i think one of the biggest and most evil lies told to women with gender dysphoria is that it's inescapable, permanent, impossible to understand or explain, and it will kill you unless you somehow achieve the impossible: becoming the opposite sex. that is such a cruel thing to tell someone.
gender dysphoria is real. the incongruence one feels between their self image or desired ideal self versus their sex and artificially enforced gender role based on one's sex is real and distressing. even disabling.
but it's not magic. it can be understood. you are unique; there are many reasons why someone would come to feel alienated from their body or social perception in this way.
what has helped me the most is to just keep asking why. there's always a root cause. in my case my dysphoria is deeply rooted in a desire to retroactively untraumatize myself- a feeling that, if i were a man, none of that would have happened to me. and if i became a man, maybe i could pretend none of it ever did happen. this isn't an actionable or rational desire. but it's honest. it's how i feel. and even just knowing the reason why i feel the way i do, makes it less scary and overwhelming. it is no longer this vague, nebulous, terrifying spectre of Dysphoria. it is a feeling grounded in my experiences and my reaction to those experiences.
it shouldn't be surprising to say this, but it's hard to work through a feeling if you're completely terrified of the feeling in and of itself, to the point of not even being able to examine why you're feeling it.
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