Welcome to #TransTuesday! This week’s topic is a big one, and kind of the reason for everything. That’s right, we’re talking about everyone’s least favorite thing, our not-so-friendly constant companion: GENDER DYSPHORIA.
Dypshoria’s remarkably difficult to talk about. Finding the right words to express it is beyond difficult, and I’m a damned writer. I’ve been trying to describe it in words for years, and it’s still a challenge.
VERY broadly, it means your gender does not match the one you were assigned at birth. There is SO much more to it than that, but I want you to have a base to start from. Somebody looked at your genitals and in two seconds laid out a lifetime of expectations for you.
There’s no easy way to explain to a cis person what it’s like, because it affects everyone in entirely different ways. I’ll try to explain what it’s like for me personally, because that’s the best I can give you.
What made my dysphoria spike more than anything was my face, and how much it didn’t look like me. At all. My face, and to a still strong but lesser extent, lack of breasts and feminine body shape were huge, huge issues for me.
Facial hair (and to a moderately lesser extent, body hair), are also problems. See the trans tuesday on BODY HAIR for more on that particular problem.
Facial hair especially drives me MAD. I want to sand it off my face forever. And there are medical procedures that can address this – laser hair removal and electrolysis. But despite what capitalism wants you to believe, covid-19 is actually still around.
My wife is immunocompromised, so me being maskless indoors with strangers in a place with a lot of people just isn’t possible. For more on the difficulties trans people face with regard to covid, see the trans tuesday on PANDEMIC TRANSITION.
I can’t wear a mask while someone zaps every hair on my face. It takes multiple sessions to permanently get that hair to stop growing. One trans woman told me she had multiple laser sessions followed by SEVENTY HOURS of electrolysis. And she’s still not done.
Guess what else spiked my dysphoria? SHAVING MY FACE, because in my head it’s another intrinsically male thing to do. So: having facial hair spikes my dysphoria, shaving it off spiked my dysphoria. Interestingly, as my transition progressed, this changed a little.
By changing the shaving cream I use, by changing the motions of my hand and the WAY I shave, I was able to divorce it from what I did pre-transition. So the act of shaving no longer causes dysphoria.
In fact, it actually gives me EUPHORIA because it’s getting rid of the facial hair that doesn’t belong on my body. Every morning I’m removing parts of me that shouldn’t be there so I can see the real me that’s always been there.
Early on in transition, my face was really sensitive, and I couldn’t shave that often. It took me months just to work up to being able to shave every other day. And do you realize what that meant? I got maybe an eight hour span, three days a week, where I could feel like me.
And the rest of the time, I just… didn’t. And replacing my wardrobe took a long time, and a lot of money, which I talked about in the trans tuesday on PRIVILEGE: TIME AND MONEY.
That was further exacerbated on how it just takes a lot of time and experimentation to find out what you actually want to wear and feel good in. See the trans tuesday on FINDING OUR TRANS STYLE for more on that.
But even as I got more women’s clothes, I couldn’t wear them every day, even if I had enough of them to do so. Why? WELL. Even if I was just in women’s jeans and a lady-styled t-shirt… if I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror like that, with stubble? Dysphoria spike.
If I FEEL the stubble on my face? Dysphoria spike. And what if I had to take out the trash, or get the mail, or step out of our apartment for any reason?
The world was literally going to see a bearded lady, and I had to decide if I had the energy in me to fend off any potential harassment that might come my way. And there’s NOTHING WRONG with bearded ladies! Women can be as hairy or hairless as they like.
But society says they should be ONE WAY ONLY, and doing anything outside of that opens you up to harassment. And, like, screw those bigots, I don’t care what they think.
But I still had to have the mental and emotional capacity to deal with it if I risked going outside with stubble. So the end result is I spent the days I couldn’t shave in old boy-cut t-shirts and jeans/shorts, the gender neutral way I dressed for all my life until recently.
And to be clear, gender-neutral clothes are RIGHT for some people which is TOTALLY fine. But it’s not right for me specifically, yet I felt somewhat forced to do it most of the time. Which caused, you guessed it, dysphoria spike.
That’s called BOYMODING (or GIRLMODING), and you bet there’s a trans tuesday on that too. And how much more painful it became to do as transition progressed.
So that’s just a small glimpse of some of the things I was dealing with early in my transition, and for all my life pre-transition. That’s NOT all there is to it, but it’s the easiest example I could show you of how it crops up everywhere and causes all kinds of problems.
Hopefully you cis folks reading can see how pervasive it is, because we get that from wearing the wrong clothing and being called by our deadnames and people using the wrong pronouns and societal expectations and a million other things. But what’s gender dysphoria LIKE?
Here’s where language kind fails us. I’m going to use several clunky and inadequate metaphors. Try to combine them all in your head, and maybe it will give you some idea that’s in the right ballpark. Ready? Buckle up. Here we go.
It’s like not being able to breathe. Like there’s a 400lb weight on your chest slowly crushing the life out of you. No matter how you struggle, you can’t get out from under it. No one will lift it off you. No one else can even see it. You have to live your life under it.
