How to Be a Man (inspired by my trans-identified daughter)

I am not a man. Nor have I ever tried to live as one, “pass” as one or pretend to fully comprehend men. But my daughter is convinced she is a man—or at least that’s what she tells my husband and me. Frankly, I don’t think she believes she was “born in the wrong body”, as the kids say these days. She has some serious teenage/young adult mental health issues—such as anxiety and social awkwardness with a little OCD on top—and is using trans-ideology to assuage them. Or rather to avoid addressing them. But she is hell bent on living as a man. Here’s what I’ve surmised that means.

Men wear ill-fitting clothing. Living as a man means wearing clothes that hide your body. All tops must be several sizes too large. All pants must bag off your bottom and be too long by several inches. Apparently “men” just can’t find clothes that fit their bodies. Also, clothes must be in drab colors. When dressing up for a special occasion, men wear their regular ill-fitting, drab garments but add the jade beaded necklace their uncle gifted them. At least, this is what I gather from my daughter’s gender expression.

Men are lacking in personal hygiene and care. They rarely wash their hair and when they do, it must be with manly shampoo—preferably in a black bottle. Men also don’t exercise or eat healthy foods, even if they formerly did when they were women (stay with me here as this gets complicated). Men have chin-strap beards that they don’t groom. Men are balding and have acne (side effects from the T).

Men have poor manners. They speak loudly in public in artificially fabricated deep voices. They belch. They man-spread. They are disdainful of women in traditional female roles (wife, mother), but embrace male stereotypes for themselves.

Men take lots and lots of drugs. Drugs to help them look like men. Drugs to arrest the hair loss caused by T. Anxiety reducing drugs (because it seems that transitioning has failed to address that issue). And antibiotics (to counter the recurring bladder infections issues).

Again, I’m gathering this from my sample of one trans-identified person, but then “trans men are men” so there you go.

If I didn’t have brothers, a husband and two sons I might have thought this is what men are like. But I’ve lived around men all my life. It’s been my experience that they can wear clothing that fit. In fact, most do. They can have fairly decent personal grooming habits that may involve flowery smelling bath products. They can be sweet and charming and display stellar manners. They can live unbidden by male stereotypes. They can do all those things and still be men.

Pretending to be a man by adopting a slovenly appearance and bad manners is insulting to men.  Just as prancing on TikTok and speaking in a high pitched, sing-song voice in the quest to be a trans-woman is insulting to women. Sex is more than a stereotype. It’s definitely more than the worst stereotypes of either sex.  

I wish my daughter respected men enough not to insult them with her poor imitation of what she thinks they are. I wish she loved and respected herself enough not to try to modify her body with copious amounts of drugs. I wish the mainstream media, and medical and psychiatric communities didn’t affirm distressed young women in their belief that they are in the wrong bodies and that the correct course of treatment is lifelong medication with severe consequences, and perhaps surgery and infertility.

Yes, I wish for a lot. But it’s Christmastime and I’m heading out now to buy my daughter some ill-fitting clothes.