My experience with gender dysphoria is kinda like If You Give A Mouse A Cookie.
It’s not that I always have this constant drive to be female, or that it’s just a thing that randomly comes and goes. It’s more like a constant push in the direction of presenting more femininely.
So if I’m clean shaven, I’m gonna want to put together a nice outfit to go with how nice and smooth my face and legs look (and it might as well be a feminine outfit - that’s what nice looks like, yeah?). If you give me a nice outfit, I’ll want to do my nails and put on some makeup. If I’m in nail polish and makeup, I look pretty nice, and almost like a girl - if only my Adam’s apple was gone and I had some breasts, that’d really complete the look. At that point, I also start getting dysphoric about my shoulders. And if I’m going that far, I should really get facial feminization surgery, otherwise my face isn’t gonna fit with the rest of me. (I understand cute outfits and makeup aren’t every girl’s cup of tea, but this is just about my experience)
It isn’t that I always want to have breasts and rearrange my facial features. When I’m presenting 100% male, those things aren’t even on my mind, and honestly I don’t even want them. After all, if I have facial hair to worry about still, breasts aren’t gonna make me look like a girl; they’ll just make my gender presentation look kinda mixed. So gender dysphoria is kind of a sliding scale.
I say all this because I’ve never seen anyone else say anything like it, but I know I’m not the only trans person whose dysphoria gets worse when I get closer to my ideal presentation, and I wish I’d known about that when I was still trying to figure things out. I thought the reason I didn’t feel very dysphoric was because I wasn’t transgender - it turned out that I just hadn’t been allowed to present femininely enough to really feel how strong the dysphoria got as I moved along the sliding scale.
So, I hope this helps someone. Thanks for coming to my essay.
reblog to help a trans follower understand themselves
I’ve never been able to put this into words. Thank you!
