The Weight of Breasts that Aren't There
April 9, 2021 10:07 AM Subscribe
"The demands of the trans community have advanced from medical transition, to depathologization, to the institutional recognition of the possibility of trans happiness. But the question of what dysphoria actually is—a market preference, a neuroanatomical difference, an ontological mismatch between soul and body, a structure of desire—still lacks a satisfying answer. "
This subtle essay about the links between transness, futurity, and late capitalism is long but worth savouring. It is, among many other things, a sharp but generous critique of Andrea Long Chu's pessimism about transition and desire, discussed previously on Metafilter here.
This subtle essay about the links between transness, futurity, and late capitalism is long but worth savouring. It is, among many other things, a sharp but generous critique of Andrea Long Chu's pessimism about transition and desire, discussed previously on Metafilter here.
[Smol request for cis people (like myself) to spend their time in this thread listening, rather than speaking. Many trans members of this site have quit because of how poorly similar threads have gone before, and I’d very much like for that to never happen again.]
posted by schmod at 10:27 AM on April 9, 2021 [82 favorites]
posted by schmod at 10:27 AM on April 9, 2021 [82 favorites]
Oh gosh. I haven't begun to dive into this yet (and might have to take it slowly, given recent personal grappling with increasingly intrusive O! When Will I Get Top Surgery! thoughts as summer approaches), but dysphoria is such a thorny subject inside and outside of the trans community that I don't know if it will ever have a satisfactory definition.
My personal experience has been more defined by times of gender euphoria (when I feel more closely aligned with my gender, like when I put on some boxer shorts and catch my reflection in the mirror and think "oh hey") than dysphoria, but there is by no means One Single Trans Journey, so everyone is different.
I will say that the medical institutions set up to treat us (in the UK at least), even the more progressive ones, still rely on a medical diagnosis of dysphoria in order to let us access gender affirming care. When I wanted to start hormones, I had to have a Zoom call with a psychiatrist, and before going into it I'd been told by other members of the community to elaborate on feelings of dysphoria in order to get the diagnosis. The psychiatrist I talked to was very lovely and didn't push me to lie, but I nevertheless felt pressured to perform Acceptable Transness for the establishment, which definitely made me feel some kind of way.
I'm not even going to touch on the push back from within the community itself against trans people (usually but not always young people) who are marginalised and shunned because they don't feel dysphoria (or don't feel it "correctly"). One of the most common questions I see on the FTM forums I frequent is "am I trans enough?" and that.. yeah, that's tough to keep seeing.
Anyway, thanks for the link! I'm going to add this to my pile of things to percolate over.
posted by fight or flight at 10:44 AM on April 9, 2021 [25 favorites]
My personal experience has been more defined by times of gender euphoria (when I feel more closely aligned with my gender, like when I put on some boxer shorts and catch my reflection in the mirror and think "oh hey") than dysphoria, but there is by no means One Single Trans Journey, so everyone is different.
I will say that the medical institutions set up to treat us (in the UK at least), even the more progressive ones, still rely on a medical diagnosis of dysphoria in order to let us access gender affirming care. When I wanted to start hormones, I had to have a Zoom call with a psychiatrist, and before going into it I'd been told by other members of the community to elaborate on feelings of dysphoria in order to get the diagnosis. The psychiatrist I talked to was very lovely and didn't push me to lie, but I nevertheless felt pressured to perform Acceptable Transness for the establishment, which definitely made me feel some kind of way.
I'm not even going to touch on the push back from within the community itself against trans people (usually but not always young people) who are marginalised and shunned because they don't feel dysphoria (or don't feel it "correctly"). One of the most common questions I see on the FTM forums I frequent is "am I trans enough?" and that.. yeah, that's tough to keep seeing.
