“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times.”

So goes the fascist aphorism originating from a post-apocalyptic novel and favored by toe-shaped men everywhere as an explanation for why society is the way it is (i.e. shitty). It may mostly just be an exercise in stroking the modern cishetero-male ego by insisting that the hard, sterile, and unforgiving life that is impressed upon every human born with a penis by modern masculinity is the supporting pillar of civilization, and as such, it must be maintained and enforced at all costs, lest we slip into weakness and degeneracy, but, truth be told, I am not entirely against the notion that struggle and difficulty is a powerful basis of character development. My favorite movie is, after all, Conan the Barbarian and to some extent I do ascribe to the Nietzsche quote that film opens with, “What does not kill me, makes me stronger.“

“Necessity is the mother of invention“, is another expression which hits to the heart of the true strength of trans people, and indeed all of those who have struggled against adversity. I only began the process of coming out as trans after almost dying of stage-IV cancer, and the gender dysphoria I experienced in my youth, but didn’t fully understand, drove me to train my body to a high level of fitness and ability in the martial arts – anything to feel OK in my own skin. These challenges pushed me past a point of comfort or even safety. There was literally a 50/50 chance that I could have died from my cancer, and I endured depression and alienation across decades due to my dysphoria, suffering psychic wounds that I may never fully heal from. I had to undergo these difficult processes, through which there was no guarantee of my survival, in order to be forged into a person who can endure that much and perhaps more. I would never wish cancer or gender dysphoria on anybody, but without these challenges, I wouldn’t be who I am today.

I don’t think I have ever met a boring trans person, and it can’t be a coincidence that I happen to know so many incredible trans people who are just such overachievers. People who have accomplishment lists that look like the work of several lifetimes – which makes sense since we kinda do live multiple lives. We can be found in the top ranks of all manner of professions, and we frequently dive into our pursuits with a neurodivergent obsession rarely found outside of the nation of the Pink, White, and Blue. I have every belief that the unique struggles us trans people face drive us to become some of the most interesting and impressive people on the planet.

But, while a life of appropriately measured challenges can build a person up, too much adversity will keep a person beaten down before they ever have a chance to grow. Untold billions of incredible geniuses and talents around the world languish in poverty and famine, never receiving an opportunity to develop or utilize their gifts. Too many beautiful and magnificent souls are taken from us too soon by bigots who hate what they don’t understand, and by our society that doesn’t value anything beyond making money for some old man. Lifting heavy weights increases the size and strength of your muscles, but if you try to lift something too heavy (or that is being held down by some a-hole while you try to do your set) and you can’t even complete the exercise, you won’t see much in the way of growth. For every overachiever trans, I also know someone whose brutal and unfair life beat them into the ground. Their confidence shot, flinching at every loud noise, apologizing for even existing, their physical health deteriorated well ahead of schedule by constant stress and anxiety. An enforced diet of cruelty starves a person ‘s soul. I have known more than a few trans women who have clawed their way back up out of hell and reclaimed themselves from a lifetime of horrendous trauma, and I hope all of my C-PTSD friends can some day find some healing as well.

Challenges need to be something that can actually be overcome in order to stimulate growth. If it kills you, you’re not gonna be around to get stronger.

Like the Toe Rogans of the world, I do enjoy both fighting and training for fighting. As I write this, all over my body I can feel the satisfying aches and bruises of a fun, but aggressive three hour sparring session with my training partner of nearly 25 years. I think overcoming a violent attacker working to inflict harm upon you is one of the most empowering experiences one can go through. If you can get through that, you can get through most anything else in your day to day. Trans women, even those who don’t train in martial arts, often know this all too well. Just about any trans woman you talk to who came out prior to the 2000’s – especially if she was a sex worker, as most of us had to be back then – typically has multiple stories of getting beaten up, usually by the cops. And pretty much all of us from any era experienced bullying or even just a general sense of perpetually being unsafe while we were growing up. Even before I understood that I was trans, I have always looked over my shoulder when out walking, I have always been on my guard. I have always known intrinsically that I am not safe in this world, and for most of my life, the sad truth is that the only person who I could truly trust to keep me safe, was myself – for if I told a soul who I truly was, I would most likely no longer be safe.

Trans women are never NOT living in the hard times.

