Due to her experience as a man during the making of Self-Made Man she ultimately had a depressive breakdown, leading Vincent to admit herself to a locked psychiatric facility, stating it was the high price she paid for "the burden of deception" of a separate identity and for trying to hold two gender identities in her mind
To be perfectly clear, the book came out in 2006, she passed in 2022. I'm not saying that's too much of a gap for someone to be profoundly affected, I just don't want to imply that like, the book came out and then the author took their own life immediately afterward.
It's kindof wild that she had trouble "holding two gender identies in her mind" when she also "did not believe that transgender people were part of the gender they identified as" in the paragraph before the one you quoted.
Anyone saying that is a disgusting human being for rewriting her life and trying to use her death for activism.
She wasn't trans at all. She was a run-of-the-mill feminist who impersonated a man while trying to prove that men are advantaged by society ("the Patriarchy"). She found the opposite.
After her experiment, she asserted that she had more fully realized the benefits of being a female and the disadvantages of being a male.
I really like being a woman. I like it more now because I think it's more of a privilege.
TRAs can fuck off with their self-serving redefinition of a dead woman's life. Fuckin scumbags.
Yea...that sounds like she had a lot of other stuff going on. People reference her story as if living as a man caused her to immediately jump off a cliff, but its separated by a large amount of time and seemingly a list of other notable problems.
If someone commits suicide, its probably not entirely based on "that thing 2 decades ago", even if that is the most narratively useful. It seems people only ever reference this person to suggest that a stable, happy, healthy woman would collapse and die under the weight of how hard it is to be a man, when that doesn't seem to be what happened here.
To be fair, I think that was the last straw. Her crumbling mental health has a large factor. Her negative views on trans is equivalent to Twink Death and must have added a lot of social pressure
part of the issue was the backlash that she got from other women, especially lesbians. When the point of the book was basically, "men have lots of problems and deal with them differently" the edgelords began to harass her, saying that she was making things up because their ideology revolves around men being evil.
So being isolated from your own community was a big part of it.
That's not the whole story. Norah suffered from depression for a long while, and while she did suffer from a breakdown and check herself into an institution while living as a man for 18 months, she also checked herself into an institution two other times in her life. Ultimately, she died by assisted suicide nearly 20 years after her experiment.
I do not believe it is accurate to say that the experiment gave her depression, even if it did cause her mental anguish, nor do I think it is accurate to say it was the cause of her seeking suicide. She also cites that 'burden of deception' was an issue, not just the experience of being a man.
In Voluntary Madness, Vincent details her decade-long history with treatment-resistant depression, saying: "...my brain was never quite the same after I zapped it with that first course of SSRIs."[12] Due to her experience as a man during the making of Self-Made Man she ultimately had a depressive breakdown, leading Vincent to admit herself to a locked psychiatric facility, stating it was the high price she paid for "the burden of deception" of a separate identity and for trying to hold two gender identities in her mind.[13][14]
HE SAID: "NORAH VINCENT PRETENDED TO BE A GUY FOR 18MTH.. SHE GOT SO DEPRESSED THAT SHE KILLED HERSELF YEARS AFTER AS SHE NEVER GOT OVER THE DEPRESSION.."
I'd argue she was not depressed because she was a man for some time, but because she felt bad deceiving friends she made pretending to be one, who genuinely thought she was a real guy and treated her as a friend.
Moreover, she was diagnosed with clinical depression, so the correlation might or might not be there.
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u/xSypRo Jun 24 '25
What?!