Thoughts on questioning your identity: there are two types of doubts

I think there's two ways of doubting your transition or just doubting your gender identity.

There's intuitive doubts, where something seems "off" about it. And then there's emotional doubts which relate to self-esteem.

The intuitive doubts are not really emotional, they're just an automatic felt sense that makes you feel like something is contradictory. For example, if a salesmen tells you a long story about how he just wants to help people and that's why he sells snake oil, your intuition might fire up and say, "no, actually I think you really just want to make money."

You could have an emotional reaction to the thing your intuition is telling you, for example, if your intuition told you that a family member did not really care for you, that would be a hard piece of intuition to listen to or validate. But usually the actual message itself originates from a non-emotional, gut-level place that in this case, knows what it means to be cared about and knows that that is not happening.

I think these kinds of doubts are worth listening to. More often than not, our intuition is onto something.

But then there's emotional doubts.

These are the kind of doubts that say things like "omg, that girl is so pretty, I'm not nearly that pretty so I must just actually be a man." They hone in on a feeling of insufficiency or lack, some kind of hole in our self-esteem or a fear that we will not be outwardly accepted or loved for who we really are. They are a fear of loss and are always experienced as threatening. They generate anxiety and the most natural response to emotional doubts is to either avoid or attack the thing that triggered them (fight or flight.)

There is the initial trigger (that girl is prettier than me) then the emotional solution (so I must be a man)

In this case, the "so I must just actually be a man" is an avoidance solution. It's saying, if I just don't identify as a girl, then it wouldn't hurt me to be possibly less valid as a girl. When really the issue is that this person genuinely wants to be accepted as a girl but is avoiding that feeling due to low self-esteem. Alternately, this person could go the other way (fight) and work really really hard on their appearance. But the fear is the same--I'm not pretty enough to be accepted and loved as who I actually want to be: a girl.

So someone may avoid transition because they have emotional doubts, but this would be a bad decision, because the emotional doubts come from a place of rejecting our true self and true needs in order to feel a sense of external safety, conditional acceptance and temporary coping. Emotional doubts are never an acceptable long-term substitute for emotional validation, but they can temporarily help us feel safe from a threat.

However, if someone were to transition despite their intuition telling them "I don't think I'm really like this," they will probably eventually burn out because they are trying too hard to be something they don't really feel like deep down. They are actively having to do some kind of ongoing mental gymnastics and constant rationalizations in order to quiet the voice of their intuition, that voice that keeps saying, "no, I don't really think this is me. I think I'm trying too hard." Or something like that.

One thing that can be confusing is that emotional doubts can compete with intuitive doubts. This is where inner conflict really intensifies and becomes very consuming and damaging.

For example, an emotional doubt could be sending you the message that you're not good enough to be someone's friend, so you avoid the anxiety that causes by trying harder and harder to make that person like you. Meanwhile an intuitive doubt could be sending you the message that this person doesn't really care about or respect you and is just taking advantage of your kindness. So your emotional doubt would be telling you to be a better and better friend, and your intuitive doubt would be telling you to dump this friend and find someone worth knowing.

These are the most toxic situations to be in. Not only are you anxious and avoiding your emotions, you are also working overtime to suppress your intuition. Because you're not listening to your intuition, you will keep trying and trying to get this person to like you even though they don't respect you. If it was only an emotional doubt, and your intuition didn't think this person was bad, then maybe telling this person how you felt could lead to a positive reaction that helped you grow. But if it's an emotional doubt conflicting with an opposite intuitive doubt, actually, probably this person does not respect you and so telling this person how you feel would just open you up to even more heartbreak. At that point it's lose-lose and the "friendship" should end yesterday.

The proper response to emotional doubts is to accept them, not rush to action, and find ways to support the underlying needs that they signal. If I don't feel pretty enough to be a girl, I should accept that not all girls are mega gorgeous, and beauty is subjective, and not the only criteria for being valid as a girl. I should recognize that not being this or that pretty doesn't suddenly make me a man, and that telling myself I'm a man would not solve the underlying problem of my low self-esteem. (I'm using this example because it was my own situation.)

But the proper response to intuitive doubts is to take them seriously and turn a critical eye toward the thing they're telling you is off. Intuition is not always right but it usually is. And the deeper and more important the issue, the more likely your intuition is to be right. If your intuition is consistently telling you "I just don't think I'm trans," or "I just don't think I'm (assigned gender)" then think about it, because in that case, you probably won't be happy if you suppress that voice.