Our lives are like Conan’s – constant toil and battle. In our Before Times, we grind against every structure imposed upon us like the suffocating prisons that they are, before struggling upstream to find ourselves amidst a hostile world that seeks to discourage us at every turn. Then, after we come out, we must battle against endless armies of the least informed, yet most obsessed people on earth for our continued existence in the world. We never get to take our existence for granted, and we never get to fully rest or relax.

I mean, our main “holiday” of every year is reading the names of those of us who were MURDERED.

As hard as trans lives are, I also believe we are in an era where most people feel utterly helpless. They are working as hard as they can, and yet their lives keep getting worse. In a culture that worships strength, power, and success, struggling under the pressure of a system that was rigged against you feels like… weakness. When those who conditionally value themselves on the basis of their strength feel weak, they need a scapegoat. They need somebody to beat up on to prove they’re not weak. Somebody who validates the contempt they have for the weak – which usually means, in their minds, a woman or otherwise feminine person – while at the same time somebody they can view as being strong enough to be a justifiable target of scorn or violence – i.e. someone they think of as being a man.

Any group of people come to mind?

Trans women – because, let’s be real, as much contempt as the transphobes have for trans masculine and non-binary people, the real locus of their hatred is reserved for we, the ultimate heretics of Patriarchy – Trans women make for the perfect targets for abuse in the minds of the Weak Men (and Women) created by the previous era of Easy Times in the American Empire, and who are now responsible for the Hard Times coming all of our way. A trans woman is somebody you can beat up on and not only get away with, but for whom you won’t have to feel any shred of guilt. Why feel guilty for a man who CHOSE to be weak, like a woman? Women, the Sex Gender, are only good for sex, and Men, the Apparently-Not-Sex Gender, only care about having sex. So therefor, any “man who becomes a woman” must be doing so for gross, weird sex reasons, and therefor EXTRA deserves to get beat up.

They believe we are weak, that we are the cartoons of us they have created in their minds. They don’t see us as real threats, even as they pronounce us to be such to “their” women and children.

Trans women who are either into swords, or knives, or guns, or martial arts make up a Venn diagram that is effectively a circle. Last I had read several years ago, the US Department of Defense is the single largest employer of trans people worldwide (though perhaps not so today since Donald Trump’s attacks on trans people in the service). Trans women of previous generations frequently spent much of our lives trying to hide in the flight into hypermasculinity, which often came in the form of military service, lifting weights, or obsessive training in martial arts. We tried our very hardest to be the men the world kept telling us to be, often to the point of achieving levels of strength and hardness beyond most cis men, who are only rarely compelled to push themselves in a similar manner. We’re built different! We got that dog in us!

While HRT changes our bodies and melts away whatever physical advantages our natal hormonal levels may have given us before transition, we still retain the skills we learned, and the attitudes we cultivated. Physical strength matters far less than the Strength Worshipers of the Patriarchy want to believe, especially when it comes to fighting. Being clever, and having a strong reason to win matters far more. MMA is one of the few sports where someone can be competitive into their 40’s on the basis of skill and experience alone – it is rare, but ‘rare’ is more common than the ‘never’ of most other sports. While we were all disappointed by Mike Tyson v Jake Paul, I assure you that I have been beaten up by plenty of wily old men in my time. When watching any combat sport, I usually bet on whichever competitor comes from the “harder” country – Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Mongolia – places where people’s daily lives involve strength and difficulty. When combined with hard training, those daily habits of life build up into more formidable fighting prowess than all the training in a fancy modern gym can give you. Often they don’t have the most impressive physiques, or the prettiest technique, but they have a hardness to their gaze, and more often than not, they win over whatever soft American they are fighting. I’m not saying it’s a ‘good’ thing that these people must live hard lives, but it sure does make them have a higher than average per capita of tough fighters.

Once again, I can think of few ‘harder’ countries than that one where all those pretty ladies come from.

One particular beautiful young trans girl of my acquaintance – my trans goddaughter, if you must know – seems to have a new story of some pervy or bigoted man she beat the living shit out of every time I see her – courtesy of skills she accrued surviving life on the street after being kicked out of her home as a teen for being trans. This pretty, young girl, who loves wearing makeup, jewelry, and corsets, and who spends more time on her hair than most have free hours in the day, has no doubt beaten up more grown men in her life than most guys who train in MMA. Let me tell you, I am one proud mama!