Anyway, thanks for the link! I'm going to add this to my pile of things to percolate over.
posted by fight or flight at 10:44 AM on April 9, 2021 [25 favorites]
My personal experience has been more defined by times of gender euphoria
This also resonates with me. While I experienced some dysphoria that matched the essay's description of a weight on my chest from the breasts I didn't yet have, I generally had low levels of dysphoria otherwise, and high levels of euphoria as things went along. And years later, I STILL struggle with the terrible but common "am I trans enough?" self-doubt, never mind that I am much, much happier with my life now.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 10:53 AM on April 9, 2021 [16 favorites]
This also resonates with me. While I experienced some dysphoria that matched the essay's description of a weight on my chest from the breasts I didn't yet have, I generally had low levels of dysphoria otherwise, and high levels of euphoria as things went along. And years later, I STILL struggle with the terrible but common "am I trans enough?" self-doubt, never mind that I am much, much happier with my life now.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 10:53 AM on April 9, 2021 [16 favorites]
If we have to use medicalised terms to describe our transness, I prefer the idea of gender incongruence to gender dysphoria.
While gender dysphoria is clearly a useful term for many people, I think the way it's become an overarching framework through which trans-ness is understood and experienced has a lot of harmful effects. It often seems to me like something that's been done to trans people, not something that is ours. It originates with Harry Benjamin, but its current incarnation in DSM-V comes from a working group headed up by Zucker and involving Blanchard. Gender incongruence at least has the advantage of not centering misery as what it means to be trans.
posted by death valley compound at 11:29 AM on April 9, 2021 [23 favorites]
While gender dysphoria is clearly a useful term for many people, I think the way it's become an overarching framework through which trans-ness is understood and experienced has a lot of harmful effects. It often seems to me like something that's been done to trans people, not something that is ours. It originates with Harry Benjamin, but its current incarnation in DSM-V comes from a working group headed up by Zucker and involving Blanchard. Gender incongruence at least has the advantage of not centering misery as what it means to be trans.
posted by death valley compound at 11:29 AM on April 9, 2021 [23 favorites]
I haven't digested this piece yet, but I'd commend Jules Gil-Peterson's recent essay to anyone with an interest in this topic. Two paragraphs in particular seem relevant here
This is why gender dysphoria is not actually a trans term. It merely specifies the arena in which dysphoria is concentrated: I experience emotional distress like fear, guilt, or shame, not because I am trans, but because my gender is treated as abnormal, illegible, dangerous, or undesired by the social world in which I live. This might manifest phenomenologically in my flesh, for instance, when I think my shoulders too broad, or my breasts too small, but it is because I fear how I will be treated when others assign and surveil my gendered body. I fear the penalties of my culture for my disobeyant form.posted by a Rrose by any other name at 12:17 PM on April 9, 2021 [25 favorites]
There is, in other words, no idiopathic medical issue, which is not surprising to us because cisgender is a fictional story our culture tells itself. Dysphoria describes a social situation of transphobia where transphobia—as in, animus towards and danger manifested towards trans people for their very existence—is the result of a social world where cisgender is granted immense power as the “normal,” default category of human experience.
I think the pull quote I chose may have made it sound like dysphoria is all that this article is about. I apologize if it was misleading. Indeed, the author talks at great length about the origins of the term "dysphoria" and the impact that it has, and muses on multiple other ways to think about transness. For example, she writes:
I wonder why we don’t simply talk about “gender phoria” (etymologically, the way we “bear” gender—the bear here is the phor of metaphor, which bears meanings across a bridge between words, and the pher of Christopher, who bore Christ across a river according to medieval legend). Dysphoria and euphoria seem like two sides of the same coin, two aspects of the same situation. Another word for gender phoria might be jouissance.
posted by Amberlyza at 12:24 PM on April 9, 2021 [7 favorites]
I wonder why we don’t simply talk about “gender phoria” (etymologically, the way we “bear” gender—the bear here is the phor of metaphor, which bears meanings across a bridge between words, and the pher of Christopher, who bore Christ across a river according to medieval legend). Dysphoria and euphoria seem like two sides of the same coin, two aspects of the same situation. Another word for gender phoria might be jouissance.
posted by Amberlyza at 12:24 PM on April 9, 2021 [7 favorites]
I have many times considered an Ask about this, but that also doesn't seem like the right place for it.
