I've seen some discussions pop up about gender dysphoria and how it's treated and pathologized, and in my opinion, gender dysphoria is a real feeling in that many trans people are dysphoric, but that medical professionals (notably cis ones) only hear what they want to hear. When it comes to gender dysphoria, I don't think it is inherent to being trans, but there is correlation between being trans and having gender dysphoria. I also think that dysphoria is exasperated when gender roles are so tied to sex and personhood - in my opinion, I think a lot of people's dysphoria may be eased in environments where perceived gender deviance is not seen as horrific or undesirable.

Basically:

1. Gender dysphoria is real and certain aspects of one's culture or environment can make those feelings more persistent. Gender dysphoria can look different between people, and that doesn't mean that one person's dysphoria is worse than another person's, or that one person's dysphoria is "right" while somebody else's is "wrong".

2. Gender dysphoria is tied to transness in a way that I think only pathologizes transness, and gender dysphoria shouldn't need to be proven in order to transition (socially, medically, any way)

3. Gender dysphoria can be a dynamic issue for anybody who has it, and a person's needs may change as their dysphoria changes or becomes lesser

4. Gender dysphoria is something a ton of people deal with - trans or no. Associating dysphoria with only trans people doesn't help the dysphoric people who aren't trans. Again, associating dysphoria only with trans people pathologizes transness itself because people will conflate the two.

5. For trans people with gender dysphoria, transition is a viable (and often necessary) form of treatment. It is not "enabling", it is helping trans people meet their needs. Transition is an option that is often successful, hence why forms of conversion therapy do not work. Transness is simply a natural variation of human identity.

I've been diagnosed with gender dysphoria/GID many times by many professionals, and I find that more often than not, these professionals are not equipped to deal with cases of gender dysphoria - especially when the person is also trans. This can be harmful because you essentially are meant to deal with those feelings alone.

I wanted to recommend a very good website, especially to my trans, dysphoric or dissociative followers.

Gender Analysis is a very well researched, well-sourced website about the trans experience. I take whatever opportunities I can to write polite, good-faith, educational replies to people on Reddit who don't "get" trans things, and I always rely heavily on GA because whatever the topic, there will be an article filled with the original scientific papers rebutting transphobic viewpoints. It can also be useful for supporting conversations with parents/friends, because it has the primary research right there. For example, today I learnt that all the concept of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria ("my kid got a tumblr and now she says shes transgender because of peer pressure!") originated on three anti-trans websites, and despite its official-sounding name, has no research behind it. I knew that intellectually, but it's powerful to have the evidence clearly there for you.

Zinna Jones is one of the key writers there, and you may know her other work as she's been a prominent internet trans human for many years (how she has the courage and spoons for that, I will never know). One of her key experiences of gender dysphoria was depersonalisation: a weird, fuzzy, not-quite-thereness. On beginning hormones, it cleared up immediately: she had an "I didn't know what wrong felt like until I started feeling right" experience, as well you might if feeling oddly absent is your normal day-to-day experience. Because it wasn't a focus of how dysphoria was written about while she was coming up, she's done a lot of writing and research on it at Gender Analysis: describing what it felt like, researching comparable experiences in other trans narratives, and most recently trialing an anti-dissociative drug to see how it affected her.

Many of us come to ghosthood due to experiencing similar things to Jones - a not-quite-thereness, an oddness, a sense of timelessness and dislocation. Some of us very clearly associate it with trauma, a mental illness, or gender dysphoria; for others, it's just part of the fabric of life. I would like to recommend reading her posts on this particular topic to anyone who experiences something similar.

Now, if you relate to what she writes it doesn't mean you're transgender - don't panic - as varieties of depersonalisation can be a symptom of all sorts of other things - especially trauma and trauma-related conditions like BPD/CPTSD. But you might still find her descriptions useful.

On the other hand, if you are identifying as transgender and wondering if hormones are for you, you might find it validating or helpful.

(and because the world is horrible, there's no small chance that trans people are also traumatised. There's a great pair of posts that I'm sure you've already read, "That was dysphoria?" - but also her follow up, in which she re-experiences some of those symptoms as a depression.)

Finally, a recent post series explored an anti-depersonalisation drug, which you might be interested in exploring as an option for yourself. I had no idea there was such a thing!

