this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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Ok, I definitely didn't see it that way. But the way you describe it, I was just constantly drawing a parallel with something like anorexia; you have an uncontrollable urge to change the way you look (and behave?). I know that gender dysphoria isn't classified as a disorder and only a condition, but it certainly sounds like something that causes a lot of distress that one wouldn't want to experience.
But now I understand that a person experiencing gender dysphoria should be treated as somebody with a disorder, in the sense that it's something beyond their control and you can't just logic your way out of it. Like, they just feel that way, even if it doesn't make sense, and for their benefit, we just have to accept it.
I also suspect it's not as bad as you described for everybody, but I need to be prepared for the worst case scenario, too.
Thank you for this massive write-up!
Yeah dysphoria/euphoria runs a gamut of severity. Some folk only experience the effects of the dopamine hit of it being what you want, some just have the perpetual downer... most of us it's a combo plate of both.
And anorexia does have a somewhat similar approach to lessening body dysmorphia. Stay away from mirrors, avoid people who focus too much on your appearance... We as a society just have come to a concensus that making commentary about people's weight is really rude and harmful. Anorexia however is socially based. It's a response to a societies beauty standards and you don't find it in cultures that don't have those beauty standards. Transness however just pops up everywhere often in complete opposition to beauty standards, cultural norms or religious doctrine across time and place.
A lot of us go through this phase right before we accept being trans where we try to be like the apex version of our birth sex. We try to over gender perform because if you are the perfect cis man or woman you should be fine living off the external validation of others the way cis people do... But when that ultimately fails to fix the problems and actually often makes them worse the reality becomes there are only a few options. Be miserable until you run out of strength and die either by suicide or a life shortened by stress... Or you explore ways that might solve your internal problem but also potentially cost you family, friendships, careers, respect, safety and basically turn up the heat on external pressures to conform.
It's a rock and a hard place. Where external factors leave you alone when you are in solitude the internal reaction is an every living moment kind of thing. You can't run away from your own body. It doesn't help that when being trans is so stigmatized transitioning often is a last resort so when people hit that point they are already contemplating death as a very logical outcome. When you start a rough climb back to safety doing so not from ground level but from the bottom of a deep pit you dug by trying everything else ... Well you can see why so many cis people on the right wing blame trans people's coming out and trying to be openly trans as the cause of their misery and sometimes suicide...