Sometimes I wonder what my life would look like if I had stayed silent.

I’ve been sitting with a question that seems to keep coming up for me: what is the relationship between unaddressed sexual trauma and the surge of gender identity exploration happening in this era?

When my own repressed sexual trauma began to surface, it arrived not just as memory or emotion, but as a disorientation in my own gender. I had moments where I experimented with pronouns. And there was a phase where I couldn’t pee in public urinals in male toilets—because my entire body would freeze up in the presence of other men. Which was such a wild experience to go through. A stunningly wild experience as a man to go through. My body wanted to disappear. It was as if some part of me was trying to eject. And within a couple of months of those memories surfacing, I created a podcast episode sharing openly about my story. I’ve since wondered—had I not been blessed with that divine courage to speak so soon—what would the trajectory of my life have been? Would I be a trans woman today?

What I’m not saying is that all trans people are reacting to trauma. That’s not only false, it’s dangerous. What I am saying is that we live in a culture that is soaked in trauma, and soaked in silence. And when we try to talk about the roots of that silence—especially when it comes to childhood sexual abuse—we are met not with listening, but with resistance. Or worse, erasure.

It makes me wonder about circumcision.

Yes, circumcision: the ritual removal of the foreskin of baby boys, often without anesthesia, often within days of birth. Most people in the U.S. never question it. It’s framed as hygiene, as tradition, as medicine. But beneath those stories is a reality: that we live in a society where a child’s first experience of his own genitals is one of pain, violation, and disconnection.

The roots of circumcision in American culture are not primarily religious. While it begins in the Jewish tradition—as a commandment given to Abraham in the Book of Genesis—it was later taken up in the United States through a very different logic: Victorian sexual morality. Circumcision was promoted by doctors in the 19th century as a way to discourage masturbation, control sexuality, and instill “cleanliness.” It became a medicalized form of moral control, and eventually, a cultural default—especially after World War II—without ever being culturally reckoned with.

That this practice has gone unexamined for so long is not accidental. It’s part of a much deeper repression of male vulnerability, male sexual trauma, and the ways in which disconnection from the body becomes normalized.

Speaking Heals the Body

Looking back, I honestly don’t know where I would be had I not started speaking openly about my history of childhood sexual abuse. I imagine I would be really sick—depressed, numb, dissociated, maybe dependent on psychiatric medications or substance addictions. And I’m so grateful I don’t live that way. I don’t take any psychiatric drugs. I’m not addicted to anything. And I truly believe it’s because I was blessed with a divine inspiration to speak out publicly—early and often.

And the thing is, I’ve come to believe that this act of speaking up—especially as a man—does something to the body. I believe it fosters testosterone. There’s something primal, even holy, about standing up for what you know in your bones to be true. I think it’s one of the most essentially masculine acts one can do. And it reminds me of the biblical story of the apostles—nearly all of whom were killed for speaking the truth of what they had seen.

My beard—its thickness, its sheen, its presence—has transformed in the last three years. My recent testosterone test showed levels as high as a man could hope for at age 37. And I find myself wondering: what would the quality of my beard have been if I had stayed silent?

Now, you might wonder—why bring up testosterone in an essay like this? Why “boast” about hormone levels in the middle of a tender, trauma-informed piece?

Because this is a conversation about embodiment. About the physical truth of healing. Deep healing doesn’t just shift your beliefs or your language—it transforms your body. And when we call something “healing” that doesn’t ripple into the nervous system, the hormones, the face, the posture, the habits—that’s not healing. That’s coping. That’s accommodation. And our culture desperately needs to relearn the difference.

The Mother Wound and Misogyny

There’s another layer I want to name—one that has lived quietly in the background of my healing: the presence of misogyny within myself. Not the social kind, or the intellectual kind. But the kind that lives in the nervous system. The kind that comes from betrayal.

