No, it's not "the drugs"
it's personality pathology
Note to clear away underbrush and anticipate any “not all” objections:
I understand and acknowledge that drugs or hormones can and do affect behavior. This essay is not denying that.
Instead, I’m saying that blaming bad behavior on “drugs” is a factual and conceptual mistake. My view is that the inclination to the bad behavior (and to taking the drugs) is in the person first, it was not placed there by some outside force called “drugs.”
As with all my writing, I will be making generalizations. Making a generalization does not mean that I do not understand that there are exceptions.
We, collectively, as a society and culture, like to blame bad behavior on anything but the person engaging in the behavior. I believe this is because we have a culture-wide problem with personal responsibility, and that we have an external locus of control (we like to blame others for what we do ourselves).
We see a lot of very bad behavior every day. It ranges from rudeness to screaming tantrums in public to mass murders. One of our first and favorite external loci of control for which we like to blame this bad behavior is “drugs.” We might cite SSRIs, illicit drugs, cross-sex hormones; it doesn’t matter.
Lots of us reach first for “it was drugs wot made him do it.” Here is an example. This is a video of a “trans woman” blowing up at a street “reporter” and physically assaulting him.
Here are some typical reactions from onlookers:
Yes, there were others reacting who properly pegged this as personality/mental illness. I acknowledge those; I’m focused on the others.
Here is what we are actually seeing in that video. It is not “drugs” or “hormones” making this man do what he did, it’s his personality disorder. Sure. He might be on drugs and hormones. Sure, those increase the chances of bad behavior.
But—this is a very important “but”—we do not need to resort to blaming drugs to explain this behavior. It is perfectly possible, and it is in fact common, for people with personality pathology to behave this way with no chemical assistance. My mother, the borderline and narcissist, was not an alcoholic or an illicit drug-taker.* Her violence and rage came from within.
When I was an alcoholic, my maudlin melancholy/rage vacillations came from what was wrong in my own mind. The alcohol merely removed the inhibitions, but what came out was pure me.
What we are actually seeing in this video is “decompensation” in response to “narcissistic injury.”
Narcissistic injury—a blow to the ego and the ego’s sense of itself that destabilizes the ego, to the point where the person feels he is not himself or has lost control of who he is at an essential level. This provokes fear and anger. We can all experience narcissistic injury, but it’s extreme if one is personality-disordered.
Decompensation—this means that a person’s ordinary psychological defenses fail under stress. They’re not able to keep up the “mask” that allows them to pass as fairly normal. Their ordinary defenses (might be sarcasm, lying, fawning, or anything) fail, and they “decompensate.” They are reduced to primitive and infantile defense mechanisms like tantrums.
Let’s apply this to the claim that it’s “drugs” that make “trans people” act this way, and think that through.
Even if drugs are contributing to bad behavior, they are not the genesis of that bad behavior. What is?
The person himself. By definition. It’s stupidly easy to see if we check ourselves and refuse to use the “it’s some outside force doing it to him” bias.
Many normal people assume that all other humans are normal. They think everyone is basically good. Basically sane. Basically stable. Wants the same things we want for the same reasons. This is not true.
This normalcy bias causes us to overlook personal responsibility. Because we don’t know, or don’t want to admit, the reality of things like Cluster B personality disorders, we reach for an outside “persecutor.” In this case, it take the form of “drugs.”
But we haven’t asked the most basic question: why is such a person motivated to “be trans” or “take drugs” to begin with? Leave the drugs aside. The very act of claiming to be “trans” is prima facie a sign of mental instability and/or more serious mental illness or personality pathology.
Because “trans” has been so aggressively “normalized,” we’re starting to forget how stark-staring fucking insane it really is. A man claiming to be a woman, or a woman claiming to be a man (and then trying to force society to claim it, too) is literally as deranged as someone claiming to be Jesus or Napoleon Bonaparte. It’s not a joke: such people literally actually truly really were properly placed in mental asylums within living memory.
6. Only a deeply troubled person is motivated to develop a cross-sex identity. This is not a debatable proposition; it’s simply the truth. No one was born in the wrong body. There is no such thing, by the basic rules of logic that are embedded in objective reality, as “being a different sex from the sex that you are.” A is not Not A.
We do not need “drugs” as an outside force deranging an otherwise normal person to explain the kind of behavior we see in the video above. I would guess this guy is perfectly sober, in fact. This is bog standard, normative behavior for a decompensating narcissist.
This is why I never stop talking about personality disorders and Cluster B. Personality pathology is the root of why we have so much bad behavior in society. If we want to decrease this bad behavior, it is necessary for us to understand and accept what causes it. Reaching for “drugs” is a way of avoiding this acceptance of truth, and it is hobbling our ability to crack down on the deranged.
At best, I’d say drugs or hormones are an add-on that worsen outcomes and behavior in some cases. But I believe we could take all those away and we’d still have almost as much of this behavior. Because the poison already exists inside people’s minds.
If you’re interested in thinking through issues of personal responsibility and locus of control,
‘s writing on her Law of Attraction Substack is excellent. Here’s one of her pieces on our relationship to the pharma companies, and how we treat them and their drugs as saviors.*To be detailed and accurate, my mother was not a heavy drinker, and she took no street drugs that I know of growing up. I suspect she was dependent on benzodiazepine (the Valium/Xanax class of drugs) tranquilizers off and on, but except in the uncommon case of paradoxical reactions, this class of drugs does not make you violent. Quite the contrary. That’s why they’re called “tranquilizers.” Take one and see!
My mother became an extremely heavy pot smoker later in life, but her deranged behavior all through my youth was there without chemical assistance.
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I think one of the major problems in our culture, and it's so embedded that it's often hard to see, is to treat evil actions a manifestation of some kind of disease. Whether mental illness, or systemic oppression, or drugs, etc., we remove the agency of the person acting bad and blame it on an outside factor.
And this is, as you say, based on the assumption that people are basically good, and therefore some outside agent could be the only explanation for terrible actions.
This is, perhaps, the most devastating and far-reaching lie ever told. The consequences of this seemingly generous belief are absolutely catastrophic.
People are NOT basically good.
Nor are they basically bad.
Rather, we all have the capacity to do terrible things, indifferent things, and great things. It's all within all of us. Environmental factors play an effect, and you can attest to how much abusive parents can warp the mindsets of their children. But in the end, we have the capacity to choose to do good, to choose to do evil, or everything in between. We have agency, and we are responsible for our choices. The sooner we can accept this is true for everyone, the sooner we can get our world to a better outcome.
I love how you point out that even though drugs clearly can affect how people behave, there was something wrong in the first place that prompted the person to take the drugs. When you go back to the root of it all, it's a person who chose to do something destructive, and it snowballs from there.
Spot on and thank you for pointing it out! MtFs are on high doses of estrogen. If this were estrogen-driven behavior, this guy would have crumpled up on the sidewalk and cried. This is likely a psychopath, or at least a narcissist, who has received the message from the culture that this kind of behavior in public is now acceptable and will be applauded. People like him used to try to control themselves because of societal expectations, but they no longer have to.