A Hero’s Journey: Trans(personal) Psychology

Are Trans people saving human civilization?

Gender Dysphoria

As a cisgender, heterosexual man, I’ve been trying to understand gender dysphoria. How does it feel to be in the “wrong” body? And what physical or psychological elements contribute to the felt sense that one’s soul or mind is of a different gender than one’s body?

Follow me down the rabbit hole as I uncover my conclusion that trans people are undertaking a heroic journey to save the soul of civilization.

Men and Myth

This article has been extracted and reworked from a longer article published in Patsy Fergusson’s Fourth Wave.

That article, in part, looks at ‘myths’ men use. By myth, I mean stories that present as quite obviously true…not the opposite. I’ll defend that idea below.

Thinking about men and myth got me thinking about my own assumptions about gender. How does the transgender journey fit into what I think I know?

What emerged was a further question. Could there be something called archetypal gender? I was surprised by an answer that cast trans individuals as heroes in the search for meaning among the wasteland of modern gender relations and assumptions.

Gender Stack

Techie that I am, I analyze gender as a ‘stack’ paralleling the layers of the first tech stack I worked with. Each layer of the stack is dependent on the previous layer’s existence, e.g. no phenotype (physical characteristics) without genotype (genetic makeup), or, using the case of network technology: no network without some wires or wifi gizmos to host the packet protocol; no packet protocol then no transmitted text and pictures.

But before we go down the rabbit hole of sex and gender, let’s start with a proviso. The difference between men and women is chronically overstated. Anne Fausto-Sterling convinced me of this in 1992 and evidence continues to support her.

My preferred starting framework is always evolutionary biology. We evolved as small groups in competition with other small groups either directly through raids and warfare or indirectly through resource control.

No group could afford to squash talent because the talented individual was the ‘wrong’ sex. It was important to value female fighters, male child-rearers, and anyone with wisdom to help in troubled times. The tribe’s survival could depend on it. This, btw, is the likely reason that human women live well past menopause…a trait shared with just a handful of other species like Asian elephants and killer whales. The wisdom of elders was/is critical.

Also, note that statements about sex differences are ‘statistical.’ Men are statistically taller than women but some women are taller than most men.

Finally, as we go down the gender stack below note that there are ambiguities at every level! Plus, the levels aren’t crisply differentiated but have complex interactions between all of them.

The Gender Stack — Details

So then, a quick sketch of the gender stack from bottom to top:

• Genotype
• Mother’s blood chemistry…hormonal mix (estrogen and testosterone being particularly relevant)
• Phenotype at birth

(Note, there are ambiguities here already. XY and XX are the most common but XXY and XYY are found way too frequently to call them abnormalities. Those genes express themselves in a continuum of morphologies.)

• Ongoing individual blood chemistry. Testosterone drip.
• Family — particularly the cultural envelope of a child’s immediate environment
• Cultural conventions — ethnicity for lack of a better term — prevailing community values

(There are feedback loops everywhere as I noted. A particularly salient one would be how your family or culture responds to their perception of your gender.)

• Media envelop — with increasing impact over the last century.

And then: gender dysphoria forces us to examine

• Felt gender
• Archetypal gender??

What’s happening here?

Back to Myth

A Starting Point: Jung and Campbell

Folks writing about myth such as Carl Jung and Joeseph Campbell (and their contemporary equivalents) typically treat gender as binary although as a polarity that all people share whether male or female. The interplay of gender opposites in dream or myth is viewed as the interaction of deep currents in the individual or culture and a central component of the work of both.

So, in talking hypotheses about myth and felt and/or archetypal gender, what exactly would we be talking about?

Myth and Gender

As noted above, in the Jung/Campbell story-space gender plays a large role in the dreams and myths that channel both cultural progress and individual growth. It’s a strong player almost always invoked.

The core myth in this story-space is often called the night-sea journey and it tells a tale of departure and return. The (masculine) hero charts a path of differentiation from the (female) unconscious represented as ocean…or as a witch that must be tricked…or monster that must be slain…and that act crystalizes out the positive feminine as helpmate or muse or psychopomp.myth

For Jung, the ego presents as masculine, and the night-sea journey charts the path of the ego differentiating itself from the (female) unconscious in order to be able to operate in a self-directed manner — but then must reconnect with the feminine in order not to be cut off from the deeper self that it needs to remain healthy and growing.

Too rigid an ego is bad; too squishy an ego is equally bad.