What you need is a sensitivity reader (here's a primer about the process). You can hire consultants for this if you want to pay it forward. I would offer but I'm not a trans woman, so I don't think I can give you the specific advice you need.
posted by fight or flight at 12:25 PM on April 9, 2021
What you need is a sensitivity reader (here's a primer about the process). You can hire consultants for this if you want to pay it forward. I would offer but I'm not a trans woman, so I don't think I can give you the specific advice you need.
posted by fight or flight at 12:25 PM on April 9, 2021
My experience with dysphoria doesn’t align with what I see in this article, but I have a lot of cognitive stuff independent of trans that probably contributes to that. In essence, the dysphoria was like seeing an unexplained rash or scab, any time I passed a reflective surface, that made my brain react automatically with “oh no a lesion” energy, only directed at my body. Testing prosthetic breasts before I started hormones made clear that I took joy from that alteration to my body, and I’m very grateful to the est/pro HRT for replacing the prosthetics, but that didn’t cure the dysphoria. Facial surgery and Adam’s apple reduction did, though — two days after I got home from the hospital, face horrendously swollen and bruised as it was, I realized that the dysphoria had disappeared entirely. Whatever markers my brain was reacting to as “disease” or “damage” were gone, replaced with “injured” and “healing”. The swelling has essentially gone by now and I still blink at my reflection sometimes because I’m not used to seeing myself without the anxiety or stress
of dysphoria. I think it must have been a lot like hypochondria in how draining it is? I’ll still have to complete some form of bottom surgery to address that dissonance, but from an everyday standpoint the face/neck outcome has replaced the constant drain of dysphoria with occasional, bearable, instants of it.
I’m still glad for this article and I’ll have to read it a few more times and share it with family, but I thought the difference in experience worth noting; into a void of descriptions, here is a semblance of one.
posted by Callisto Prime at 12:29 PM on April 9, 2021 [23 favorites]
of dysphoria. I think it must have been a lot like hypochondria in how draining it is? I’ll still have to complete some form of bottom surgery to address that dissonance, but from an everyday standpoint the face/neck outcome has replaced the constant drain of dysphoria with occasional, bearable, instants of it.
I’m still glad for this article and I’ll have to read it a few more times and share it with family, but I thought the difference in experience worth noting; into a void of descriptions, here is a semblance of one.
posted by Callisto Prime at 12:29 PM on April 9, 2021 [23 favorites]
(schmod, I’m one of them.)
posted by Callisto Prime at 12:30 PM on April 9, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by Callisto Prime at 12:30 PM on April 9, 2021 [3 favorites]
My experience was one of not recognizing the dysphoria until I had a taste of phoria (thank you, Daniel Lavery, for that Shondaland piece about binders). Coming to the realization that I was trying to fit into a framework that I didn't fit into was very freeing.
At this point, I parse it as having gender dysphoria but not body dysphoria. I like my breasts fine; I don't like what other people assume about me because of them, so wearing a binder feels better when I leave the house.
When among friends, I find myself increasingly describing my gender as "wow, people care about this a lot more than I do" and "I guess, if you insist?"
posted by Lexica at 3:55 PM on April 9, 2021 [25 favorites]
At this point, I parse it as having gender dysphoria but not body dysphoria. I like my breasts fine; I don't like what other people assume about me because of them, so wearing a binder feels better when I leave the house.
