Gender Dysphoria Isn’t What You Think
Cassie LaBelle has an interesting take on gender dysphoria over at Medium.
She argues that the traditional descriptions of gender dysphoria may not make sense to trans people who are still in denial or exploring their sense of self:
The more I read, the more certain I became that I wasn’t trans. I had only cross-dressed a few times as an adolescent, and never as an adult. I didn’t feel intense distress about having a penis. I didn’t even feel like I was “trapped in the wrong body.” I didn’t exactly LIKE my body, but it’s not like I looked in the mirror every morning and thought to myself, “hmm, this should be a girl!” And if that wasn’t at the heart of being trans, then what was?
Telling a trans person that they aren’t trans — or aren’t “trans enough” — serves no purpose other than cruelty, Cassie argues. She also points out that lot of “unhatched or newly-hatched” trans people suffer from gender dysphoria without actually realizing it.
Gender dysphoria appears as a different experience once you fully accept the fact that you are transgender. Mirrors were distressing for Cassie, but she did not understand why. “..early on, you can come up with an alternate explanation for almost every symptom,” she writes.
Talk to trans women about their pre-transition experiences with women’s clothing, or with playing female characters in video games, and you’ll get a similar range of answers. Some trans people gravitate toward expressing their true selves using clothing or digital avatars early on, perhaps not even realizing why. Others (like me) felt too much frenetic energy bound up in these things, and shied away from them — not because I didn’t want to be seen as more feminine, but because I had a lot of shame and confusion and anxiety bound up in these things, and I wasn’t ready to face it yet.
Read the whole article including “Cassie’s Incomplete List of Things That Were Actually Gender Dysphoria The Whole Time!” here!
Illustration: Ponomariova_Maria
