Male men / Automatic aphorism
Today: Activist, musician, and writer jj skolnik; and Brian Hioe, Taipei-based editor, translator, activist, DJ, co-founder of New Bloom, and author of Taipei at Daybreak.
Issue No. 478
What Is Manhood?
jj skolnik
My Catchphrase
Brian Hioe
What Is Manhood?
by jj skolnik
Five years ago, I had top surgery, and three years ago, I started testosterone. People might wonder why I chose this, why I wanted to be a man, what I saw in manhood. And honestly: I don’t have an answer for you beyond, “Because something in me felt that it was necessary, because I finally had the opportunity to do so, and because I felt calmer and more integrated doing so.”
People have described this as “gender euphoria,” the joy of inhabiting the self you’re meant to. For a guy who was turned away from this possibility by doctors 25 or so years ago—having been shoved back in this particular closet so hard that it took truly annoying levels of work to get here—it registers mostly as relief. I wake up every day now and feel like myself, rather than a funhouse-mirror version thereof. My brain just feels like things have been righted; even before I noticed any physical changes, the mental health benefits were there for me. I was able to make breakthroughs in therapy that had felt perennially, frustratingly out of reach.
I started from a personal inner understanding that for me, being a woman—being perceived as one, sure, but also just BEING one, in an embodied way—felt awful, and I followed the thread. I don’t think I needed an answer beyond that, and the more I think about it, the less I care.
I do not think that manhood is a single definable thing, one narrow range of aesthetic expressions and activities. I find patriarchy’s standard definition pretty bleak: a capacity for violence, a drive to be a protector and a hunter, a need to be dominant, a lack of emotional expressiveness. Many men clamber into that definition, seemingly for safety. They apparently believe it to be an expression of strength, but I can’t imagine anything weaker than operating purely from the fear of losing status and losing control. If you need to make other people feel terrible in order to prop up your sense of self, that’s elementary school bully shit. Tragic and small, though not at all exclusive to men.
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