#transwithoutdysphoria

Today I fell in the “can you be transgender without dysphoria” debate rabbit hole and I spent a substantial amount of time listening to people (both trans and cis to my surprise) commenting on how you can or cannot be transgender without dysphoria. I am not here to judge those opinions and I am not interested in doing so either, or add mine to the party, because it is irrelevant (as it doesn’t change anything in the grant scheme of things).  However, I would like to point at something that I noticed during this small investigation. When I started looking into the subject, at first I came across the opinions of the people who I already follow (mostly transmasculine people, as I am a transguy myself). Their opinions were not consistent, there were opinions of both sides of the debate and some in-between. This is not what I found interesting though.  What was really interesting to me was that each and everyone of the videos that I watched and the opinion pieces that I’ve read (as I did search for more content through the day) were actually saying, in one way or another that they do not identify with the lack of dysphoria situation, as they themselves experienced dysphoria as part of being trans; and the only difference between them, was that the ones who believed that you can be trans without dysphoria, clarified that they respect that “some” individuals may identify with that, and that “some” people may experience being transgender without dysphoria. 

After watching a bunch of videos like that, repeating the same “some people might” and “we don’t want to erase people who might”, I tried to actually find those people. Find people on the internet who actually say they are transgender and haven’t experienced any type of dysphoria, ever. Needless to say, I couldn’t. I don’t know if it’s because these people feel attacked or at risk so they are not visible, or if these potential people don’t exist, but it’s really interesting to me how we are basing a relatively big community debate, around opinions that have nothing to do with the people that might actually experience this, if there are any.