When I first came out I was told that my dysphoria would gradually disappear as I had medical interventions. I thought this was great news, I figured that since I had no genital dysphoria I would only need HRT and Chest Reconstruction to feel 100% male*. ( I no longer think of medical transition as becoming a man but as a series of interventions to reduce dysphoria caused by gender/body incongruence)
I was given bad advice.
My experience of dysphoria has been much more complex than this. When I started HRT my dysphoria dropped really fast and almost went away for a little while. Except that after a few months my chest really started to bother me. My whole body would squirm and it felt like my skin was crawling as I became aware of my breasts more and more often.
Then after I had top surgery my dysphoria dropped again, I mean I wasn’t happy with my result (to the point of sobbing at a mirror 6 months post op) but at least I didn’t have to bind anymore. I figured so long as I looked ok in my clothes and nobody could tell I was trans then I was happy.
Incorrect.
As time went on I the all pervading dysphoria came back, I had no relationship with my own body and up til this point all of my transition had been done to deal with the outward problems of others perceptions of my gender. At this point for me, transition isn’t about gender. It’s about incongruence & dysphoria….
My social *gender* dysphoria has now been resolved which has brought to light the root of my gender incongruence. My body, as in my own relationship to it.
I’ve been so consumed with chest dysphoria that I’ve lost all relationship with my body. I have been alienated from it as a defense mechanism to stop me from totally crumbling. This suppression of a physical relationship with myself meant that by the time I noticed the dysphoria related to my genitals it was screaming at me.
I’ve had bouts of needing to use a prosthetic in the past, or times when I wished I could STP or penetrate in sex but I figured these were niggles and that maybe at most I might benefit from metoidioplasty. It turns out those niggles were the same type of warning signs I was having in the lead up to going from being post top surgery to having full blown incapacitating dysphoria relating to my chest. It went something like this:
-”oh well, I mean it isn’t perfect now but it’ll flatten as it heals”
-”Hmmm. I should probably work out my chest to flatten some of this saggy skin”
-”working out hasn’t done much, I guess I should give it more time, at least it’s better than binding, even if I can’t take my shirt off in public”
-” You know this saggy skin kinda looks like very small boobs..and I can’t get rid of it. I might have to start taping in in summer because I look like a saggy old man when I wear T-Shirts/Vests”
-”No but really I look like I have tits?!!! This isn’t what it was meant to look like!! GEt it off me! How the fuck am I supposed to cope with this saggy awful wonky chest! My body still looks like a woman! Get it off me!!!”
This progression took around 18 months, it was insidious and all consuming, I hear phrases similar to that last one ringing in my head every single day and none of my coping mechanisms for anxiety of other MH issues have any effect.
The problem with my lower dysphoria is that I was still so consumed with my chest that by the time I noticed what was happening it was already traumatic.
It finally became unignorable while I was having sex a few months ago. I couldn’t get off, nothing felt right and I stormed out of the room crying and immediately found my packer (which had been sat in a drawer for months). I recognised these feelings and sobbed, I don’t want to have to have multiple surgeries to alleviate this. I don’t want to have major recovery, and lots of scars. I really don’t! I’ve done plenty of research into phalloplasty options and the end result is *exactly* what I want. It will make such a difference to my life. But it’s not something I wanted to have to do.I now have to pack everyday and sometimes even pack whilst sleeping. I’ve had to devise a way to jerk off using my packer so that it bumps up against my current anatomy because I can’t touch or engage with what I already have unless I’m showering. Sitting to pee is becoming a chore that causes me distress, I’ve found myself accidentally putting off peeing a lot recently.
In many ways, I’m happy and optimistic one way or another my chest dysphoria will be resolved and the same for my genitals but one thing is for certain. The dysphoria I had when I started this process of transition is a very different shape from my dysphoria now. some things are incomparably better and no longer an issue but other things are either worse or are brand new dysphoria triggers that I wasn’t even aware of. This isn’t a smooth proccess of upward progress towards a 100% dysphoria free life. It changes and evolves as I did. I do hope that one day, probably a few years after my final stage of phallo when all my healing is done, my dysphoria will be minimal and not something that invades my daily thoughts. I do think that when this is all over I will have a body that I can feel in tune with, it’s something I already work hard on despite my brain shouting at me about it. But this idea of transition as the route to unwavering body congruence and happiness is a myth and we, as trans men, need to be more honest about that.
