Today marks my twenty-fifth birthday, and I am here suffering. So, to ease up my suffering, I will rant to you about gender dysphoria: what it is, common experiences and, finally, a rant about how the concept of gender dysphoria has been shifted and manipulated to represent nothing of what it was before.

Gender dysphoria, what is it?

Wikipedia tells us this:

Gender dysphoria is the distress a person experiences due to inconsistency between their gender identity — their personal sense of their own gender — and their sex assigned at birth.

I will rephrase it to be a little bit more verbose: you’re born and assigned a gender based on what your biological sex is, or what the doctors can assume your biological sex should be in case you’re intersex. This means that if you develop gender incongruence by growing up, you will, probably, experience gender dysphoria as a result of gender incongruence.

Gender incongruence is, of course, the incongruence between what society expects you to be, based on what your birth genitals are, and what you effectively are.

Some examples, which also can explain some types of dysphoria

Physical Dysphoria

Those are some examples of what is called “physical dysphoria”, which is essentially your reaction to your own body, and every other reaction you might have because of your body being part of your attention.

You avoid mirrors because your mirror image feels off, it doesn’t match what you think you should be on the outside. Maybe you want a flatter, or larger, chest? A deeper, or higher voice? A paler skin? Maybe your height is the problem here.

You avoid seeing your own body much, therefore you always wear hoodies or oversize shirts, and long pants, as to cover every inch of your body.

You are repelled by images of your assigned sex’s beauty standards. Watching advertisements on the street is painful because they feature beautiful examples of people that share their assigned gender at birth with you - and you know you don’t want to be like them, even if society expects you to be.

(This one is rare but I experience it personally.) Sometimes you feel as though you have “phantom” body parts that should be there but aren’t. Some other times, you clearly feel parts of your body that are there but shouldn’t. For example, you are hyper aware of breasts (eg. their weight) or, conversely, you feel the absence of breasts as a “phantom pain”.

Social Dysphoria

Those are some examples of “social dysphoria”, which is your reaction to common social situations in relation to the gender differences between you and other people.

In a social setting, you struggle to be accepted or even included by those who share your assigned gender. You might think you just think different than them, that you’re not like them. Sometimes you can be seen as awkward by them, and they might intentionally cut you off.

It’s “more normal” for you to approach and share any conversation with people of a gender different than the one you’ve been assigned. Although, you could feel the strong desire to hang out with them but you feel awkward to approach them because of your assigned gender.

In online situations, you are more comfortable with adopting usernames that might not give out your gender by mere assumption, and you feel better if other online users perceive you as a gender other than the one you’ve been assigned.

Biochemical Dysphoria

This is the hardest to get because it’s something you can push off to the side, and potentially blame other medical conditions if you have some medical history, or just “being permanently depressed like many other people” if you don’t have any. Anyway, yes, you can have biochemical dysphoria, even.

Biochemical dysphoria comes directly from your brain being wired in such a way that is fundamentally incompatible with whatever hormones and chemicals your body produces. A cheap analogy is “trying to feed water through the cables of an electrical fridge.”

You feel as though your mind is constantly foggy. You would want to think clearly, but you just cannot. You feel as though the clarity in your mind vanished after reaching a certain age (most commonly the age at which you start puberty) and you have been going “almost like a zombie” ever since.

You feel depersonalized and derealized most of the time:

• You have feelings, but you don’t really feel them;
• You feel split between two (or more) parts of yourself - one does the IRL acting, and the others just watch and judge from afar;
• You could think you have no real sense of self;
• The world around you is grayed out, and it feels “distant” - objects close to you are perceived as distant even though to rational scrutiny you know they aren’t;
• You spend most of the time rationalizing what’s happening to you and the surroundings you’re in;
• You don’t feel things as they happen, and therefore everything has to be artificially processed by yourself in a conscious way to give out a faint feeling of being real;

So, what is not gender dysphoria?

