These are sentiments I’ve heard frequently from friends, family, and even strangers when bringing up my desires to medically transition and discussing surgery. All with positive intentions.
I feel like one thought a lot of people have about me is that I’m a very confident person. Which is true in a sense, but not as much when it comes to discussing how gender dysphoria affects me. Mentally, socially, physically.
It’s almost the biggest taboo part of being transgender.
We’re so often defined by our bodies, but yet, a big chuck of transition can revolve around them. It’s never just our bodies that cause us dysphoria though, it’s also the social ways people interact and react to us.
Before I go deeply into my own struggle with gender dysphoria, and very much expose my own mental “underbelly”, let’s give a simple definition of it.
Gender dysphoria: the distress a person feels due to a mismatch between their gender identity and their sex assigned at birth.
The short and easy version of that means I get uneasy to extremely uncomfortable about the physical attributes that are derived from me being born male, but internally seeing myself as female. I also have varying levels of discomfort in regards to how I’m perceived socially.
“I just spent 45 minutes doing my makeup, to just look like a man in makeup.”
“If only I could feel confident wearing more feminine clothes, without people thinking I look like a transvestite or cross-dresser.”
“I hate my jawline. I hate my hairline. I wish my face didn’t look so manly.”
“What if my breast grow to be really noticeable, but then I still have a man face. I’ll just look like a man with tits.”
“My body looks straight up and down. I wish it looked more feminine. I’m built like a brick.”
“I wonder if they’ll use the right pronouns for me.”
“I just want to go to the grocery store in normal clothes without being misgendered.”
“I’m tired of feeling like I have to put on my gender.”
“I just want to wake up in the morning as myself.”
I’d given you the comments of others, and now there are the realities of how I see myself every single day. The thoughts I have around my gender, who I am, and how the world perceives me.
A lot of time when people hear plastic surgery, they hear vanity. But for myself, and many other trans folks, it’s most about us just wanting to finally be us.
And so, the seemingly sweet comments can sometimes feel condescending.
Of course, myself nor any other trans person, really lives in a bubble of our own mental realities. We also have to live and try to thrive in a world that often still sees us as the way we were assigned at birth.
(Unless of course, the dysphoria isn’t worth it that day so we hide away in our own solitude.)
This is where the discussion can get even trickier, because a good amount of transgender people will say “We shouldn’t have to conform to be valid!” Which is a sentiment I can totally agree with.
But, it’s a sentiment that in and of itself can also feel invalidating. Because while I’m wanting to lessen my dysphoria by changing by body for the way I view myself, I am also changing it to send social cues to others to see me as who I am.
Cis women aren’t just women in a vacuum. A portion of their womanhood involves them experiencing life as a woman. And if there weren’t men, would women still be women, or just humans?
Perhaps that’s a little too philosophical of a way to say it helps with my gender dysphoria when someone calls me “Miss” or “she”. As opposed to the gut wrenching feeling I feel during an otherwise pleasant conversation with a stranger, and they verbally recognize my maleness in one way or another.
Or the idea that I won’t once again have to be called by a male implied slur by a group of men in public.
And since my social status as male or female is derived by each individual based on what physical cues I’m giving them, and not just how I feel about myself, it does really help when those cues are very easily distinguished as a woman’s.
The world isn’t a safe space operating on a “What pronouns do you use” reality. So until collective humanity decides to overthrow such a binary, it would most certainly be helpful to also socially feel like a woman.
Hormones have also so far helped me mentally feel even more like myself and lessened my dysphoria. Believe it or not, it can be pretty hard to “feel like a woman” when testosterone is making you feel oh so man-ish.
If this is all what gender dysphoria really feels like though, what would it feel like to finally relieve it? To relieve the burden of feeling as if part of my life experience is lived in in-authenticity.
Recently, I looked in the mirror before showering. Which for the most part, seeing my body fully naked is something I avoid.
In that moment, I realized for the first time my chest wasn’t just a body part that was there reminding me of what I wasn’t. For once, I looked at my chest and realized that it was finally starting to look like breast.
In a moment of calmness and tears, my body was starting to look like me.