Aiso, years ago, Boehm, in discussing “the femininity-complex in men” (that is, aspects of masculinity), described the role of fear that arises in boys and men because they envy women’s femaleness:
Hatred of women originates in . . . castration anxiety. Because boys imagine that conception and parturition are so complicated and uncanny, and because these processes are so mysterious to them, they have a passionate wish to share in them or else an intense envy of this capacity in women. . . . Envy of the woman’s capacity to bear children (which I will call, for short, “parturition-envy”) is a considerable incentive to the capacity for production in men.
There is yet another form which men’s envy of feminine attributes may assume, namely, envy of the woman’s breasts. I think that when we are children we envy others if they have anything more than we ourselves have. It is inevitable that the female breasts should rouse envy in boys and call forth the wish to possess these organs, especially since the breasts, as I mentioned above, represent in the boy's unconscious a tremendous penis. Apart from this, however, they have a function different from any possessed by boys. . . .
I said just now that it excites our envy when others have something more than we have ourselves. We may say, further, that when they have something different, something which we can never have, we experience a sense of inferiority. The quality of the “different” thing does not matter very much. We have so often been told, and every analysis of a woman confirms the fact, that little girls envy boys their power of passing urine in a continuous stream, further and higher than they themselves can manage it. But many men can recall an experience of their nursery days: how their little sisters could pass a broader stream of urine than they could and how it made a quite different, duller sound in the chamber. One of my patients remembered distinctly how it vexed and shamed him that he could not produce the same noise when urinating. In later life his great hobby was a garden-hose from which he could send out either a full stream or a fine spray of water.
All the phenomena which I have briefly described so far may be summed up in the term: The femininity-complex in men. (6, pp. 456-457)
One can argue that the transsexual’s mother, with her intense and manifest hatred of males in general, cannot help but transmit an enraged feeling to her son. Of course she does transmit that feeling about males in general, but my observations are that in him she finds an exception to her rule; he knows that her disparagement of his father does not include him, the transsexual. This particular boy—this beautiful phallus—is so much his mother’s prize, the end of her hopelessness, the happy completion of her formerly inadequate body, the joy of her life, that there is no reason to expect he will suffer as long as he stays inside the symbiosis. One can speculate that he suffers, that anxiety floods through him, that he is psychotic and barely covers it over with the transsexual symptomatology, but that is “explanation” gathering its strength from expectation, not observation. This is not to say that there are not people who use a strong identification with women to defend themselves against such flooding anxiety and who even collapse into psychosis; I see many more such patients than I do transsexuals. But I disagree with those who say such primitive anxiety is also present in these rare cases, the male transsexuals. For that anxiety to appear in the latter people, I would need to believe either, as some Kleinians do, that there is an inherent state of terror in all infants independent of the quality of the mothering (which does not explain why everyone is not a transsexual), or that these mothers are inflicting massive, terrible (though hidden) traumas on their infant sons, sufficient to produce this huge defense but too subtle to be observed.
One should suspect that hostility directed upon him by his mother would help cause the transsexual’s femininity; it does so in effeminate homosexuals and transvestites (3, 144). Since she expresses her hatred and envy of other males, it is not likely this mother can restrain herself with her son, no matter how she might consciously try. While that is likely (and was the position I assumed years ago when first studying the symbiosis), the hostility just has not appeared. That can be due to its subtlety, my ineptness, or its absence, and I have struggled over these possibilities.
At present, I can still only say that I have not found that hostility inside the symbiosis. If nonetheless it is there, it should eventually make its presence known. Gender reversal is a massive shift in identity; it is not likely to be caused by some puny whisper of mother’s will. If hatred or its permutations are strong, the effects should also be reflected in the infant in forms with which those studying children have long since familiarized us: defective nongender ego development, such as delay or precocity in intellectual functions, motility, or speech; disorders in physiological functions such as sleep, feeding, muscle turgor, and crying; out-of phase, unintegrated development; disruptive affects such as rage, terror, depression, apathy, anxiety, withdrawal—inappropriate, excessive, bizarre, or ill-timed; distorted or delayed development of object relations—with family or strangers, humans or animals, animate or inanimate objects; reduced or absent curiosity; reduced or absent creativity, as in games or fantasying; thought disorders in nongender areas; and so forth. Almost never is even one of these effects present in any of the little boys I call transsexuals.
By no means is this blissful merging to be confused with the “fusion, meeting, and lack of differentiation between the self and nonself ’ (90, p. 309) noted in children who are the product of psychotic symbiosis. Transsexuals’ mothers hold their babies too long and too close, but they do not restrict motility (that would be another sign of maternal hostility), which might discourage finding the nonself world. These mothers help their sons define the borders between self and outside world in all regards except mother's femaleness and femininity. They also encourage the boys’ creativity and the growth of other ego functions, so that these boys are typically lively, alert, and artistic (60, 137)—again suggesting that mother’s hostility is weak or absent in the symbiosis.
As the boys grow, they are not isolates but, instead, easily fit in with peers in games and studies. Only as they enter the phase of unmerciful harassment, in school, for being feminine do they turn away from others.
This explanation may be unpalatable, for it suggests that a major deviation in character structure can be created atraumatically. Yet atraumatic pressures are among the most important factors in the development of character structure, both “normal” and “abnormal.”
This chapter is about masculinity in males. Yet the thesis about the role of the early symbiosis ought to be tested with females as welclass="underline" is femininity augmented, as the thesis would predict, in a wholesome mother-female infant symbiosis, and is masculinity in females encouraged by lessening intimacy in the symbiosis? There are hints of confirmation: the most masculine females known, the female transsexuals, seem to develop out of the following: they are not considered beautiful or graceful at birth; they are not cuddly infants; there is a markedly flawed symbiosis, with their mother not psychologically or physically available in the first months or more of life and no adequate person to substitute; the girl is encouraged, especially by her father, to be strong and masculine, that is, not to need symbiosis (141). (Recall also the relationship of the transsexual boy's mother to her mother for a related inadequate symbiosis that contributes to h£r masculinity.) These factors suggest that, as with males, foreshortening the symbiosis and making its attenuation worthwhile creates in females those behaviors and that identity we designate as masculinity. (One aspect of the next book reporting on my research will be the development of femininity in girls and women.)