Gender dysphoria is a sense of dissatisfaction, unhappiness, or numbness related to one’s internal sense of gender not aligning with the gender they were assigned by their culture. For some people, gender dysphoria is really obvious, but it doesn’t have to be. Gender dysphoria can be subtle and creeping, especially if you’ve avoided thinking much about your gender or considered that it might not match what you were assigned.
For many transgender people, gender dysphoria feels like an underlying dissatisfaction with life before they ever realized they were transgender. They may not feel like they have complaints with their birth gender, but they may find that they spend a lot of time wondering what it might be like to be a different gender or wishing they’d been born that gender (even while seeing themselves as their assigned gender). Life might feel dull and unreal. They might feel like they don’t really know themselves and are living someone else’s life, but have no idea how to fix it.
I was in treatment for depression as a kid, but there’s a special kind of depression and fog that comes with living in a body and gender role that’s wrong for you. Prozac won’t touch it. Therapy doesn’t fix it. Nothing is wrong, and yet everything is.
Your face and body belong to a stranger, and mirrors force you to lock eyes with that stranger every single day. You’re detached from everything and everyone despite desperately trying to connect, drifting through life without ever touching it. You can feel parts of you dying. Other parts of you take up massive chunks of your brain, and you’re constantly aware of them without knowing why.
Nothing is wrong with your life, and you may not realize why you’re so deeply unhappy until stumbling across something that makes that misery go away for a moment. Maybe that’s wearing a skirt or drawing on facial hair with mascara. Something clicks. There’s hope. But the fog comes back down all the same when you take off the skirt or wipe off the facial hair. You find yourself longing for another chance to do what made you feel better, but flinching away because “you’re not supposed to do that”.
When you finally figure it out, it all makes sense in retrospect. In the moment, it’s a deep sense of dissatisfaction, longing, and pain that you can only barely consider the cause of. Everything is wrong and there’s no reason why.
Gender-affirming treatment is like being born and living for the first time. It takes that sliver of joy and vitality from wearing a skirt and extends it out for a lifetime.
Something a lot of people remark on is that pre-transition people’s eyes don’t have that spark to them in photos. They can see the spark appear after they transition. They start to live and love themselves. It’s waking up in the middle of your life and having the rest of it ahead of you instead of an endless expanse of gray.
I think that getting a few things wrong and winding up too physically masculine was worth it for me because of that. I’m glad I had that chance to screw up. I know too many people who grieve never having that chance.
…The methods we used for convincing ourselves we can’t possibly really be trans, we simply must be making a mistake. They echo the concepts that thread through cis society and are used as a means of invalidating us. “It’s probably just a kink, a sex thing”, “it’s just a phase… if I just settle down with a woman, maybe have some kids, and learn how to be a good man, it will go away”, “doesn’t everybody, on some level, sort of want to be the opposite sex?”, “I should just learn to live with being a feminine man”, “I just need to man-up, be more masculine, that will make it go away”, “maybe I’m just a self-hating gay man?”, “maybe I can just cross-dress on weekends? That will be good enough”, “It’s just my asberger’s”, “just my OCD”, “just my depression”, “just my lack of confidence”, “just my hatred of my identity”, “just…”.
And deepening this denial is the assumption that in order to accept the possibility of being trans, we have to prove it to ourselves. This, again, eerily echoes the external invalidations, demands and expectations placed upon us, as in the gatekeeping model. “But how do I know I’m trans? What if I’m wrong? What if I’m making a mistake? What if I regret it?”
After all, surely if we’re going to risk so much, put so much at stake, in such a monumental “decision”, we should approach it carefully, and make sure to be certain, right? Shouldn’t we be looking for proof that we’re trans before gambling our whole lives on that being the case?
Well, maybe… if proof of being trans was even really something possible, beyond the simple proof of subjectively experiencing your identity and gender as such. But more importantly: we never ask ourselves for “proof” that we’re cis.
Cis is treated as the null hypothesis. It doesn’t require any evidence. It’s just the assumed given. All suspects are presumed cisgender until proven guilty of transsexuality in a court of painful self-exploration. But this isn’t a viable, logical, “skeptical” way to approach the situation. In fact it’s not a case of a hypothesis being weighed against a null hypothesis (like “there’s a flying teapot orbiting the Earth” vs. “there is no flying teapot orbiting the Earth”), it is simply two competing hypotheses. Two hypotheses that should be held to equal standards and their likelihood weighed against one another.
When the question is reframed as such, suddenly those self-denials, those ridiculous, painful, self-destructive demands we place on ourselves to come up with “proof” of being trans suddenly start looking a whole lot less valid and rational. When we replace the question “Am I sure I’m trans?” with the question “Based on the evidence that is available, and what my thoughts, behaviours, past and feelings suggest, what is more likely: that I’m trans or that I’m cis?” what was once an impossible, unresolvable question is replaced by one that’s answer is painfully obvious.
Cis people may wonder about being the opposite sex, but they don’t obsessively dream of it. Cis people don’t constantly go over the question of transition, again and again, throughout their lives. Cis people don’t find themselves in this kind of crisis. Cis people don’t secretly spend every birthday wish on wanting to wake up magically transformed into the “opposite” sex, nor do they spend years developing increasingly precise variations of how they’d like this wish to be fulfilled. Cis people don’t spend all-nighters on the internet secretly researching transition, and secretly looking at who transitioned at what age, how much money they had, how much their features resemble their own, and try to figure out what their own results would be. Cis people don’t get enormously excited when really really terrible movies that just happen to include gender-bending themes, like “Switch” or “Dr. Jekyl And Mrs. Hyde”, randomly pop up on late night TV, and stay up just to watch them. Etc.
Natalie Reed, The Null HypotheCis, 2012
See also: genderdysphoria.fyi