I expressed recently that I strongly believe I would still experience dysphoria in a vacuum, and I've gotten a surprising amount of dissent on this. many have expressed that they believe a trans person could only feel distress about sexed aspects of their body if they learned that it was abnormal for someone of their gender. I think what's been missing from this conversation, though, is the concept of "subconscious sex," a theory I'm a proponent of that Julia Serano writes about in Whipping Girl
I highly recommend reading the book for yourself, but I'll give an excerpt from chapter 5 that hopefully explains the theory. I've added single quotation marks where I feel the wording is a bit dated, but I hope you'll agree the theory itself remains sensible
"Perhaps the best way to describe how my subconscious sex feels to me is to say that it seems as if, on some level, my brain expects my body to be 'female.' Indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that our brains have an intrinsic understanding of what sex our bodies 'should' be. For example, there have been numerous instances in which male infants have been surgically reassigned as female shortly after birth due to botched circumcisions or cloacal exstrophy (a non-intersex medical condition). Despite being raised female and appearing to have 'female' genitals, the majority of such children eventually come to identify as male, demonstrating that brain sex may override both socialization and genital sex"
Serano writes a few pages later, building off of this theory and toward what she calls "gender dissonance":
"For me, the hardest part about being trans has not been the discrimination or ridicule that I have faced for defying societal gender norms, but rather the internal pain I experienced when my subconscious and conscious sexes were at odds with one another... subconsciously seeing myself as female while consciously dealing with the fact that I was [physically] 'male'."
Serano characterizes this dissonance as many feelings at different times: stress, anxiousness, sadness, grief. While she calls this "gender dissonance," I would personally call it "sex dissonance," though I more often just call it "dysphoria" for the sake of clarity (I recently clumsily called it "bodily gender dysphoria"). It's this dissonant distress, explained via the theoretical basis of subconscious sex, that I believe would not simply vanish in a perfect society
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