Today we have not in denial, also known as G.
G Is a 46-year-old married man with two daughters. He has been a mental health professional for more than twenty years. He quotes my interest in issues of sex and gender stems from my early life experiences. I was a sensitive child, and as a teenager, I felt alienated from the models of masculinity I saw around me. As a result, I often felt my life would have been easier if I had been born a girl. Becoming a father at 28 was the beginning of my journey towards discovering a positive sense of myself as a man.
Since 2010 I have been active in men's work - psychotherapeutic group work for men. In men's work, we proceed from the understanding that there are archetypal masculine qualities that men need to reckon with if we are to avoid falling into harmful patterns of behavior. For instance, we need to know where we stand in relation to the warrior archetype, in order to be able to manage our inherent propensity to aggression. We are also very much focused on men's tendencies towards disengagement and disconnection.
Recently I have been deeply troubled by the absence of men from the conversation about gender ideology. As a group, we appear to be enacting an age-old pattern of abandoning our daughters and sons, leaving women to do the emotional and relational heavy lifting.
Our engaged presence seems to be most needed by those young men who are drawn to gender ideology since dominant feminist accounts of male-to-female transition tend to stigmatize them as fetishists and colonizers.
For me, the question then becomes: how can older men such as myself, who have thought long and hard about masculine identity, best support this group?