In short, I was re-reading the archives this morning, and it occurred to me that a great many followers here might appreciate or find these posts useful. Make of them what you will, and best wishes to you all x

A tonne more thoughts after the cut:

This isn't meant to be "a trans blog", so I'm not going to focus on this too often. But certainly for me, Jones' posts really spoke to me and my experiences. I think there's a real danger in underselling how weird gender dysphoria feels. One sort of expects or assumes gender dysphoria is "I hate my breasts because I am a man"; there isn't so much written about how it can be "I'm tired, I don't really care, everything seems hollow and false, but I can't imagine life being any different because it's what I've always known, and it's not clearly anything to do with gender". That's been my experience - and it's incredibly hard to spot. I've been through six diagnoses since I was a teen (OCD, depression, anxiety, BPD, ADHD, autism), because while I've always been clearly unwell, it's hard to pinpoint gender dysphoria when it just manifests as brainweird, especially when that brainweird is you normal, as it was for Jones.   For example, I've never really recognised my own face in the mirror. Weird, but whatever. When I was considering hormones last year, I decided to take up weightlifting as part of my experimentation process. It would allow me to see how I felt about developing a more masculine body, in a controlled way, and as someone who *hates* exercise, it would also be a useful test of commitment: was I dysphoric enough to motivate me to go to the gym? Because if not, I probably was not dysphoric enough to transition either. Well, I went three times a week and followed the correct food recommendations for building muscle until I could no longer afford either; and then it happened. I looked in the mirror and it was like a visceral, immediate shock of recognition. And now I can't unsee it. Every time I look in the mirror, my brain immediately pings back "nice Robert Plant vibe you got there man", which is ridiculous; no one else on the planet would see me and think that. But that very small amount of muscle, and slightly-more-masculine-shoulder/arm-profile, was enough to make my brain recognise itself for the first time.

Sometimes you don't understand what "wrong" feels like until you have "right" to compare it to.

(I think those of us with early experience of abuse might also relate to that; the way that being loved and respected by a good person later in life can be both shocking, and bring on a period of processing and heavy reflection because it illustrates how very wrongly you were treated before. Even if you know it intellectually,  just the experience can be profound. Certainly, I've got a few experiences of not-being-taken-advantage-of which were absolutely shattering, like I was being taught how to love myself for the first time.)

And as you might expect, I'm also feeling very reluctant to pursue transition. This sort of nebulous dysphoria is, well - . I envy very much the "I knew I was trans from the moment I hit puberty because I hated the gender I was living in" people, who clearly see gender as their problem. It's very hard to contemplate something as life-changing as transition when its motivated by an increasing certainty that the only cure for my incurable mental ill is a different hormone balance, and as many days I have where I ask myself why I didn't transition 5 years ago already, I have others where I know I'll have to be dragged kicking and screaming through the process as my last resort.

Like, a few years ago I was at a "Even if I am transgender, I think I'd rather live as a woman [for reasons]" point; and now I'm at a "I would still rather live as a woman, but I am desperate to have enough disposable income to buy a really nice set of towels and maybe transition would make me well enough to not only work, but have a real career, and maybe I could buy a car, and go on holiday, and start buying tailored clothes instead of charity shop, and maybe redecorate my house in faux-Victorian style, and I really don't care if everybody hates me and I no longer have a coherently cisgender body, I would do anything to be able to afford unusual cheeses and teas rather than subsisting on stew" point. It sounds so shallow, but there it is; because so many of the problems I have don't feel dysphoria-related, because I'm only understanding them as dysphoria-related because nothing else has made an impact, my focus is increasingly on the little things in life I want to achieve, and maybe could achieve if my brainweird was fixed. I'm now fairly sure that if/when I do transition physically, I'll continue to recognise myself more, and realise how much of an impact physical dysphoria was having.

But it's what I know. And like Hamlet says, easier to bear the struggles we know than fly to others that we know not of.

Sidenote:

Intermittently, you'll see approaches which try to set up trans or mentally ill people as enemies to otherkin people, like the two experiences cannot co-exist, or like otherkin people ought to take the fall for the way transphobic use them as an anti-trans "gotcha". I personally find this very frustrating: I prefer approaches which are open, rather than closed off. Many/most of my followers here are either trans, mentally ill, have trauma, experience dysphoria or some other unspecified bodyweird/brainweird. In real life, I have four otherkin/therian/furry friends - and they too all meet that description. {There are also many otherkin who see their history as spiritual or religious, who aren't trans/mentally ill/traumatised, or who don't really know the source of their experiences - all of which is also OK!}.

I would always prefer to take a holistic and compassionate approach to the way experiences can overlap, rather than a combatative/competitive/polarised one; any hostile or fightin' talk messages/replies will be ignored, blocked or deleted as appropriate, because that's not a value I have for my online space. Although I'm open to discussing or exploring it, so please don't hold back if you want to talk about your experiences in good faith.

In short, there is a fairly significant overlap between people who come to identify as transgender/dysphoric/mentally ill, and those who come to identify as otherkin, or who might temporarily identify with one of those experiences while figuring things out  - and this post is for them. Politics makes things sound so simple and clean-cut, but people are messy and complex, and I'd much rather help individuals navigate and explore their experiences - even if they are contradictory, or don't support my political goals. Trying to figure out brainweird and bodyweird is challenging enough, without making people tread on eggshells during the process.

