Itâs because âdysphoriaâ is usually frames as feeling a disconnect, a strong dislike, or distress related to oneâs body or social perception. This sounds reasonable enough, until you realise that people consider their own experiences to be the default of something until they learn better â that is, there are plenty of trans people who donât report experiencing this, because they feel that their relationship to their body and social perception must be normal. What they do find is that once they eventually foray into living as their own gender, it feels AMAZING, and their previous feelings werenât standard at all.
These people arenât a tiny minority. The vast majority of trans people Iâve ever met have this story; assuming that their relationship to their body is normal for years, experimenting, and spending yet more years unsure, thinking they must not be âtrans enoughâ that they havenât suffered enough, because they never cut themselves, because it took them so long to even realise that something was wrong. Some of those people turn around and say âactually, I was hella depressed and probably wouldâve committed suicide laterâ. Some turn around and say âactually my old life wasnât too bad, this one is just way betterâ. Some decide not to transition for reasons of their own safety or to preserve a ralationship with their family, and then beat themselves up for decades about it, because if they donât want to transition then it must mean theyâre not âtrans enoughâ, right?
The first problem with âyou must experience dysphoria to be transâ is that nobody can agree on what âcountsâ as dysphoria, and many people canât tell theyâre experiencing it until after they transition.Therefore, if we cut people out of the community fro not being dysphoric, we shut the door on huge proportions of our own community who need our support and protection, before they have a chance to find themselves. There is no single typical trans experience, and if youâre going to use a definition of âexperiencing dysphoriaâ wide enough to encompass every trans person at every stage of their self-awareness, the term becomes too confusing and meaningless to be worth using at all. (I have met SO MANY transmen who spent years thinking they were women dealing with internalised sexism; so many trans women who thought they were men put off by confrontational masculinity culture. None of them would have characterised their feelings as actual dysphoria until after they started to transition and noticed the difference.)
The second problem with âyou must experience dysphoria to be transâ is that it frames the entire trans experience as one of pain and disconnect. Instead of âif you know youâre X gender, and you feel so much happier as X gender, but you were raised as Y gender, you can switchâ, it becomes âif you donât hate Y gender enough, youâre stuckâ. Only people in enough pain can be trans. If youâre a happy person who loves life, looking at your body in the mirror needs to be the one black mark on your day, because otherwise youâre not trans â happy people canât be trans (unless theyâve completely transitioned, of course, and even then their experiences must be shaped by hating what they used to be). This is such a shallow and depressing read on our community; weâre so much more than that.Â
Dyshoria, as a category, is a fairly meaningless term. You can talk about specific instances or symptoms of it; some people with gender dysphoria are uncomfortable with the way their body is gendered and want to change it, some people have bad gender dysphoria and it creates depression, things like that. But to use it as a broad term to encompass the experience of being trans renders it very confusing and harmful to the community, because its many vague meanings not only encourage people to view being trans as an entirely negative experience, but confuse and intimidate new members of our community who are still trying to figure themselves out. If they donât consider what theyâre feeling to be dysphoria, and you tell them that to be trans they have to experience dysphoria, youâre telling them theyâre definitely not trans and shouldnât explore their gender with you. Which is actively damaging to the community and to baby trans peeps. Thatâs why I have no truck wih the claim that trans people need to experience dysphoria â itâs confusing and meaningless at best, harmful at worst. If a gender you werenât designated with fits better, youâre trans. Everything else is semantics.
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