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 expressed or portrayed, are all suggesting that there must a very high level of distress required in order to be trans.
But that isn’t my experience.
I am able to function as male without any level of distress that inhibits my life. I believe I am female and I am happy when I can express that, but when I can’t it doesn’t cause me to feel depressed. I think about my gender a lot, but not so as it is all-consuming and prevents me from functioning. I can get on with my life and some days don’t think about it much at all.
So I would have to say I’m not that distressed. It seems I’m coming back to my old friend “am I trans enough?”, and probably have to conclude that I don’t think I am “distressed enough”.
I do have distress though. It does tend to be quite contextual however.
Often in my day to day male life, I will catch sight of my reflection and be struck by how feminine my face is. When I am trying to girl mode, and particularly if I have done makeup, then I can only see a man in the mirror and I hate that. I’m feminine for a man, but manly enough to not look like a woman. I think that’s dysphoria?
It’s a similar story with my arms. As a man, my arms are pretty skinny and lacking in muscle, I don’t look very masculine. Put on a sleeveless dress however and all I can see are massive butch arms like popeye or something. Hate that. Again, I’m feminine for a man but too manly to pass as a woman.
Sorry to talk about genitals, but it’s relevant, most of the time, when I’m boymode and doing normal life, I’m not particularly aware of them. I no more think about them than I am consciously thinking about my elbows at any given moment. Hence, day to day, they don’t really cause me distress. If I put on female underwear though, the horrible bulge does cause me distress: I hate it. Worse if I can see it through clothing, that’s just awful. Is that dysphoria? I think it has to be, because the clothes help me to feel like a woman and I feel comfortable when I can do that, but anything that destroys that feeling really is distressing.
So here’s a question then: if my dysphoria is contextual and related to my trying to make myself look and feel female, could I make dysphoria go away by just stopping trying to be a woman and focus on being a man?
But I know that I can’t do that. Whenever I have tried to suppress my feelings about gender, it has always come back. I don’t even want to be a man. I totally want to be a woman.
This may be circular reasoning but I seem to suffer from dysphoria because of my dysphoria; that is although my body dysphoria only causes me distress in a context, I only have that context because of my dysphoria about my gender.
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