Dysphoria

I’ve had this post sitting around for a while…I originally wasn’t going to post it at all, but I eventually decided to just put it up.

This post is extremely personal for me. Dysphoria is extremely difficult to explain, but I tried my best. Keep in mind that I’m speaking from my own experiences, and I’m not trying to speak for anyone else. This is me trying to explain how my dysphoria feels.

Imagine that you are you, exactly as you are right at this moment. Now imagine that you wake up in the morning and you have all the wrong bits. You now have a penis instead of a vagina, or vice versa. You have developed breasts where there was only flatness before, or vice versa. You’ve lost your beard or grown some facial hair. You say something at the mirror in surprise and your voice is too high or too low. You are still you, you know that. But then you realize that everyone outside your room doesn’t. You go to your closet or dresser, looking for something to wear that might help you assure people that you’re you, you’re not this body. But everything in your closet is just wrong – where there should be skirts, there are baggy jeans, or where there should be t-shirts, there are blouses. You pick out the least offensive outfit you can manage, but everything is ugly and scratchy and doesn’t fit right – not to mention that it’s all extraordinarily brightly colored so you’ll be sure to attract a lot of attention. So you pull on a hat with a brim you can pull down around your face and finally leave the room. Someone’s coming in the building, so you hold the door for them.They just kind of stare at you as you walk past, and you just know they’re trying to figure out why in the world you’re dressed that way, and slowly say, “Thanks sir/ma’am.” The wrong term, of course. They see you as the wrong gender.

But you put up with it, pull your hat down further, and hope you don’t run into anybody else. But then you have to order your morning drink with your too high or too low voice that everyone in the room hears. The card you hand the barista to pay screams your (incorrect) gender, and they don’t even realize. You go to class or to work, and your professors and classmates or boss and colleagues all call you by the wrong gender (things like “hey girls” or “sir”) and they don’t even realize that they’re doing something wrong. They think they know you, they think that by the way you look, they can tell exactly who you are.

Now imagine that your best friend in the world comes to hang out with you later, after work/classes are done. They don’t misgender you, and when they ask you how you are, expecting a proper response, you go to tell them that you hate how everyone sees you the wrong way and calls you the wrong pronouns and is just so sure that their view of you is the right and only view and they do this without even realizing. But as soon as you try to put it into words, you realize that you don’t actually have the means to properly describe this awful, empty, hopeless, despair feeling. And even if you did, you are so sure that you can see the flicker of doubt in your friend’s eyes, and you just know, or think you know, that they don’t believe you. That they only refer to you by the right gender to humor you, that they’re so sure it’s just a phase. But how can this be a phase? You just feel so wrong, your body is not you. It doesn’t fit right.

Now do that again. And again. Some days you feel better in your body than others, some days you feel worse. But even when you feel great, this feeling is still nagging at you.

Dysphoria: [dis-fawr-ee-uh] (noun) a state of dissatisfaction, anxiety, restlessness, or fidgeting

Gender and body dysphoria is, therefore, dysphoria pertaining specifically to one’s gender or body. I am currently experiencing some really bad gender/body dysphoria.

I’m neutrois. That means that my ideal body is free of all sexual characteristics. I don’t want breasts, or a vagina, or to be immediately recognizable as female. I don’t want hair except on my head. I don’t want my voice to be quite so high.

Right now, the fact that I am immediately gendered, immediately recognized as female even though it’s not true is distressing. I’m extremely uncomfortable and annoyed that everyone misgenders me, and would honestly much rather be sitting by myself in a corner with a book and some tea rather than out on campus where everyone thinks that they know I’m a girl.

Dysphoria is somewhat pervasive in the trans* community, where there is usually an inherent conflict between one’s gender and one’s body. Not all trans* people feel dysphoric, some do sometimes, some don’t at all. Personally, I only feel dysphoric sometimes.

What to do to ease dysphoria is different for everybody, and I haven’t found or heard of any surefire way to make it better. Personally, I wear a binder to hide my breasts. I like to dress up, wearing a button-down, a tie, and slacks. I wear a lot of layers – binder/sports bra, undershirt, t-shirt, sweatshirt. I slouch more to hide any curve of my chest. I drink a lot of tea. But these things don’t fix the problem, they just make it a little easier to deal with.

Right now, I’m hiding in some baggy men’s jeans, my binder, a unisex t-shirt, and a three-sizes-too-big sweatshirt with a hood vaguely reminiscent of a Jedi robe. And, despite all of this form-hiding, baggy, masculine/androgynous clothing, I still feel too gendered. I feel like I stand out, like everything I’m wearing is neon orange with bright purple stripes and a glowing sign above my head saying, “Look at me, I’m female”. It’s hard to talk to people, to look them in the eye, to even go outside, knowing that they are all so unconsciously certain that they have me correctly gendered. Even going to class today was a battle, knowing that in German we would be talking about gendered nouns and that in French I would have to refer to myself with female-gendered words. Even if I had been quiet in every class (which I couldn’t be, so I had to listen to my too high voice all day), just sitting there knowing that everyone in the room assumed they knew my gender was torture.

One of the most annoying things is that (most) people don’t even realize that they’re gendering the people they encounter. They see someone on the street and automatically judge whether to use masculine pronouns or feminine pronouns. One irritating part of dysphoria for me is being sure that everybody will automatically label me female forever. That no matter what I do or say or wear, I will never be seen as anything more than a girl.

The single worst part of feeling dysphoric for me, though, is my complete inability to feel comfortable in my skin. I am anxious and fidgety, and constantly something feels wrong about me. My body doesn’t fit right. It’s not the way I know it should be.

How does this relate to you if you’re cisgender? Try to pay attention to how you judge other people. Next time you walk around near other people, watch how you think about them, notice how quickly you gender them in your head. The next step is to try and stop judging people so quickly. If someone looks male, it doesn’t mean they are. If someone wears a skirt, it doesn’t mean they’re female. Gender identity is different for everyone, and some men like to wear skirts while some women like to wear ties.

I guess what I want you to get from this is, besides a basic understanding of dysphoria as it pertains to me, is that sometimes your unconscious judgements can hurt people. I know I’ve talked about things like that before, but honestly. If we can stop jumping to conclusions about people, I think the world would be nicer. Not free of dysphoria, but perhaps easier to deal with.

Trans* vs. Trans: A brief explanation

There is a distinct difference between trans-with-an-asterisk and trans-without-an-asterisk.

Contemporary society acknowledges two genders, male and female. This is the gender binary. A lot of people are male or female. But a lot of people aren’t – their genders tend to be categorized as non-binary. A problematic idea sometimes associated with the gender binary is that those are the only two genders. This is not to say that we shouldn’t have a binary, because male and female are completely valid genders. It just means that we need to recognize that there are far more than those two genders.

Trans-without-an-asterisk is referring only to binary trans people: male-to-female (MtF) trans people and female-to-male (FtM) trans people.

Trans-with-an-asterisk refers to all transgender people: MtF, FtM, agender, genderqueer, everyone whose actual gender differs from the gender they were assigned at birth.