Tag: dysphoria
all the doctors are friends (but not *our* friends)
this is just because i’ve been having some conversations about kids and gender and transition and puberty-blockers and so on. and having some feelings about that.
(to get a few things out of the way as a preamble)
what i want in the world is for folks (of all ages) to be able to make and put into effect any decision they want about what to do with their bodies – which means, practically, working for there to be more and more possibilities available to more and more people. in the realms of gender and sexuality that includes access to all kinds of body modifications, whether towards or away from any particular socially recognized gender position, and also access to all kinds of options for reproduction, from permanently or temporarily preventing it to actively facilitating it. what’s important to me is the possibility of real, meaningful choice, and the removal of restraints on that.
probably because of coming up right before and after the arrival of antiretrovirals, i think about most of the access-to-medical-transition stuff as a “drugs in bodies” question, through the analogy of AZT. in the absence of much actual decent research on HRT drugs (either to learn more about their longterm effects or towards making better ones), we already know they’re generally shitty, but bad drugs in living bodies is better than dead bodies.
(and here’s the meat of the post)
so: in the current conversations, mostly things are framed as a fight in which advocates for kids’ access to puberty blockers face off against advocates of “reparative/corrective therapy” to normalize kids to their assigned genders. that’s how, for instance, julia serano sets things up in her mostly useful piece on Medium last year.
and that’s generally how things play out among trans community activists, parents, TERFs, and other folks outside the medical institutions involved.
but here’s the thing: that’s not a divide that exists among the doctors.
the best-known puberty-blocker doctors and the best-known “reparative” therapists work together, publish together, and generally see each other as collaborators rather than opponents. kenneth zucker and peggy cohen-kettenis, for instance, co-wrote the chapter on “gender identity disorder in children and adolescents” for a 2012 “handbook of sexual and gender identity disorders”. and that’s not an anomaly: even a mild bit of googling finds the two of them as co-authors on papers all the way from the late 1990s to the past few years (with at least a few also including ray blanchard in the credits). and that collaboration isn’t just on the page: well-sourced gossip tells me that before zucker’s clinic was shut down (finally!), he was known to send so many kids who didn’t respond to his “conversion therapy” bullshit to puberty-blocker clinics that he was considered one of their biggest referrers.
whether or not you agree with the analysis i lay out in the rest of this, if you care about trans lives, you need to think long and hard about that. not just the fact of the collaboration and mutual support, but also the fact that it’s not part of the public conversation (even the parts of it that well-informed folks like serano help to shape), and the amount of work that has gone into keeping it out of the public conversation.
I hope it’s ok to pull out one sentence from below the cut here, bc I really strongly recommend that folks read the whole piece:
what [these doctors] agree on is a vision of the world where there are as few trans folks as possible, and where the ones who do exist are as indistinguishable from cis people as possible.
The Pain That Most Transmen Are Ashamed to Talk About
We have learned of the higher risks of cancer if a hysterectomy is not completed after five years of being on testosterone.
This is important. Read it. Especially if you have been on T for over or close to 5 years. I have felt these pains. Even just today. I have been on T for over 5 years.
Something I have learned and have tried to be less of afraid of as a trans person is that you need to put your physical health above your feelings of shame. If you’re having a serious medical concern you need to find a doctor you are comfortable with and talk to them. It’s not fun, it’s not easy to do, but it’s important for your health.
Please, followers, remember to report any and all pain you experience to your doctor. Do not hide it! Your doctors are there to take care of you and ensure that you are safely and discreetly taken care of.
honestly i think we should start having conversations about many butch lesbians’ dysphoria because it’s something thats pretty common afaik but rarely talked about
like i wish i knew about it when i was questioning my gender bc i honestly felt like i couldnt possibly be woman aligned if i was dysphoric
Yeah, this is a thing that seems to make virtually everyone uncomfortable and so it never gets addressed.
