Gender dysphoria isn’t just hating your body-it isn’t despising yourself.
It’s over the years, you grow numb when you hear your birthname. People call it out to you and it echoes in your head but you don’t know that name anymore-it doesn’t belong to your body but you’re so drained of it and you can feel a slight pain deep in your core where you know it’s the monster called gender dysphoria is waking up.
It’s getting undressed and walking past a mirror because you don’t care, then you decide to look at the mirror-you look at your body-and you immediately begin to cry once your eyes reach your chest and crotch. It’s falling to the floor crying, clawing at your chest because you don’t want this anymore, and you look pitifully into the mirror to see how sorry of a scenario your brain put you through.
It’s the constant touching of your chest in the sports bra you’re wearing because you know it’s there, but you keep torturing yourself anyways. It’s looking over at your friend and constantly asking if your chest is flat. Asking them until they get annoyed with you because they don’t understand the demons you’re trying to chain down when they say “yes”.
It’s your friends or just other trans people at a young age getting on hormones and getting ready to get surgery and all you feel is pure jealousy. You wish you could be in their place. You wish you didn’t have to spend all the money you’re saving up just to be comfortable in life.
It’s talking to your therapist and having to apologize over and over again for crying when you bring up the future and how you’re scared you won’t pass or you’re scared that you’ll get beat up or killed. It’s seeing your parents sadness in their eyes when you bring up being transgender over and over again, knowing that they lost a child and even though it’s been years, the mourning continues while you stand right in front of them.
It’s the demon that holds your mouth closed when you want to meet new people because you know that when you open your mouth, they will know what you really are and the thought of having to force yourself out again and again is so mentally draining.
It’s feeling a phantom dick in between your legs. It’s feeling a dick and reaching down only to grasp air. It’s the sadness that starts from your stomach that climbs up to your throat until you can’t cry anymore, you just whimper because this happens regularly and you should know better than to hope for the impossible.
It’s the longing to have the bodies of men who walk around you. It’s longing for their beards and their veins in their arms and their flat chest and their rough voice. It’s longing to be them. It’s the fear that hits and tells you “you’ll never look like them when you’re older” when you imagine yourself in the future.
It’s my mental disorder I deal with daily.
