A topic of discussion in my male adult survivor's group yesterday was the urge of the adult survivor to harm his own genitals.

An urge born from feeling deep frustration with hypersexuality. After binging porn and having sex doesn't seem to work, then comes the urge to yank out one's cock and remove what one sees as the source of the problem. I've felt this before deep in the throes of my own sex addiction. It's a visceral urge from a place of frustrated rage to self mutilate. "God, oh God, why is my cock erect all the time and how can I get anything done with this constant debilitating arousal" – to give you a verbal flavor of how that would come alive in me when I was subject to this. Other men in my group shared their own stories of the same. A man (who shall remain anonymous) spoke about fantasizing that instead of his cock, there was a black hole there instead. Another spoke about how he'd wish that he could remove his cock to bring an end to the suffering from constant arousals.

The worst of this for me was in late 2016, 5y before I first had a sense of having been sexually abused in my childhood. I even did a comedy set back in 2018 that talked about how I lost my virginity very late (the first time I had consensual penetrative sex was in early 2017, at the age of 29). You can find the set here –

– it's been surreal to watch that set from post recovery of childhood sexual trauma. The self-delusions we live under!

Back then, I had no idea that one could touch a cock in ways other than masturbation or for penetration. I had no idea that I could just cup my genitals and breath. Or massage it like I would massage any other muscle in my body with oil, without the intent of extracting release.

Back then, I had no idea that so many of these "arousals" were just trauma triggers. Cycles of traumatic sexual experiences working their way through my body.

Essentially, this is what trauma does – it collapses the realm of possibilities into just a scary few. Raising consciousness is the work of bringing to mind all the wide possibilities that always exist before us, at every moment. Trauma collapses nuance, the nuance of what might be causing the arousal into only one possibility – that of release.

This is the perspective from which I've come to wonder about transitioning surgeries. I wonder what would have happened if I had been aware of an option of surgically removing my genitals back in late 2016 and if it had been presented to me as a ground truth. A reality. Hey, perhaps you were never meant to be in this male body? Have you considered that? Perhaps the solution is to seek help in affirming the gender that you truly are, instead of suffering in this male body with this organ that is the source of so much distress in your life. Don't worry, it's done safely with sufficient anaesthesia, so you won't feel a thing. I shudder thinking of these possibilities given the deep yearning for fatherhood that I have come into only in the last 2 years. Back in 2016, in a sexless marriage, completely depressed, caught in deep porn addiction, I would not have even considered fatherhood as a remote possibility.

If I numb myself out before I inflict physical harm on my body, does that release me from the karmic implications of self-harm?

Western medicine is a champ at reductive localization of bodily issues. Focus on the specific spot on the body where the symptom is present and address it surgically. Did you know that surgery as a discipline was born from carpentry and barbery? A lot of early surgery was attempts to prevent infected body parts from affecting the full human body by removing them. Prevent the spread of gangrene by amputating the limbs. Typically, a last ditch effort to save the body, when nothing else seems to be working to localize and contain the infection.

Working with the Protector parts inside the internal trauma-fractured family of my psyche, I've learnt that all of the wisdom and knowledge that one accumulates first goes to the Protectors. Whatever NVC, Circling, relational conversation skills I've learnt have first and foremost helped strengthen the defense of my own Protectors from the vulnerable, scary act of opening my heart. All the theories of wisdom go into propping up the intellectual defense of the Protectors, in absence of a desire to feel deeply into the body and the heart.

The mode of operation of the Protector is to find ideas that it can use to justify the actions that it wants to take. Not the other way round. And oddly enough a common strategy that Protector parts use is to project a Perpetrator on the outside in order to maintain their reign of terror on the inside. I'm not sure how many of you have encountered this very peculiar phenomenon of Shadowy Protectors. Originally born to help protect the wounds, eventually they grow into inflicting terror both outside and within, just to continue existing. This larger phenomenon is seen most clearly in the actions of the State of Israel, inflicting the exact horrors on another populace that had prompted its own birth – traumatizing its own people too because they see and feel the horror of what their ancestors went through.

So when I see a reactive resort to accusations of "misgendering", that's how I see it. A human who has misgendered themselves under the influence of Protector parts that don't believe that the Self is capable of seeing the depth of wounding that the human carries, but instead has adopted convenient sounding intellectual ideas to prop up its desire to self-harm, then blaming an outsider as inflicting harm by using the wrong pronouns. A pretty dense sentence and I'm not sure if this will get through to the folks that I believe it really needs to get through to.

I hope there is more conversation about male childhood sexual trauma. So many brave, strong men that I've met and know, with a direct history of childhood sexual trauma, seem to talk about so many amazing things and I wish they spoke more about their direct trauma – just to bring awareness into how widespread the phenomenon is. To bring it into the Zeitgeist. To load it into general societal consciousness. So that it's seen as a possibility. A real possibility when someone wants to transition.

I hope there is more conversation about repressed childhood sexual trauma especially in conversations around gender identity and gender transitioning. I hope people can feel brave enough to open up about their direct trauma history while talking about these tender subjects and not intellectualize it so much. Gender is our lived experience, not an abstract philosophical concept. Discussing it abstractly and philosophically further strengthens the dissociative tendencies in traumatized bodies. Tendencies of conscious awareness to drift away from the zone of trauma – the genitals into the safe mind.

I still remain open to the possibility that there are trans humans who have no sexual trauma (repressed or not) but are actually just inherently trans from birth. But given the wide wide prevalence of childhood sexual abuse and how little we, as society, speak about it, I remain skeptical about this notion. I'm not opposed to the existence of transitioning surgeries. In fact, for some adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, this might be the best route to live a reasonably "normal" life. Just the marketing of it as "gender affirming" irks my heart that cares deeply about male adult survivors making good choices for their own healing journeys. I'm willing to bet my life that there are male adult survivors with repressed childhood sexual trauma who have undergone transitioning surgeries because they started believing they were supposed to be female – this is not an intellectually debatable point, unless we are dropping in about specific human histories with an openness to discuss vulnerably the underlying trauma, while accounting for the possibility of it being repressed.

I understand how scary of a claim this might sound to those who have transitioned without clear awareness of their childhood sexual trauma history. It's no joke bringing such a claim to reconsider such an important irreversible choice. You may feel the urge to attack me if that's you and if you believe you were always trans from birth. You may feel the urge to especially attack me if your identity is built on being an ally to such humans. I request that you refrain and read what I've written again assuming I'm only speaking for male adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse – brothers of mine who were also raped as kids like I was – who might be on the verge of making a costly irreversible choice about their bodies – and that I'm not speaking for humans who were born as trans. If you are an ally who is feeling drawn to attack, I ask you to instead share your own experience with desires to inflict genital mutilation or to transition, so that you may broaden my own perspectives.

There's a whole spirit infestation angle to this work that I won't even get into in detail at this point. Spirits wanting to be reborn as humans getting lodged inside human bodies because the sexual portal that had opened up was not conducive to procreation. And then attempting to seek that release from their trapped state of existence inside human bodies through spurts of ejaculation. More on that in a separate post, as writing about spiritual theories makes one extra susceptible to be rejected and I don't want to muddy a share of my direct experiences with the spiritual hypotheses I hold.

Meanwhile, if there's any active research being done on the intersection of this subject, I'd love to be pointed to it 🙏🏾