I think there’s a convergence of three present cultural assumptions that make this conversation difficult:
- terfs’ entire campaign to bully and harass trans men until they detransition leading to people to assume any CAFAB GNC person IDing as a woman must actually be trans-masculine and in the closet,
- people already assuming butches are somehow “like men” or “closer to men” than femmes, and
- False notions of trans male identity in equating transness with dysphoria and equating manhood as the absence of femininity
If we’re going to acknowledge that you don’t need to be dysphoric to be trans, we should also acknowledge that you don’t need to be trans to be dysphoric. The most important part of identity is what feels right/comfortable/accurate to the individual, and we need to respect that. Also, as certain body parts or body shapes aren’t inherently male or female, we also need to acknowledge that it’s possible for women to, for example, not want breasts. That doesn’t make them male.
And if we’re going to understand femininity as coercive and performative within patriarchy, and acknowledge that masculinity is almost exclusively defined by denouncing anything deemed feminine in our mainstream culture, then we also need to acknowledge that gender nonconforming women are going to be seen as “masculine” or “mannish” just by not performing femininity.. it doesn’t require “emulating” or “replicating” manhood, it’s just not working actively to perform culturally recognized femininity.
I’ve already ranted a million and one times about why it’s harmful af to equate butch women to trans men, and why it harms literally all LGBT people to do so, so I won’t get into that rant on this post. And I think trans men are the best people to speak to point one, so I’m leaving that open to them.
But I do think this is important, because everyone (including butch women ourselves sometimes) has this knee-jerk reaction to assume if a cis woman is experiencing any sort of dysphoria or desire to have her body look unlike the cisnormative standard, then she must be trans. It’s really problematic for both cis women and trans women to equate certain bodies and presentations with gender.
I want everyone to just collectively understand that gender is nuanced, and the person you’re talking to probably knows a hell of a lot more about their own gender than you do.
Bruh!!! BRUH!!! HOLY SHIT BRUH!!!! Gender dysphoria among cis LGB people being talked about without terf or radfem politics!!!!
as a butch trans woman, i think butch cis women use dysphoria to mean something different than trans women do. which is to say, what both butch cis women feel and trans women feel is accurately called gender dysphoria, but there is a significant qualitative difference between the two experiences which causes confusion when the two groups come together to talk about their experiences.
i also want to add a point 4 to the cultural assumptions that make this conversation difficult: trans men’s historic proximity to butch lesbians lead to many similarities in the way butch lesbians and trans men describe themselves, which leads to outsiders confusing membership in the groups. i would love to see that change, but i think trans men’s self-description will continue to track any changes to butch rhetoric for the foreseeable future.
(also “gender dysphoria among cis LGB people”? this post is about lesbians)
i also want to talk about how dysphoria can fuel eating disorders to the point that thinness maintained by a restrictive eating disorder can feel like an integral part of gender expression for trans people & how the demonization of fatness in our culture can hugely hinder the recovery even of people whose eating disorders always revolved more around dysphoria than the fear of being fat
i want to talk about how the culturally enforced ideas of thinness as the epitome of androgyny, thinness as the epitome of femininity, & “maybe not thinness but definitely a lack of curves that can sometimes only be obtained by thinness” as the epitome of masculinity poison our thinking as trans people & contribute to an overwhelming epidemic of eating disorders in our community disproportionate to even the epidemic in wider sociey
i want to talk about how controlling our food to control our bodies & to control our minds & to feel like we have some control over circumstances that are wildly out of our control is horrifyingly commonplace in the trans community & no one is talking about it
Important
they/them
where did the idea come from that you need dysphoria to be trans?
is it a medical industrial complex definition that’s just been taken as fact by young trans folks?
transgender has always been an umbrella term. I’m really bewildered by this internal gatekeeping. it’s undeniably harmful and I don’t see any good reason for it.
Tips for making peace with your body.
One of the body positivity things that I see going around is the emphasis on loving your body, and sometimes that can be very hard, even impossible.