It’s like being underwater, being able to see everyone else around you swimming, while you’re eternally drowning. And no one helps. Because no one knows. Worse, some of the people you love so much ARE THE ONES HOLDING YOU UNDERWATER.
Imagine you’re at dinner with your friends, and you see them. Not with your eyes, but you SEE them. As people. You love them. They think they see you. But they don’t. They can’t. You’re buried behind a six foot thick concrete wall that separates you from the world.
EVERYWHERE you go. EVERY second of your life. Crushing weight, lack of breath, nobody knows or sees the real you. You see a person in the mirror and in photos that you know is yourself, because people tell you so. But it’s not you.
See the trans tuesday on PHOTOS AND REFLECTIONS for more on the ways our very appearance betrays and wounds us.
It’s being buried somewhere deep inside a fleshy meat sack you’re steering around the world, piloting a robot you never asked for and don’t know how to operate. And, in most cases, the appearance and physical aspects of that robot repulse you.
And in my case, it’s not that I hate men. It’s that I hated people thinking I’M a man, because I’m not and never have been. While developing, my physical body went one way and my brain and gender went another. It’s a mismatch.
Even just talking about it I can feel the oppressive weight in my chest. So we do what we can to try to fix it… changing our clothes, our hair, our names. Trying medical options like hormone replacement therapy and gender confirmation surgeries.
Because living like this is PAINFUL. It’s AWFUL. It is literal TORTURE. You do not understand the sheer body horror of watching yourself go through the wrong puberty, and your body shifting and warping into a nightmare that you can’t escape.
Cis folks, there’s a chance you can experience small tastes of what it’s like. In our highly gendered society, women wearing “men’s” clothing is largely seen as great and wonderful, because men are so awesome and should be aspired to.
But cis fellas out there? Have you ever worn a dress? How did that make you FEEL? Did your skin crawl? Could you just not wait to get it off of your body? Was it gross and uncomfortable and weird and awful? You just got a .00001% taste of gender dysphoria.
BTW, if it DIDN’T feel weird and gross and awful, that’s super cool. You may be a cis dude who likes skirts and dresses, which is a totally legit thing to be. But, uh, y’know… you might also not be cis. See the trans tuesday on HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU’RE TRANS.
For ANY cis people reading, a thought exercise: seriously sit and imagine every day you must wear clothes for a gender that’s not yours. You see someone of a different gender in the mirror. You know it’s not you, but EVERYONE will act like it is.
And everyone expects you to play that part. And punishes you when you’re bad at it, all the while you’re dealing with just how terrible it makes you feel. Your pronouns are wrong, your name is wrong, YOUR ENTIRE LIFE IS WRONG.
It’s all day long. It’s EVERY DAY OF YOUR LIFE. FOR YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS. It never ever stops. Until you finally realize what’s causing it. Imagine the relief you’d feel to know you’re not the only one who experiences it.
Imagine the relief you’d feel to know there are things you can do to correct it, to fix it, to not feel that misery anymore.
Now imagine so many people NOT like you want to punish you for seeking the things that would fix it. Want to, and in some cases do, make getting that care ILLEGAL.
Does that make you anxious? Does it make you panic? Does it make you feel like the walls are caving in and there’s no way out, nothing you can do, and no one who will help you?
You are, maybe, starting to get it.
I’m far enough into my transition, and have been lucky enough with the way my body has responded to hormone replacement therapy, and in a few other ways, to basically not have any dysphoria anymore. Though seeing my stubble each morning still causes it.
TO BE CLEAR: you do NOT have to have dysphoria to be transgender. But the vast majority of us do. But also! Gender dysphoria has largely been described and decided on by a field of entirely cisgender doctors. Which, yeah, is as messed up as you think.
I’m personally of the opinion that the definition of gender dysphoria should be opened up wide. Because we all experience it in different ways, caused by different things, and at different intensities.
So like, if you ask me, someone who was assigned male at birth simply saying “I’d be happier as a girl”… that’s gender dysphoria, to me. Even if it doesn’t come with all the anguish. Because cis people don’t feel that way.
In any case, I want to leave you with one final description of gender dysphoria that I surprised myself with. If you follow me on any of my social media accounts, you know I post daily pre-coffee thoughts as I sit around waiting for the caffeine to kick in.
Many are goofy or ludicrous, some are poignant, some are sad, some are just bad puns. I don’t plan them, I just go wherever my non-stop brain takes me that morning.
And a little while back I was just thinking about dysphoria one morning. I wasn’t lost in it, I wasn’t even feeling it. Again, I’m incredibly lucky in that my life is almost entirely dysphoria-free now. But I had dysphoria for my entire life. It was really, really bad.
And I’ll never ever ever be able to forget how it felt, no matter how I try. And so this poem about it just… came out. And afterward, I realized it may be the most accurate description of gender dysphoria I’ve ever managed to put to words. Here it is:
cries
from stygian depths
clawing
scraping
form without shaping
reverberating off bone
amplified by beating sinew
pleading for you
to see a light brighter
than a galaxy of suns
screaming
set me free
Cis folks, please understand what so many of us go through. Transitioning isn’t a whim, isn’t elective, it isn’t even really a choice… for so many of us it comes down to: try to be free, or spend life trapped in waking death.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com