When among friends, I find myself increasingly describing my gender as "wow, people care about this a lot more than I do" and "I guess, if you insist?"
posted by Lexica at 3:55 PM on April 9, 2021 [25 favorites]
I just want to say that I'm grateful to the author for introducing me to the word "futurelessness".
posted by mikelieman at 6:39 PM on April 9, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by mikelieman at 6:39 PM on April 9, 2021 [6 favorites]
Going back to the essay, there's another part that really hit me hard:
Longing, on the other hand, is like having a live wire drawn through your flesh
Recently, when I started playing with VR, I found a virtual environment where you're on a Star Trek Federation shuttle, in warp flight. Something about it was so profound to me. Because you can't feel anything in that environment, I lay down on my back on the floor instead, which was solid in the real world and in the virtual, and looked up at the stars streaming past.
And cried, as I felt the exact same feeling I experienced with gender dysphoria prior to transition - the same intense, wrenching, physical sensation.
And I realized that the feeling I had before transition, and the feeling I had on that simulated floor of a spaceship, was the same: the intense sensation of longing for something I couldn't have.
Or I thought I couldn't have. Good news: I got to be a girl. I'll keep dreaming about the stars too.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 8:04 PM on April 9, 2021 [23 favorites]
Longing, on the other hand, is like having a live wire drawn through your flesh
Recently, when I started playing with VR, I found a virtual environment where you're on a Star Trek Federation shuttle, in warp flight. Something about it was so profound to me. Because you can't feel anything in that environment, I lay down on my back on the floor instead, which was solid in the real world and in the virtual, and looked up at the stars streaming past.
And cried, as I felt the exact same feeling I experienced with gender dysphoria prior to transition - the same intense, wrenching, physical sensation.
And I realized that the feeling I had before transition, and the feeling I had on that simulated floor of a spaceship, was the same: the intense sensation of longing for something I couldn't have.
Or I thought I couldn't have. Good news: I got to be a girl. I'll keep dreaming about the stars too.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 8:04 PM on April 9, 2021 [23 favorites]
I'll add on the talk of dysphoria/euphoria by noting that I never really experienced much in the way of body-focused gender dysphoria before realizing I was trans. The closest thing that I had in that regard were feelings about my gynecomastia. Essentially, I wasn't happy about having "man boobs," even small ones, but I wasn't bothered enough by them to get them removed. This also left me hemming and hawing for ages about whether I should even bother with HRT, because if I was so meh about my "man boobs" what on Earth made me think I wanted actual tits? I'm glad I decided to pull the trigger, and now I have a fairly impressive rack after close to a year on HRT. It seems I totally misread my feelings about my chest. I wouldn't give my titties up for anything short of a breast cancer diagnosis.
What I did have a lot of was social dysphoria. There is just so much about manliness, masculinity, how the world sees men, and how men are expected to be in the world that I could not do or handle. The more I tried, the worse it felt, and I tried pretty much every way to Be A Man that I could before realizing I had other options. That's the most important part of transitioning for me: not that I wanted a different body, but that I wanted to be a different person and have the world see me as such. It's why I don't really identify as a woman for anything beyond practical day-to-day life purposes. I don't know if I'm a woman, but I am absolutely 110% Not A Man, and as long as the world sees me as something that isn't a Man, I'm satisfied, and the demon dogs of dysphoria are kept at bay.
posted by SansPoint at 8:33 PM on April 9, 2021 [15 favorites]
What I did have a lot of was social dysphoria. There is just so much about manliness, masculinity, how the world sees men, and how men are expected to be in the world that I could not do or handle. The more I tried, the worse it felt, and I tried pretty much every way to Be A Man that I could before realizing I had other options. That's the most important part of transitioning for me: not that I wanted a different body, but that I wanted to be a different person and have the world see me as such. It's why I don't really identify as a woman for anything beyond practical day-to-day life purposes. I don't know if I'm a woman, but I am absolutely 110% Not A Man, and as long as the world sees me as something that isn't a Man, I'm satisfied, and the demon dogs of dysphoria are kept at bay.
posted by SansPoint at 8:33 PM on April 9, 2021 [15 favorites]
"Coming to the realization that I was trying to fit into a framework that I didn't fit into was very freeing."
