Electric Intensity

1950′s: Elvis Presley 1960′s: The Beatles 1970′s: Stevie Wonder 1980′s: Michael Jackson 1990′s: Garth Brooks 2010′s: OUR GIRL TAYLOR SWIFT

and my kitty pictured there, my dearest Niko boy, he passed away suddenly one night several months ago from an unknown heart condition… one night he just finished up his dinner, took a few steps toward the door, fell over and actively started dying. It happened so fast and was so confusing… I never left his side as he panted, gasping for air he couldn’t get….his tongue hanging out of his mouth like a fat piece of rubber, huge and turning blue … letting out these screams of fear . .all while i pet his cheek and

by the time we had called the 24 hour emergency vet and gotten him into the carrier and on our way to the vet hospital, it was too late. In the time it took us to put on shoes and get there, a fifteen minute drive, he passed.

He wasn’t very old, only 8 and never had any health problems before. He was the most talkative, cuddly, fluffy little guy ever and I miss him terribly. I can’t ever explain to you what it’s like to see your fur baby pass in front of you like that . . at home… so suddenly… I could tell he was in just as much shock and confusion as we were. I only wish I could have helped him more.

My heart aches for our Niko boy.

but now you know that he existed, and that he brought peace, loud screaming that was more like a conversation, and happiness to his family while we had him. He was born indoors and somehow got out to a local convenience store where he rubbed up on everyone until my then room mate picked him up and took him home. His original owners, where he was born, said he wouldn’t stay inside and we could keep him. And its true, he loved to explore and adventure when we let him. There was no confining him, he liked to have the whole living room to himself sometimes.

Since I haven’t seen any posts describing what gender dysphoria actually is, I made this as an introduction to it, and how to help cope with it! PLEASE spread this, even if you aren’t gender dysphoric or transgender. This is very important information to educate people on!

If this information struck a chord with you and you want someone to talk to or have further questions, feel free to send a message to my inbox! There are also many advice/support blogs which can help you out.

Some further resources:

“That was dysphoria?” 8 signs and symptoms of indirect gender dysphoria

transgenderteensurvivalguide’s Trans + Nonbinary Flowchart

another list of some identities

a few alternative pronouns

a few masterposts with lots of resources! X X X X

two masterposts specifically for trans girls and women X X

masterpost for trans people of color and another one

Transgender Housing Network

The Leelah Project and Transgender Clothes Exchange on tumblr

my trans resources tag + my friend’s

First, it’s often confused with negative body-image, which it is not.  Dysphoria is not body hatred.  It’s a sense of disconnect, of wrongness, and the best analogies I’ve seen compare it to phantom limb syndrome.  Your body has a mental map that’s telling you what you should look like, and the more your body diverges from that map the more uncomfortable things get.  The mental map model doesn’t have much evidence, mostly just anecdotal, but it’s something that resonates with a lot of trans people.  Myself included.  It was really weird to feel a sense of rightness when I started to transition after 30+ years of feeling a sense of wrongness.

Second, we often talk about dysphoria as though it’s a trait that one can possess or not possess, in symptomatic terms.  While it’s possible that might be accurate, I’m actually bending towards the idea that dysphoria isn’t really a symptom at all, rather that it’s a definition.  You can easily summarize trans identity by saying that a trans person is someone who does not identify with their assigned gender.  In this model, dysphoria just becomes another way to say the same thing; namely:

A trans person is someone who either feels uncomfortable in their assigned gender, more comfortable in their identified gender, or some combination of the two.

We can look to society for inferential evidence to support this defintion.  Society is oppressive to gender non-conforming people, so anyone that transitions has to do so facing significant opposing pressure.  If the pressure to transition wasn’t at least high enough to clear that bar, you wouldn’t transition.  So anyone who does transition feels enough of what we call dysphoria to buck society.  And anyone who doesn’t transition would have a reason for identify as trans in spite of that.  Since what’s left over are trans people who are uncomfortable but can’t transition and cis people who aren’t uncomfortable, we can infer that dysphoria is a fundamental part of being a trans person.

In short, dysphoria is just another perspective on how we don’t identify by our assigned genders.

It’s also true that some trans and nonbinary people don’t feel badly presenting themselves as their assigned gender, but do not identify as that gender privately, in their own minds. Especially in history, there was a lot of blurring of that line, so it’s hard to say what we can define as dysphoria and what we can’t.