Before I start here, I should say I’m going to be talking here about my own understanding of dysphoria and how that has affected my thinking. I have no relevant training or medical background and this is simply my personal experience. A good place to start is with a definition, and as I’m no expert, I looked it up on Wikipedia: Distress experienced where gender identity is different to the sex assigned at birth My gender identity is female and I was assigned male, so that part works, but what about distress? Does it cause me distress? If it does, how much distress is enough distress? This is where I find myself influenced by popular conceptions of what it means to be trans and representations in media and fiction. Ideas like “a trans person is a woman trapped in a man’s body”. Or “it was transition or die” (or variations on that), or “she viewed her male genitalia as like a tumour that had to be removed”. These, and the many other ways that it is ex...
I’m just a boy who dreams of being a girl. These are my musings about that journey as I try to work out exactly what that means.