Mental Health

As a trans masculine person I got the opposite problem. My anger was never treated as a valid response so after basically being treated as though my anger was funny, stupid or cute but ultimately unacceptable I lost my ability to feel it for a long while. I couldn't pick it out of the slurry of internal emotions. Functionally anger is a means to not just feel injustices but motive to externalize the source and feel empowered to do something. To fight on your own behalf. Not living without anger meant everything was turned around. I couldn't fight for myself . When something bad happened to me I would find ways to make it my fault. When I eventually snapped and tried to hurt someone, when I became temporarily physically frightening for short spell to another person, it was so far beyond a conscious process because if I was in the headspace of my conditioning I should have been rendered powerless.

Separating anger out of the mass of just negative emotional mass and being able to not just feel it, but to indulge it and express it took me decades to manage. For a long while I couldn't help but feel whenever I was angry I was transgressing. I was doing something that was illogical and isolating. I also wasn't very good at it. I also couldn't meet resistance without just feeling powerless or like I was in the wrong.

My anger still isn't treated seriously by other people. I envy cis men their ability to have their anger actually taken seriously at the same time I recognize that a full range of expressions of powerlessness and weakness were always allowed for me and denied them. Not just allowed... but rewarded with sympathy.

I lost a job a year ago for a fairly tame expression of anger. The sort anyone more comfortably coded as a man would be excused for just for feeling his feelings. My cis male coworkers around me validated that anger as perfectly rational and my reaction as fairly analogous to stuff they had done and easily gotten away with in the past...but it was treated as an unforgivable sin in my case because I was held to a different standard of emotional control. I know that when it comes to interfacing with other am never supposed to act on my feelings of anger directly. I am culturally supposed to seek concensus and sympathy from other people by at best talking about it or outwardly displaying helplessness at the injustice. People who recognize and treat me as a man will acknowledge my anger better because they recognize that aspect of them in me. Those that code me as female generally however don't really don't recognize my anger as valid and treat me as though I have lost my mind. I recognize there are missing tools in my social kit that were stolen from me and it sucks absolute donkey nuts.

Gendering emotions cause real harm and internal disregulation. Being culturally frozen out of your feelings regardless of the targeted feeling is awful. I really hope it gets better for you. Being stuck with half a kit is excruciating.