I feel so similar to this. I mean the moment when I permitted myself to realize I was non-binary was when I realized that I'd be fine with any parts, that I'd still be me, and that I'd be fine being seen as myself with different parts, but also happy with people not knowing what parts I had.
People said to me that I wasn't like people of my assigned gender, but only in the sense of being an unhappy aberration who suffered because I didn't fit the framework well. I didn't fit woman or man as a framework, both boxes were not right but also not entirely wrong. Yet that wasn't the time and place for saying that maybe that framework wasn't right for me. There are so many more ways of being a trans person than I knew about, so many different people being themselves. I was so afraid that I wasn't trans enough to be trans, that I didn't have the right to, and only now I see that transness is not inherently rooted in suffering.
Nobody told me I might be trans or enby until I told other people I was. Nobody encouraged me to explore gender. Nobody told me how you could know you were trans if you were mostly okay with what was between your legs and on your chest. Nobody told me that cis people generally don't imagine, fantasize, or have vivid dreams of being able to switch or transform their gender/bodies. Nobody said that most cis people didn't comfortably take on a gender role that wasn't theirs online. I assumed I was cis because nobody ever asked me what I wanted.
So if someone needs to hear it, if you need a transgender person's permission to be trans or a nonbinary person's to be nonbinary, you have mine. I don't have all of my own answers, I certainly don't have your answers, but I know that it's okay to ask these questions and that maybe everyone should ask them. Even if you are certain you are cis, it's okay to explore gender.
Oh, I probably wouldn't have commented here if this thread wasn't centering transgender experiences. I appreciate that that is happening.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 2:42 AM on April 10, 2021 [29 favorites]
I feel so similar to this. I mean the moment when I permitted myself to realize I was non-binary was when I realized that I'd be fine with any parts, that I'd still be me, and that I'd be fine being seen as myself with different parts, but also happy with people not knowing what parts I had.
People said to me that I wasn't like people of my assigned gender, but only in the sense of being an unhappy aberration who suffered because I didn't fit the framework well. I didn't fit woman or man as a framework, both boxes were not right but also not entirely wrong. Yet that wasn't the time and place for saying that maybe that framework wasn't right for me. There are so many more ways of being a trans person than I knew about, so many different people being themselves. I was so afraid that I wasn't trans enough to be trans, that I didn't have the right to, and only now I see that transness is not inherently rooted in suffering.
Nobody told me I might be trans or enby until I told other people I was. Nobody encouraged me to explore gender. Nobody told me how you could know you were trans if you were mostly okay with what was between your legs and on your chest. Nobody told me that cis people generally don't imagine, fantasize, or have vivid dreams of being able to switch or transform their gender/bodies. Nobody said that most cis people didn't comfortably take on a gender role that wasn't theirs online. I assumed I was cis because nobody ever asked me what I wanted.
So if someone needs to hear it, if you need a transgender person's permission to be trans or a nonbinary person's to be nonbinary, you have mine. I don't have all of my own answers, I certainly don't have your answers, but I know that it's okay to ask these questions and that maybe everyone should ask them. Even if you are certain you are cis, it's okay to explore gender.
Oh, I probably wouldn't have commented here if this thread wasn't centering transgender experiences. I appreciate that that is happening.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 2:42 AM on April 10, 2021 [29 favorites]
I like my breasts fine; I don't like what other people assume about me because of them, so wearing a binder feels better when I leave the house.
This is close to how I feel about my own body (though I wouldn't say I like my breasts fine at this stage) - it's not that I was born in the wrong body or any of the other clumsy analogies that have been used in the past to describe the experience of not vibing with one's assigned gender, it's that other people keep making incorrect assumptions about me based on the body I happen to have.