Essentially, I’ve written this post not only to distract myself from shit that happens to me (I mean, that’s also reason enough) but because I am seeing this term being watered down and, also, seen as problematic at times.

Gender dysphoria is not to be treated lightly as it is a complex experience that affects many trans people in various degrees; however, nowadays people call themselves “dysphoric” for much, much less, probably because they know no better.

Cis people “can have gender dysphoria”

I’ve read that “cis women can have gender dysphoria” in relation to them not wanting huge breasts (so, wanting smaller breasts), or in relation to them being raised with dangerous expectations, such as “being nurturing, calm, welcoming” or “catering to the sexually pure aesthetic” whereas they’re hot headed, totally not calm and probably they want to live their life being open about their sexual preferences and fantasies. This, of course, is not, and cannot be, gender dysphoria, as it doesn’t have anything to do with gender unto itself, but rather gender roles, expectations and stereotypes. Also, wanting smaller breasts is the same body dysmorphia that causes most cis men to have cosmetic surgery on their chests and abs as they don’t have defined muscles there.

Also, I’ve read that “cis men can have gender dysphoria” in relation to them being soft in nature, not embodying toxic men’s standards, and lamenting problems with their own objectification especially in cultures where the man is seen as the “key that opens (and should open) all doors” such as the shithole I live in. And again, it’s not gender dysphoria as it has everything to do, again, with gender roles - and we have to fight those ones, for both cis and trans folk.

Gender dysphoria misrepresented as a dissociative disorder

Gender dysphoria is also, often times, sold as a dissociative condition (most likely OSDD-1b) especially in the plural community - and then you see most people describing what essentially is DP/DR (which is definitely induced by gender dysphoria) through the lens of their feeling “split” (which again, is DP/DR, which again, is induced by gender dysphoria.)

To come clear, I am not saying that a trans person cannot be plural, as I am trans and part of a plural system myself; but gender dysphoria affects the brain, and by extension, it affects all of us here to various degrees. By being medicated for gender dysphoria you reduce DP/DR, and your eventual “raw” dissociative symptoms can manifest themselves better - making it even easier for your therapist to eventually treat those, if you desire to undergo such treatment.

If I have to be blunt about something that also is common inside the plural community, it’d be the “trans” word used as a label to mark gender-expectation-incongruent, but not gender incongruent, people. Just stop it, okay? My experience is not your label, and there’s countless cis people who fight against gender expectations every day and by labeling alters like that you’re doing disservice even to them.

”You don’t need dysphoria to be trans” and the stigmatization of dysphoria

In most radical trans spaces there’s this saying that dysphoria is not necessary to be trans. Still, for the most time I went about my day because I thought they were referring to the formal diagnosis, which is rare to get especially because we’re constantly marginalized, infantilized, and most of our community is poor and cannot afford a doctor for such objectives; however, I stand corrected: the feeling is literally becoming “you don’t need gender dysphoria to be trans” as in “being trans is a choice” (spoiler: it is not.)

This narrative is progressively eradicating the meaning behind the term, as most people I know of nowadays literally lack the framework to judge if they have dysphoria or not, and, more often than not, their “dysphoria concepts” are heavily distorted by the community on purpose, to antagonize those who suffer from gender dysphoria and (often) seek proper treatment.

As such, gender dysphoria is now referred to as a brain worm that makes you a “fascist transmedicalist scum” just because you might want to undergo medical transition.

Therefore, I need to remind people that “transmedicalism” is the act of thinking that seeking medical intervention is a prerequisite to being transgender, alongside having gender dysphoria. We don’t need to discuss this further, do we? (spoiler: yes.)

Conclusions

Talking to you - the reader - directly, I don’t know from here what you’re experiencing, but I hope this post clears some of your thoughts out, if they need some clearing out.

Read this too

Gender Dysphoria, FYI is a valuable resource that can explain gender dysphoria better than this oppressed ass of mine.