Almost all of us have some part of our bodies that we just don’t get along with, some part that hurts, some part that offends us, some part we dislike, some part we hate. No matter what the reason.First of all, how do I know what it feels like to be at odds with your own body, making it very hard to even like it, let alone love it?
I am disabled, now, but in my youth I could climb trees, I could ride my bike literally all day. I went on a bicycle from my home town of Akureyri down to Reykjavík, a distance of approximately 400 kilometers, or 250 miles.
There are days when I feel honestly betrayed because the walk to the bathroom from my bed is so difficult that I have to mentally prepare myself before I even stand up.
I am a trans man, dysphoria was there to tempt my patience long before my ability waned.So, I’ve had to look for ways to make a sort of peace with the old bag of bones, or if not peace, at least a temporary truce until peace can be found.
I’ve borrowed from my studies of psychology and so on,.. so there’s a research basis for the things I’ve learned to do.First up, You Do Not Have to Love Your Whole Body All The Time!
I’m not the first to say this nor the last but this is the truth.
Just like you don’t have to love everything about anything the whole time, the same applies to your body.
You could Love Pizza, but there’ll be days when you’re not in the mood for pizza.You’re allowed to dislike some parts some of the time, even all of the time.
But here’s the thing.You shouldn’t focus to long on what you dislike!
If we get trapped in the cycle of hashing and rehashing the things you dislike, over and over, then we’ll end up spending a ridiculous amount of time and energy on nothing but misery, and that’s a sorry waste of both!
So, what then? How do we find a way to allow both of these things to be true at the same time?
How can we both hate our cake and refuse to eat it?There are two things, above all else, that can make living with your body a little easier;
1. Find something, some one thing, however small, that you like.
There’s an Icelandic saying; Ekkert er svo með öllu illt að ekki boði nokkuð gott. (Nothing is so entirely evil that it doesn’t bode anything good.)
What that means is that there’s nothing in this world that is so utterly and completely bad, in every conceivable way, that there isn’t even a tiny speck of it that can’t be considered “good”. Even the worst atrocities of human history have in some way contributed something positive, even at an atrocious cost.Your body literally can not be so entirely and completely “bad” that there isn’t some part of it, however small, that is “good”.
Find it, acknowledge it, accept it, remind yourself of it, look for another one.Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and if you preoccupy yourself too much with seeing the parts you hate, it can get really hard to look for parts you like, so.. there’s another thing you can do whenever you can not find anything beautiful about yourself.
2. Acknowledge your body as a tool.
Hey, I’m disabled, I know, the damned thing might not work good, but hear me out.
Find something you enjoy, some experience or sensation that is accessible to you and enjoyable to you.
For example, I really, genuinely, enjoy the taste of a good cup of coffee.
This experience, tasting a good cup of coffee wouldn’t be possible without my body.Sure, if I had a different body it “might” be available, but aside from how that’s not an option and therefor not worth dwelling on, it might also not be available, because the configurations of my neurons in this body, and my taste-buds in this body are what give me the experience that I’m enjoying.
Try getting into the habit of quietly thanking your body whenever you experience something enjoyable, something that gives you pleasure, whether it be the sensation of running or the taste of a delicious treat. These things are possible because of the body that you have.
When you do something well, when you draw something, write something, cook something, dance, sing, play an instrument, or any other thing, remember to appreciate the tools you had to work with, however wonky, that made this possible.
Thank your body when it gives you good things, good feelings, good experiences.
_In time, these two things, can make even a banged up model with production flaws, like mine, something you can appreciate, even sometimes like, in a certain angle and a certain light.
And when storm clouds come rolling in, pain seeps into your bones, or you catch your reflection and recoil from it, or for any reason you find yourself falling into a downward spiral of profound dislike for your body, you have tools to stop the cycle, to remind yourself it’s not ALL bad… and you can go and indulge in something that tastes good, or entertains you, and you can remind yourself about your finest features, and you can negotiate a truce, even peace, again.
_
You don’t have to love your body, all the time, but you can be okay with it, even when it’s being less then ideal.
As a 30+ year old cripple I cosign this.
alder-knight 