Essentially, I wasn't happy about having "man boobs," even small ones
I spent years agonising over the amount of facial hair nature gave me while pretending to be a cis woman, considering laser/electrolysis etc. As soon as I realised I was non-binary-towards-transmasc I stopped hating my facial hair, because it had never been about the hair itself, it had only ever been about the fact that I was not supposed to have facial hair if I was performing cis womanhood correctly, when I'd already had a lifetime's worth of feedback about how bad a job I was doing at that. Life has been so much easier since I actively stopped trying to pretend.
I agree that dysphoria isn't a particularly useful concept for a lot of trans people, and it feels a bit like some of the bullshit gatekeeping around eating disorders where you have to meet certain arbitrary severity metrics before you're allowed to be diagnosed/treated. Something that helped my own experience click was this Instagram post, which does unfortunately frame a useful concept in terms of dysphoria - it turns out I feel fine about my mind in terms of gender, mostly fine about my body (and in the ways that I don't, most of them aren't about gender), and that most of the horror of performing my assigned gender was the social stuff, the fact that other people were reading and parsing me as female and making assumptions about me based on their own understanding of what that category is supposed to mean and the fact that that whole cycle triggered a bunch of shame for me pretty much every time I blundered into it. Which is not to say that there's anything shameful about being a woman or perceived as a woman, more that I suspect that people who actually are women don't find it actively shameful when their gender is read accurately by others.
Something I particularly hate about how strongly "gender dysphoria" has caught on as a term and as a concept is the fact that people now use "dysphoria" as a shorthand meaning "specifically gender dysphoria". I've experienced general-purpose dysphoria (the kind people talk about much less) a huge amount over the course of my life thanks to often-shitty mental health, and it's jarring to hear people use that word in the wild and only mean the subset of that experience that's about not fitting into mainstream concepts of gender, and not the broader experience that's more about feeling as though the entire world is a gross swamp, where you-the-whole-person and not merely you-the-gender-nonconforming-person know acutely that you don't belong and that the swamp is actively drowning you no matter how hard you fight to get your head above water.
posted by terretu at 2:53 AM on April 10, 2021 [16 favorites]
This is close to how I feel about my own body (though I wouldn't say I like my breasts fine at this stage) - it's not that I was born in the wrong body or any of the other clumsy analogies that have been used in the past to describe the experience of not vibing with one's assigned gender, it's that other people keep making incorrect assumptions about me based on the body I happen to have.
Essentially, I wasn't happy about having "man boobs," even small ones
I spent years agonising over the amount of facial hair nature gave me while pretending to be a cis woman, considering laser/electrolysis etc. As soon as I realised I was non-binary-towards-transmasc I stopped hating my facial hair, because it had never been about the hair itself, it had only ever been about the fact that I was not supposed to have facial hair if I was performing cis womanhood correctly, when I'd already had a lifetime's worth of feedback about how bad a job I was doing at that. Life has been so much easier since I actively stopped trying to pretend.
I agree that dysphoria isn't a particularly useful concept for a lot of trans people, and it feels a bit like some of the bullshit gatekeeping around eating disorders where you have to meet certain arbitrary severity metrics before you're allowed to be diagnosed/treated. Something that helped my own experience click was this Instagram post, which does unfortunately frame a useful concept in terms of dysphoria - it turns out I feel fine about my mind in terms of gender, mostly fine about my body (and in the ways that I don't, most of them aren't about gender), and that most of the horror of performing my assigned gender was the social stuff, the fact that other people were reading and parsing me as female and making assumptions about me based on their own understanding of what that category is supposed to mean and the fact that that whole cycle triggered a bunch of shame for me pretty much every time I blundered into it. Which is not to say that there's anything shameful about being a woman or perceived as a woman, more that I suspect that people who actually are women don't find it actively shameful when their gender is read accurately by others.