So basically, when or if you question your gender identity, ask yourself, is this about my self-esteem? Am I just trying to run away from a fear? Or is this just simply a message that's coming from my intuition?

Hope that helps someone... at least, that's the way of seeing it that has finally led me to make sense of my own competing doubts.

 

Thanks guys I'm glad if it could help!!

You're right. It can be very hard to tell the difference. Especially with gender issues it can feel like everything is emotional and everything is confusing at the same time. I've definitely struggled with this and I'm always trying to find a way to make it more clear.

So I think the easiest way to begin to differentiate between the two is to look at how they make you feel. Again, we can have an emotional response to intuitive doubts but intuitive doubts are not emotional on their own.

Well, emotions also exist to tell us what actions we should take.

So let's put it this way. If you have an intuitive doubt, you will not immediately feel a desire to act on it. Rather than action, intuitive doubts create curiosity.... wanting to find more evidence to support or challenge that doubt. Searching for answers. I would say that intuitive doubts actually specifically delay action and they resist emotion.

Emotional doubts, on the other hand, immediately make you want to act a certain way. They involuntarily make you consider and desire a fight or flight response, without any further information gathered.

Emotional doubts usually have an approach-avoidance theme. Like maybe I'll go to a store I really want to shop at, then I'll get a wave of anxiety and walk quickly past it, angry at myself for avoiding but relieved that I don't have to challenge the fear.

So one way you can tell it's an emotional doubt is that, until you do that thing, the feeling will continually reoccur. Moving towards and then running away from it, moving towards and running away, over and over again. The desire to move towards it crops back up once you have successfully avoided and then you feel safe again.

The behavior with an intuitive doubt, OTOH, is to delay action and delay feelings. When you're having these doubts you will kind of pause what you were doing and start researching, investigating, asking around, trying to form a fuller picture. Intuitive doubts create curiosity and also a craving for certainty. But they don't create an immediate desire to take action, either way.

For example, my thinking about this topic and writing this thread is the result of an intuitive doubt. You wouldn't get this kind of analysis and searching for answers with an emotional doubt. Emotional doubts are temporary fixes to anxiety whereas intuitive doubts are internal warnings that the current course of action may not be right. For me this all cropped up as a result of trying to detransition. I had a lot of issues with my self-esteem, I was constantly stuck in the approach-avoidance loop, and it was hurtful. So the emotional solution back then, because there was a lot of pain, felt like, "I'm just a man." I'll just detransition and not have to feel this way.

So I tried. I stopped hormones, bought some boy clothes, bought a binder, cut my hair to shoulder length, etc. And in this process the intuition started firing up again. I'd see a cute couple together, and my intuition would scream at me, what? I don't want to be the guy in that picture, I want to be the girl.... and I'd ruminate on it for hours, becoming preoccupied with these thoughts and less interested in doing anything else that evening, but eventually the voice would quiet down. Then next day I'd go out and try on clothes, and the lady would tell me the women's changing room is the other way, and I'd correct her that I'm actually a guy, and she'd give me a weird look and be like, oh, huh.. sorry... and again, I'd ruminate on it for hours. Something just felt so off to me, like I had said it but now I doubted what I said. I would call to ask about a name change and the woman told me to ask a lawyer, and I was like, ugh, why is it so hard? My intuition would ask, why am I even doing this? Do I honestly want to be a guy? Then I'd put it off for a few months and not really even think about or want to think about it again.

Over time I realized I'm not really developing an identity or a life as a guy, I'm not really even trying or actively wanting to. I'm just trying to be not a girl. My intuition was constantly firing up and telling me this really, really isn't me. But the intuition wasn't saying, "ok now hurry up and go be a chick again, go live your old life." It was just saying "umm, wrong way.... still wrong way...."

And you know, I noticed that the more I ignored the voice of my intuition and went the other way, then when I would finally get back to my emotions, they were really intense. I became really emotionally volatile and deeply conflicted inside. I started feeling trapped and hemmed into a corner in my own life in general, almost paranoid, looking for something stable to hold onto but never finding it.

I should clarify that when I was first transitioning to live as a girl, none of this intuition stuff happened. I did have emotional doubts that I would try to cure by either avoiding or fighting (trying harder to feel natural by being more pretty or feminine etc..) but I never felt a sense of, "no, this isn't really me and I'm not sure if I actually want this." And I never felt like I lacked motivation to go forward. It's just that the emotional doubts create two opposing motivations, but then when I avoided that, the intuitive doubts came from a total lack of motivation, aka depression.

Hahah, so I'm totally writing a novel here in this thread but again, if any of it is helpeful then that's great.