Flight to Military and Marriage

Many of us join the military and/or get married to deal with our TSTG behavior. In my case, I did both. The conventional clinical wisdom to explain these flights typically invokes the desire to demonstrate “psychodynamic hyper masculinity” or the desire to be “cured” of TSTG behavior. These are typical clinical explanations, invoking sexual drives and broken psyches that need to be fixed. However, I suggest a simpler and more plausible explanation that is supported by science.

MTF transgender people are twice as likely to join the military compared with their non-transgender peers as found in a study of 5 million service members by George Brown, an Air Force and Veterans administration clinician. (The study has not yet been published.) Similar studies for FTM transgender people are lacking but the rate is also believed to be disproportionately high. Brown has been at it for some time. His first research paper on the subject was in 1998 in which he concluded that transgender people join the military to express hyper masculinity, a psychodynamic concept expressing false masculinity, macho behavior and danger seeking. Brown believed that all males go through a hyper masculine phase that coincides with the age at which many join the military. The notion was that transgender people were more prone to join the military because they wanted to flee into hyper masculinity. There has also been speculation that transgender people flee to other high-risk occupations such as firefighting or high-risk avocations such as skydiving.

Based on my military experience and 25 years dealing with the military my opinion is at variance with Brown. People in the U.S. military do tend not to be macho but genuinely want to be part of something important. Macho people with hyper masculinity tend to not last very long because they are not dedicated to the military mission.

Now that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” has been repealed, the next big hurdle in granting LGBT people their right to serve in the military is granting TSTG their right to openly participate. Admittedly there is more to do to grant full rights for LGB and their dependents in the military but the TSTG hurdle has not been surmounted. Granting LGB rights required changing a law, granting transgender rights only requires a change in medical policy. There are very few studies of transgender in the military, so the Brown studies and a few others are pivotal in getting medical people to understand transgender people in the military. However, the psychodynamic reasons that Brown gives for motivating transgender membership in the military are speculative at best.

Flight into marriage is often described in clinical case studies for transgender people. The usual story is that the clinician believes that transgender people marry as a search for the “cure” to being transgender. Of course there is no cure for the biological phenomena that is TSTG. (I have documented the evidence for the biological nature of TSTG in previous posts). When no cure is forthcoming and when transgenderism is revealed, the marriage becomes imperiled. The marriage partner resents having being lied to, doubts his/her own sexuality and seeks a divorce. That is the old story. The current story is that marriages with transgender participants are staying together more than ever before. Support for non-transgender spouses is available from support groups and expert mental health professionals. There is scientific evidence from a 2013 study by Aramburu at the University of Nevada Reno that indicates that even spouses of transsexuals can adapt their sexual and family behavior and stay in their marriages.

A simple evidence-based explanation for flight is that transgender people are trying to alleviate thought preoccupations that they have for transgender behavior and for secrets to hide transgender behavior. Since transgenderism is a biological phenomena, the contention between gender predisposition and assigned gender behavior category results in the desire to crossdress reflected in thought preoccupations. For me, if I did not crossdress within 6 weeks or so, my thoughts were dominated by the need to express my transgender behavior. As Lana Wachowski wrote in The Matrix, it is like “a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.” Although she applied this phrase to the false reality of the Matrix, Lana knew first hand about such preoccupations because she was a transgender person.

The thinking of transgender people who are still in the closet is also preoccupied by the need to anticipate and respond to interpersonal communications that might reveal their transgender behavior secrets. In The Psychology of Secrecy, Anita Kelly reviews the scientific evidence associated with secret keeping. People who have secrets are preoccupied by thinking aimed at appearing authentic and developing cover stories and lies to protect their secrets. Secret keeping also tends to result in self-enforced isolation, loneliness and depression. The isolation is self-enforced in order to limit social interactions that require high mental workload to protect secrets. Studies have shown that transgender people are prone to this type of loneliness as well as depression.

Both flight to the military and marriage by transgender people can be explained as attempts to alleviate thought preoccupations by engaging in important activities that society values. These engagements serve as distractions from transgenderism or secret keeping and often conflict with the tendency towards isolation. They provide meaning for transgender lives. Military operations and activities urgently engage transgender people to deal with the enemy, sometime on an imminent life-or-death basis. For me it was working with a team on new technologies for the U-2R and B-2 airplanes that held near-term promise to end the Cold War. Marriage requires engagement to deal with solving the problems and activities associated with a relationship and with children. For me, it was hard to think about crossdressing while I was taking care of my kids or coaching a soccer game.

So as we try to get transgender people their right to serve in the military or as we endeavor to help the marriages of transgender people survive, let us rely on science rather than psychodynamics. The simplest explanations are usually correct and the biology of transgenderism and psychology of secrecy provide uncomplicated explanations for flight both to the military and to marriage for transgender people.

Tags: crossdressing, featured, military, partners, spouses, Transgender

Category: Transgender Body & Soul