Something I particularly hate about how strongly "gender dysphoria" has caught on as a term and as a concept is the fact that people now use "dysphoria" as a shorthand meaning "specifically gender dysphoria". I've experienced general-purpose dysphoria (the kind people talk about much less) a huge amount over the course of my life thanks to often-shitty mental health, and it's jarring to hear people use that word in the wild and only mean the subset of that experience that's about not fitting into mainstream concepts of gender, and not the broader experience that's more about feeling as though the entire world is a gross swamp, where you-the-whole-person and not merely you-the-gender-nonconforming-person know acutely that you don't belong and that the swamp is actively drowning you no matter how hard you fight to get your head above water.
posted by terretu at 2:53 AM on April 10, 2021 [16 favorites]
I've come to find gender euphoria a much more helpful guide than dysphoria. Mostly for personal reasons. For one, dysphoria, the concept, is used as a cudgel by truscum to gatekeep who is a *real* trans person and who is ... well, I guess some kind of impostor, poseur, or whatever else truscum are complaining about.
But also, dysphoria as The Sign of Transness bothers me in that it centres our pain, and our otherness. While there is legislation being shoved through state legislatures across the US that is criminalising trans kids, I think there's a danger in emphasising this narrative that "being trans is suffering"—a narrative that misses the part where the misery comes from living in a transphobic society—and seeks to "cure" this suffering by forcing trans kids and adults alike to accept the body and social expectations foisted upon them by their AGAB, regardless of how they feel.
Gender euphoria, by contrast, emphasises trans joy. I think it can also be a far more helpful guidepost for where a person's gender identity may be.
Like, take the Ice Cream Metaphor for example. Let's say all your life the only ice cream you were fed was vanilla. Maybe you didn't hate it. Maybe you could tolerate it. Maybe, sometimes, you could even make yourself like it. But then one day, you decide to try strawberry, and you're like whoooah nelly, where has this flavour been all my life? And you realise then you absolutely love strawberry ice cream.
Loving strawberry doesn't mean you suddenly hate vanilla; but you probably won't go back to vanilla once strawberry is available. And simply hating vanilla on its own is not going to tell you much about what flavour you do like apart from "not vanilla". Nor does loving strawberry ice cream rule out the possibility that you might discover another flavour that you love even more.
While personally, I absolutely did (and do) experience types of dysphoria, it's euphoria that has been far more helpful to me in understanding myself better. And in a cisnormative society that relishes in, fetishises, and focuses on our pain, feeling joyful about my transness feels like an act of rebellion.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 5:19 AM on April 10, 2021 [22 favorites]
But also, dysphoria as The Sign of Transness bothers me in that it centres our pain, and our otherness. While there is legislation being shoved through state legislatures across the US that is criminalising trans kids, I think there's a danger in emphasising this narrative that "being trans is suffering"—a narrative that misses the part where the misery comes from living in a transphobic society—and seeks to "cure" this suffering by forcing trans kids and adults alike to accept the body and social expectations foisted upon them by their AGAB, regardless of how they feel.
Gender euphoria, by contrast, emphasises trans joy. I think it can also be a far more helpful guidepost for where a person's gender identity may be.
Like, take the Ice Cream Metaphor for example. Let's say all your life the only ice cream you were fed was vanilla. Maybe you didn't hate it. Maybe you could tolerate it. Maybe, sometimes, you could even make yourself like it. But then one day, you decide to try strawberry, and you're like whoooah nelly, where has this flavour been all my life? And you realise then you absolutely love strawberry ice cream.
Loving strawberry doesn't mean you suddenly hate vanilla; but you probably won't go back to vanilla once strawberry is available. And simply hating vanilla on its own is not going to tell you much about what flavour you do like apart from "not vanilla". Nor does loving strawberry ice cream rule out the possibility that you might discover another flavour that you love even more.