“Who runs faster? The Fox or the Hare?” Asks Aesop.

“The Hare. For the fox merely runs for his dinner, while the hare runs for his life.”

These people who are against us have the upper hand. They currently have the force of government and society behind their hateful beliefs. As tough as trans people are, we are, at the end of the day, far more frequently the victims of violence and systemic discrimination. But at the other end of the day, their hatred and discrimination isn’t coming from anywhere that truly matters. They won’t die for their hatred. Like all predators, they want a victim, not a fight. We, on the other hand, are fighting for our very lives. We have no choice but to fight as hard as we can.

Or, to paraphrase Osama Bin Laden in a way that I often repeat in my head but never publicly admit to (until now, I guess) “We love our genders as you love your lives.“

This is why I believe that we will win, in the end.

[just as Osama Bin Laden low-key did in the end lol]

But what truly is ‘winning’?

Is becoming so hardened by a cruel world that you can crush your enemies worth it if it means you lose your softness in the process?

What truly is ‘strength’?

Is it possible to be strong AND soft?

“A Piece of Iron Wrapped in Silk”

You may not be surprised to learn that I am, among other things, a Taoist (pronounced “Dow”, not “Taow”) – a religion/philosophy from 5th Century BCE China based around harmony with natural forces. This includes one’s own nature, and the natures of those around us. I came to Taoism as a result of my lifelong love and study of Asian martial arts, which are deeply and irrevocably tied to Taoist precepts due to its historical ubiquity during the time of their development. As a white person, I have a complex relationship with Taoism and other aspects of Asian cultures that is probably best saved for another post, but in so many words, Taoism was the “first set of eyes” that I learned to view the world through. Even as I investigate and embrace other beliefs closer to my own ancestral cultural background, this belief still colors how I understand everything I encounter.

The famous Yin-Yang symbol of Taoism shows the two primal, complimentary forces that exist within and govern all things. Yin, the soft, flexible, yielding force that is typically associated with “femininity”. Yang, the hard, rigid, forceful, uh, force, that is typically associated with “masculinity”. See how the black contains a bit of white and the white contains a bit of black? All things contain these two essences within them in differing amounts, and indeed, each side of the duality contains the other in it’s perfected form. To be “strong” is to be able to overcome difficulties and challenges, which leads to the question of how can one be truly “strong” without being capable of softness, gentleness, and flexibility if a challenge requires it? And if to be “flexible” is to be able to adapt to all situations, how can someone be truly “flexible” if they aren’t capable of being strong and forceful when occasion for it arises?

This, too, is the great power of trans people. By having been forced to walk a path that has traversed both ends of this fluid spectrum, we have the capacity to utilize both aspects of existence interchangeably. We can be both hard and soft at once – as all things truly are, but so very few invested in the gender binary are capable of accepting.

As we trans women walked the path of ‘Yang-ness’ and strength that was forced upon us in our former lives, on some level, to varying degrees, we kept the soft, feminine core of our Yin nature alive inside us. I never wanted to be a hard, tough, strong man. I was a gentle and sweet child that didn’t want to hurt anybody. It was a hard, cruel world that forced me to harden up an exterior Yang shell, and learn how to defend myself. As we trans people enter the crueler, harder future that undoubtedly lies ahead for most of us, we will be forced once again to become “Hard”. This will be a necessity, as it always truly was. But in doing so, we mustn’t lose sight of our Yin-ness as well.

Our strength lies in our duality. Our soft side will make our hard side stronger and more resilient, and vice versa. Our future will depend upon care and compassion as much as it depends on strength and toughness. We will have to yield at times and be flexible with ever-changing and often disappointing circumstances, and we will have to stand up and fight when the time for direct challenges to danger and injustice are required.

Those who hate us believe us to be the “Weak Men” who resulted from the Soft Times, rather than the Strong Women who are forged in all times, as all times are hard for women like us. To exist as we are is to overcome challenges we thought to be impossible, becoming stronger than we could have possibly imagined. But through it all, we also kept our Softness, and that makes us truly unbreakable.

So don’t lose your softness, don’t be afraid to embrace hardness, and don’t sell yourself short or count yourself out. Because, chances are, you are far stronger than you know, simply by being who you are.

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