“No doctor told me that getting a troubled shelter dog and bonding with her through training, being in a loving and supportive relationship, or making many friends with similar experiences could improve my well-being so much that I wouldn’t have to pretend I was a man in order to feel okay. Nobody told me to read a wide variety of radical and lesbian feminist literature with my friends, and to discuss and debate it at such length and with such depth that it began to change our lives. Nobody told me that being in a room full of women that I have a lot in common with, laughing together, could make me forget I had ever vehemently denied and sought to eradicate the reality of my girlhood and womanhood."
I am not a wretch, though. Women who look different aren't ruined women. To see ourselves as ruined on the basis of how testosterone and surgery changed our bodies is to reveal the extent to which we hold ourselves to woman-hating definitions of what femaleness is. Being a woman does not mean I exist to be looked at and have my appearance evaluated, and it does not mean I have to exist to have children. These are the metrics by which transition is considered to have ruined us.
- Max Robinson, Detransition: Beyond Before and After, p. 41
How does radical feminism explain dysphoria? I agree with the basis of 'if the only reason you think you're trans stems from being treated badly as a girl, feeling unsafe and thinking it'd be easier to be a guy' etc, that's probably not a gender thing, that's just being aware of unequality. But what about stuff like dysphoria that is separate from that? I also have never really met anyone who cited those reasons for figuring out they were trans, I feel like I only see it from rad fem blogs talking about it.
This answer is going to be a bit of a mixed bag, clip compilation of videos and reading, because your question sparked like five different responses and reactions in my head haha. (Great question anon.)
So, different types of diagnoses are different, you can have a disease (caused by a single biological thing, like cancer which is caused by uncontrolled cell growth, or AIDS which is caused by a virus) or you can have a disorder which is characterised by a list of symptoms.
Here is the diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria in children :
I would have met 4-5 of those as a kid. If i had hated my sexed body, i could have qualified for a dysphoria diagnosis. So that's one criticism of the diagnostic criteria, it leaves open the possibility that quite standard gender nonconformity combined with distress over puberty is diagnosed as dysphoria. So is dysphoria completely separate from sexism or being treated worse as a girl? By the criteria themselves, not really.
Here's a video with more discussion about the criteria:
We don't know what causes dysphoria, or if it is one thing. We don't know if distressed teenager who meets these criteria is going through the same thing as a little boy being coached to understand his gender nonconformity as being in the wrong body, like the child described in this clip (the woman speaking is Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who is Medical Director of the Center for Trans Youth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles):
Feminist analysis about dysphoria is relatively new, but some women connect it to feminist discussion about anorexia, the plastic surgery industry and anti-psychiatry. You can start out with this article by Victoria Smith and the books she mentions (may be paywalled, archive link here):
Forcing people to live in a body where they do not feel at home causes intense, often unbearable suffering.
Here is an interesting video by a detrans woman about girls growing up in toxic online communities:
Also no compilation like this would be complete without mentioning the book Detransition: Beyond Before and After by Max Robinson. It may be hard to get a physical copy but there is an audiobook or ebook option too.
“I am overjoyed to be a lesbian now that I understand that contexts exist where my sex can enable, rather than conflict with, my ability to exercise agency and fully participate in a community of peers.”
— Max Robinson, Detransition: Beyond Before and After