While personally, I absolutely did (and do) experience types of dysphoria, it's euphoria that has been far more helpful to me in understanding myself better. And in a cisnormative society that relishes in, fetishises, and focuses on our pain, feeling joyful about my transness feels like an act of rebellion.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 5:19 AM on April 10, 2021 [22 favorites]
I can't speak to trans experience(s), as a cis person, but I do think the mainstream hyper-focus on dysphoria is part of why cis people can't wrap their heads around what it means to be trans. Because the truth is, everyone without exception experiences unhappiness to various degrees around having to live within their assigned gender and bodies. No one's existence, not even the most cis of the cis, perfectly maps to any given gender. Most people have at least some difficult, negative experiences of having their gender performance policed or feeling uncomfortable having to perform gender in a way that feels dissonant and inauthentic. And so I think cis people extrapolate from their own experiences and think, "okay, so what makes your discomfort special???" and then assume that the discomfort has to be absolutely excruciating in order to prove that a person is "actually" trans.
Like, there's a lot about being female I like and a lot - socially, psychologically, physically - that makes me unhappy, but the reason I know I'm a cis woman is because the prospect of being male or nonbinary does nothing for me. I wouldn't hate being a man, it just doesn't feel more appealing, the prospect doesn't bring me feelings of relief or joy or longing...it's just 'meh, I'd rather not.' What I have noticed is different between myself and trans friends is exactly those feelings of joy that everyone above have been sharing in this thread.
posted by adso at 12:14 PM on April 12, 2021 [4 favorites]
Like, there's a lot about being female I like and a lot - socially, psychologically, physically - that makes me unhappy, but the reason I know I'm a cis woman is because the prospect of being male or nonbinary does nothing for me. I wouldn't hate being a man, it just doesn't feel more appealing, the prospect doesn't bring me feelings of relief or joy or longing...it's just 'meh, I'd rather not.' What I have noticed is different between myself and trans friends is exactly those feelings of joy that everyone above have been sharing in this thread.
posted by adso at 12:14 PM on April 12, 2021 [4 favorites]
Well ftr, I did not intend my comment to mean that dysphoria isn't a big deal, nor comparable to the cis experience of gender, nor even that it isn't a sign someone is trans. Cis people talking about their own problems with their AGAB is certainly enlightening, and there would probably be a lot to learn from a discussion between cis and trans people on gender performance.
The core of my issue here is that dysphoria is the negation; the what-is-not of the trans experience of gender. It can underline that there is something missing, but not necessarily tell you what that missing thing is.
I can't speak for other trans people, but for my part, 99.9% of the pain I experience from being trans would go away if I didn't live in a transphobic world. So I'm trying my hardest to focus on and amplify my joy.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 2:26 AM on April 13, 2021 [3 favorites]
The core of my issue here is that dysphoria is the negation; the what-is-not of the trans experience of gender. It can underline that there is something missing, but not necessarily tell you what that missing thing is.
I can't speak for other trans people, but for my part, 99.9% of the pain I experience from being trans would go away if I didn't live in a transphobic world. So I'm trying my hardest to focus on and amplify my joy.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 2:26 AM on April 13, 2021 [3 favorites]
Well ftr, I did not intend my comment to mean that dysphoria isn't a big deal, nor comparable to the cis experience of gender, nor even that it isn't a sign someone is trans.
Oh, I mean I think we're in agreement - my point was exactly that cis people project their own personal difficulties with gender onto their understanding of what dysphoria and being trans is. Like, cis people then extrapolating that dysphoria must just be the gender discomfort that cis people feel but...amplified. And that's part of where mis-recognition and gatekeeping emerges.
posted by adso at 11:20 AM on April 13, 2021 [2 favorites]
Oh, I mean I think we're in agreement - my point was exactly that cis people project their own personal difficulties with gender onto their understanding of what dysphoria and being trans is. Like, cis people then extrapolating that dysphoria must just be the gender discomfort that cis people feel but...amplified. And that's part of where mis-recognition and gatekeeping emerges.
posted by adso at 11:20 AM on April 13, 2021 [2 favorites]
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Just wanted to chime in here and say that this matches my experience prior to transition quite accurately.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 10:24 AM on April 9, 2021 [10 favorites]