I’ve had to face the part of me that harbors deep resentment toward my mother—for having failed me. For not protecting me. For being the one I was supposed to trust, and who, for whatever reason, could not shield me from harm. And I say this not to blame her as a person, but to acknowledge the realness of the relational rupture. Because when that maternal bond is broken by early abuse, it often curdles into anger, and that anger can turn into internalized misogyny—especially in men.

And sometimes I wonder: when I see trans women stepping into combat sports against biological women—how much of that is driven by unaddressed misogyny? How much of it comes from a desire to dominate or defeat the figure of woman, when the original mother figure failed to protect?

These aren’t easy questions. They aren’t comfortable. But they are necessary.

The Protector and the Wound

In many trauma healing traditions—particularly Internal Family Systems (IFS) and inner child work—there’s an understanding of how the psyche splits. There’s the wound, often exiled or buried, and then there’s the protector, whose job is to keep the wound hidden at all costs. That protector will do anything to prevent the wound from being touched. And when the wound is exiled so deeply that it cannot be felt, the protector is ready to attack anything in the external world that threatens to remind the human of what was never healed.

This, I believe, is one of the roots of the violence against trans people. Not all of it, but some.

There is something about encountering a transhuman that triggers a subconscious trauma response in people who have repressed sexual trauma—especially unresolved childhood sexual abuse. The sight of gender fluidity, body modification, or disidentification with traditional gender roles can stir something in the nervous system. Something that says: danger. memory. rupture. It happens below the level of language. And some people lash out.

And some of these transhumans—again, not all, but some—may themselves be working through dissociative layers of unprocessed trauma. If they were to touch those layers and speak their own unspoken grief, they might come to land in a different relationship with their gender. Or not. But we can’t know, and they can’t know, if we live in a world that refuses to talk about childhood sexual trauma in the first place.

Initiation by Exile

In my soul’s purpose to spread awareness and invite conversation about childhood sexual abuse and childhood sexual trauma, I’ve been writing openly about these wonderings for a while. This reached a boiling point in the wake of Trump’s election, which in my mind has deeply split the trauma-oriented community—between those who foster victim consciousness and those who uphold sovereignty.

I’ve since come to the awareness that a small group of local, activist-oriented humans—who identify as trans, queer, or allies of trans and queer spaces—have been actively working to disinvite me from events and community spaces.

It’s been painful. And not surprising.

In many ways, it felt like the natural culmination of my journey as a cisgender, heterosexual man seeking to deepen into my masculinity within queer culture. A culture I was drawn to for its openness, its beauty, its refusal to conform. And yet, one that often carries an unresolved, collective trauma around masculinity itself. There is a powerful undercurrent—spoken or unspoken—that associates masculinity with harm. And that association shapes who is welcomed, and under what terms.

So yes, this exclusion has hurt. But it also makes a kind of sense. Queer culture, as it stands, may not be a place designed to support the healing of masculinity.

And still, it strikes me as such a strange use of energy—this effort to block, silence, or exile. I’ve invited many of these same humans into dialogue. I’ve extended open invitations to record conversations with me, to speak honestly and share differing views. None have accepted. So much energy expended in avoidance, and so little in conversation.

And so I welcomed the initiation.

I’ve come to realize there’s something about isolation that serves as an initiation ritual for men in this age. And in my imagination, it lives best when romanticized as the mythical American adventurer, headed West all alone. That’s where we are right now, collectively—in the wild, wild West of trauma and spiritual knowledge. And it needs men like me, and others, to venture into solitude. To explore the uncharted. To return with maps.

At the same time, I want us to be able to tell the truth. I want us to be able to talk about childhood sexual trauma. Because if we don’t, we won’t understand the full story of gender, of disembodiment, or of healing.

We need to ask:

What did my body survive? And what has it been trying to say ever since?

If this message resonates with you—even quietly—I invite you to openly like it, love it, share it. So many people have told me privately that my words strike a chord, and I’m grateful for that. But we need more than private agreement. We need a culture where truth is met not with silence, but with solidarity. So if these words feel true to you, let them move. Let them ripple. Because silence—at every level—is what keeps this pain alive. And it’s time we broke that silence together.