As with Freud, there are some interesting (but not necessarily convincing) convolutions added to account for how this might play out in the different genders.

Campbell’s work parallels Jung at a cultural level with the hero departing and returning after completing heroic tasks. Campbell talks about renewing culture rather than helping integrate individuals.

Initiation

In both cases, initiation is a pivotal concept. For Jung, the individual ‘Self’ is forged in a departure from everyday conventions and then a return with a more complete identity under the tutelary impact of an archetype demanding wholeness. Something needed but excluded has been discovered and then integrated. For Campbell, the hero must depart a withered kingdom, find that something new, and return to renew the culture. In both, the pattern of leave, change, return is a pattern of initiation.

Sound familiar? In applying this to the lives of trans people, we see the same pattern: leaving the withered kingdom (culturally-imposed, stereotypical gender norms), finding something new (the transgender identity), and returning to renew the culture (dismantle toxic gender norms).

Culture-Bound. An aside.

As I hinted, I never found this male hero thing convincing. Jung and Campbell both came from cultures with more rigid gender roles and worked in a context in which the roles were viewed as clear and natural. Their interpretation is way too pat. Like Jung’s typology, his play of genders is interesting and probably useful as a starting point. Accurate? Well, not so much.

See the clip below for an eloquent rebuttal of a hero’s necessary maleness. Note a key element: the hero is a defender… not some blindly aggressive dipshit.

Archetypes

This is the last piece we need. Jung views the Self as an archetype activated to push toward wholeness. The night sea journey is an archetype describing parts of that process.

Archetypes, simply, are stories that have you. They can override the individual and hence are essential to bringing an individual or culture forward into something new and renewing. They can carry the ego on a wave of image and emotion with the ego either surfing the wave or slammed broken on the reef.

To understand archetypes, think dreams. Dreams have both content and energy. Think of a highly focused dream with more narrative cohesion and a lot more energy — enough energy that you are to a significant degree, inside the dream. You are nudged into following its suggested narrative and are attracted or repelled by people and elements of the world around you as that narrative calls them out as players in your own deep story.

Archetypes have a cultural component. Jung describes archetypes as equivalent to a crystal where an inherited pattern gets filled out by culture and our personal biography and acts to channel ‘libido’ when activated.

To understand the crystal’s pattern vs. the specific cultural component, let’s take a parallel. We have an instinct for language. Infants automatically seek to learn it. Accent-free second languages are easy to learn until the window shuts in adolescence. Yet the specifics of the language vary widely from culture to culture.

Archetype activation comes from the challenges and conflicts of everyday life: finding a mate, sexual attraction, parents and children, personal and tribal enemies, same-sex and cross-sex relationships, shame, weakness, and growth.

It can, also, come from the fracture lines in a culture that create conflicts in everyday life. A key difference is that one can grow to ‘solve’ individual trauma, but the cultural fracture lines need a collective solution. Artists, visionaries, and activists (a group that includes trans people) have a critical role in interiorizing the conflict and then generating possible paths forward — possibly initiating the rest of us.

Archetypal Gender

Okay, sorry: long windup to the pitch here.

So then, does an individual’s gender identity have a mythic component? Could gender dysphoria be grounded in something archetypal?

It fits the criteria. As with language, a sense of gender polarity could persist strongly. And this despite the fact that specific ‘natural’ gender traits vary dramatically from culture to culture like elements of language.

As with other archetypes, gender discomfort could trigger the crystallization of a cross-sex gender ‘imago’ strong enough to override a simple ego-based ‘get out and walk on it’ type solution. And if we look deeply across cultures for story patterns, it seems that there are, also, imagos for intersex actors.

Initiation

This will be the starting point for another article, but one last observation.

If we bring in archetypes, then the proper framework for understanding gender dysphoria might be as a rite of initiation.

And that initiation could be called forth by a world culture that demands some individuals cross the night-sea of gender assumptions and perform heroic acts on behalf of us all!

PS, if you’re hoping for tidiness in the world of gender, here’s my favorite recent research: Masculinity may have a protective effect against the development of depression — even for women. (If you read this, note that there’s a cultural bias in the definition of traits and that androgyny trumps all as Jung might have predicted.)

Thanks for reading!

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Big thanks to Evelyn Jean Pine, Patsy Fergusson, and Wendy Walsh for making this a better piece. Thanks also to James Finn for helping to identify potential problems.

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