would disappear, that I’d be called to account for my previous sins.
Ultimately, it became impossible for me to continue living this way. My then-partner became suicidally depressed, and I tried to be one of their primary sources of support for several months.
At first, it was affirming. I could help by being there, by listening, by patiently reassuring, and know that I wouldn’t be abandoned because I was being relied upon, and because I was doing wonderful, helpful things. Over time, though, everything fell apart.
It’s sustained stress and struggle that reveals who you really are. You may be able to keep together certain parts of the identity you wanted to create, but cracks begin to appear. I started to make promises that I couldn’t keep, say that things were okay when they weren’t, and eventually I started to snap at people who you promised infinite patience. I shifted rapidly between total support, frustration, and indifference, professing unconditional love while enacting all of the traits I tried so desperately to repress. As much as this person was reliant on me, I was also reliant on them in a profoundly horrifying way.
I couldn’t accept that I had limits. I couldn’t accept that I was the type of person who wasn’t able to be the best thing possible for my partner. I feared that it meant I would be unlovable, that I would be left behind if I ever said that I wasn’t okay. I feared the possibility of being responsible for someone else’s death. I slept less, and always had my phone nearby, constantly checking to see if I’d get another text about self-harming, about suffering, about wanting to die, or if I’d get a panicked, tearful phone call. Sometimes I listened mindfully, others I zoned out, distracted myself by browsing the internet while listening to them cry, or just barely responded. One day, they visited me during my lunch break at work, and cried in the breakroom while I ate a sandwich.
Over time I got more aggressive, telling them they were doing things wrong, trying to bully them into thinking differently. No matter what I said, no matter what I believed or tried to practice, or what I knew was right, under this strain, I fell back to my instincts, to my dependency and rage and selfishness, to the things that I had totally disavowed, and that I believed I had outgrown. I would sometimes realize that it had happened, feel regret, apologize, and promise to do better, but never actually did better. I was unmasked. I was dangerous.
There is nothing in 6 years of reading theory and trying to be “good” that could fix this. In fact, it would have been much safer if I hadn’t done the reading. Knowing how to signify virtue, and doing so in ways that were painful and difficult meant that I could convince both myself and others that I really was better — that I could do things the right way. I worked for it. I suffered for it. Unfortunately, so did someone else.
For many of us, I think that the first step is to just be upfront about our vices, our desires, our failings. Signifying virtue does not make us virtuous. It can help people feel at ease, and it can help reassure people that we care about their experiences and are here to support them, but it is madness to confuse it with actually doing the work. If someone depends on us to live up to our word, and we do so only partially, only messily filtered through neurotic-obsessive repression, it creates an exceptionally toxic, exceptionally unstable environment.
What I do, in the end, is what I want to do. I have the vocabulary to rationalize my actions, and the tenacity and motivation to continue to do so. Even if I stop myself, or do something else, the things I desire will show themselves regardless, but in increasingly grotesque, twisted ways. What’s much harder is to not try to preemptively defend myself from an imagined audience; to let others see what I am, to ask for what I want, knowing that I will be judged for it.
Sometimes I will hurt people, and some of that pain will be deep, irreconcilable, and permanent. There is no identity that will exempt me from this.
