If you are on Instagram or TikTok, you might have recently come across a video about a woman who spent a little over a year disguised as a man to see what life would be like. The woman, journalist Norah Vincent, died by suicide in July 2022, several years after undergoing this experience and writing about it in her book The Self-Made Man.
The video in question leads the viewer to believe that Vincent's death happened in response to how she was treated while living as a male, but the reality is not nearly as straightforward as that.
Norah grew up in Detroit, Michigan, and London, England. She was curious about the impact gender and biological sex can have on each of us, and in 2003, she decided to hire a makeup artist to help her appear as a man. She began working out and binding her breasts, and she proceeded to live as a man for 18 months.
Norah took on the name Ned and chose joining a local bowling league as her first experience as a man. She later described entering the bowling alley for the first time as "the most terrifying moment" and explained to NPR, "As a woman, you're, you know, all your hairs stand on end. You sort of feel like, okay, this is not a place I'm supposed to be. And so, of course, nobody probably really looked at me, but it certainly felt as if every eye turned on me and stuck. And I realized, okay, there's no going back. I've got to do this."
In the same interview, she admitted to being surprised by the first handshake she received as a man, especially by how it differed from handshakes she had received from women. Norah said, "You know, I always think of men as being very competitive, territorial. And in fact, what I found was, meeting strange men, and this happened many times, not just this night at the bowling league, that the handshake of a strange man was incredibly welcoming. And it was as if I was joining in this camaraderie that felt very old."
She wasn't very good at bowling, a fact that she thought would lead to the men ostracizing her and leaving her out. Instead, she found the opposite was true. Norah said, "I found that men don't generally wanna beat you when you're not at your best. They don't, you know, as a guy just said to me recently, you know, you don't wanna win the pool game when the other guy scratches on the eight ball. That's no fun. And so they wanted to help me to get better, and then you wanna, you don't wanna beat the guy on the handicap. You wanna beat him at his best."
Norah eventually spent the next 18 months dating women, going to strip clubs, and joining an awareness group for men. While she expected to live with a kind of freedom of presenting as a cisgender, heterosexual male, she found the opposite was true. In a phone interview with Evie Magazine, Norah explained, "I suspect people will go into this thinking, oh, it’s written by a lesbian, she’s going to be male-bashing all the way down the line."
She continued, "But my experience was one that made me feel very vulnerable and made me feel a lot of pain and difficulty. While all of us in the post-feminist movement are convinced that women have always had it worse and men have always had it better, it took me stepping into their shoes to realize that that’s not true at all."
The experience was so negative that Norah voluntarily committed herself to a mental health facility following the completion of her book. She chose to take on another identity while there and wrote her next book, Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin, in 2008. From there, it seems that Norah's choice to take on different identities caused a psychological break.
At first, Norah was OK. She told Evie Magazine, "Still, getting lost, sometimes dangerously so, in my work is nothing new. I began my writing life as an immersion journalist. I put myself inside other people’s lives, and I purported to write from their perspective, but inescapably, I did so by means of my own." But Norah began seriously grappling with depression, and she attempted to die by suicide in 2014.
Norah also said of depression, "It lies in wait for the moments when we are weakest. Managing it is a constant battle. We must be ever vigilant. Even so, we do not always prevail."
Unfortunately for Norah, she was unable to continue that fight. She died by assisted suicide in July 2022 while in Switzerland, though the exact details of her death remain a mystery to this day.
Note: If you or any of your loved ones are struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can always reach out to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling 988. They are available 24/7 by phone or online chat.
