internalized misogyny and dysphoria
while sex or gender dysphoria can often feel like body-hate, it doesnât always (or even usually?) present that way. i see people say things like, âsex/gender dysphoria doesnât mean hating your body!â well, okay, fair. but that doesnât mean gender dysphoria that feels like alienation from your body is somehow more âvalidly transâ than body-hate.
my dysphoria felt more like the âwrong bodyâ trope, too. i didnât feel right, didnât identify with my primary or secondary sex characteristics. male sex characteristics seemed preferable.
rather than taking this as a sign of someone being actually trans, i think itâs more reasonable to see this is disassociative behavior.
the misogyny gets so internalized you donât even have to believe it on an intellectual level because you know it on a deeper level. youâve seen women abused, ridiculed, assaulted, belittled, held back, talked over, ignored, sexualized and just generally consumed, all for being women, all for having primary and secondary female sex characteristics.
on a subconscious level, you donât want any of these things to happen to you and when they start to, you disassociate yourself from the cultural signifiers that bring that treatmentâfemale sex characteristics.
youâre smart and funny and athletic and precocious, so much more than just something to be sexualized, so having breasts feels wrong. you want to take an active role in your desires and sex and sexuality, so your vagina feels wrong, you should have been born with a penis. you want people to stop ignoring you because youâre smart and you have good ideas, so your high voice sounds wrong.
this is so clearly internalized misogyny in retrospect. i mean, itâs easy to see why transitioning seems like a good option, because quite obviously sexism and misogyny are nowhere near changing. you canât force men to start treating women like people, but you can trick them into believing youâre male and thus opt out of experiencing sexism some of the timeâmaybe even most of the time.
but the hard truth is you can never become male. another hard truth is, youâll lose the deep connection and sisterhood you had (or have the potential for) with other women when they start seeing you as male, and you wonât find that with men. men donât have that. so you lose a lot and gain very little.
itâs really not an easy situation, but developing a strong muscle for self-acceptance and love for women is much more rewarding than being called âbroâ by the cashier.
ultimately, iâm not even saying âdonât transition!â i believe in the right of adults to do what they want with their bodies. but i shudder when we start telling girls that their really understandable feelings somehow mean theyâre trans. thatâs an obvious self-fulfilling prophesy.
investigate your feelings instead of accepting some âpackaged truthâ about what they mean. consider for yourself whether sex and gender can really exist separate of one another. can you logically extricate gender from both sex AND gender roles? ask these hard questions and then some.