Hey mods, I’m gonna preface this by saying that if you can’t answer this that’s understandable. I’m a trans guy that’s been out (to varying degrees) for a little under 3 years now, but whenever somebody misgenders or deadnames me I always have a really hard time correcting them. I get this irrational fear that they’ll get super mad at me, or that they’re really transphobic and will harass/attack me. Do you have any tips for gaining confidence in correcting people? Thanks!

I think it really depends upon the context, like, how to act, how to react, how safe it is, what to say, how to get the confidence - they're all things that you tend to have to judge on a case by case basis. There are some situations where I don't correct because it's a random shopkeeper that I'll never see again, so it's ultimately just an effort that I don't personally feel the need to exert (it triggers dysphoria when they do it, obviously, but it's already been triggered by the time I need to correct them, so I'd rather scan my stuff and leave than dwell on that moment).

When it comes to my family, with my birthname, we found a compromise - when I was younger they often used to shorten my birthname to one of two masculine nicknames. I let them call me those nicknames now - I know that my family doesn't like the name that I picked for myself, or my reasons for picking that particular name, so I don't force them to call me that, especially since there's another viable option.

My family does misgender me consistently, and rather than correcting them on it I talked to them about how they feel - they told me that they accept me, that they value me as me, and they did the typical "I don't think of you as a girl or a boy, you're just you" speech, and I know it came from a good place even if it's a cliché that can sound invalidating. The way I see it, they're not thinking about gender, it's not on their minds like it is for me - to them "she" is just the natural word to say because it's what they've said for two and a half decades, it doesn't mean "I think of you as a girl" in their heads, there's no depth or underlying meaning behind their use of the word.

However, they do make little efforts to validate my identity or to show that they do support me - they buy me mugs or towels with "mr" or "his" on them, for example. If I jokingly say something like "I hope you don't expect me to wear a dress to the funeral." they'll say something like "It's a funeral not a drag show. Just wear your usual emo shit." They'll often say something like "typical bloke" if they catch me looking at an attractive woman on the TV or if I burp after a meal.

So yeah, I had a lot more success just talking to my family and being casual about it - showing that I appreciate the little things that they do, and finding middle-grounds and understandings rather than just expecting them to be fully capable of meeting all of my needs - but I don't actually correct them at all.

Ultimately, I don't know the people in your life, I don't know what tactics to use, how to talk to them, what they think, so I can't really tell you how to broach the topic with them or how to word the corrections. I think people disagree on the etiquette of it all too - like, some people interrupt, some just cough, some say "You said 'she'" at the end, while some say "It's 'he'", some go passive-aggressive, some go sympathetic, some like an apology, and some (like me) really dislike having too much attention drawn to it.

Sometimes I'll correct people in casual, safe social situations, like if I'm hanging out with friends of friends - but even that's rare, it's more likely that they either notice somebody else calling me 'he' and catch on, or my friends correct them for me. Sometimes I correct people in "official" situations, like when somebody on the phone says "Can I speak to Mr [awesome name]?" and I say "That's me!" because I've no other choice (and even those aren't definites, like I've actually said "Sorry, he's not in right now!" on a call to my MOBILE PHONE to get out of dealing with it). If I can avoid correcting, I will - I don't correct plumbers who look temporarily confused at the name on the form before they decide that they aren't paid enough to care, I don't correct doctors who literally have my medical records right in front of them (my brain just goes "They're probably having a rough day, it's a rough job, this has nothing to do with me, I'll let it slide" - it's not empathy, I have no clue if they're actually stressed, I'm just like "If I convince myself that they are then I'll feel better").

In fact, I once had a very long phone call for a bill or something where I tried to correct the person on the other end, they didn't believe me, I tried again, they still didn't, and eventually they came to the conclusion that "my dad" had given me the answers to the security questions so that I could pretend to be him while he was passed out drunk. I was so fed up that I just went with it, and because I had the answers to the security questions it didn't really matter, they had to allow my fictional seven year-old daughter to take the call. I ended up pretending to be my own non-existent child, who was failing at pretending to be me.

Another time, a transphobe decided to protest my pronouns in an LGBT+ group that I volunteered at, by interrupting anyone who said "he" and incorrecting it to "she" - my friends and strangers alike. It was annoying more than anything, like, people were trying to have a casual conversation and they kept getting interrupted and sidetracked into dumb arguments, regardless of whether I was even there that day. I don't think I ever responded to it, I don't think I had ever even corrected him in the first place. I would just blank him, but my friends would bite the bait and try to defend me... in the end, that just gave him what he wanted.

Anyway, as you can probably tell, I'm not very confrontational - I prefer to either remind myself of why that person's opinion doesn't matter, or talk myself into believing that the person doesn't have any ill intentions behind the misgendering, rather than making an effort that (for me) costs more than it pays.

So, with that in mind, my advice for you is that there's always another possible reason that somebody misgendered you - a slip-up, stress, tiredness, they've got a lisp and they actually are saying the other pronoun and somehow you can't notice it on any other word... I'm pretty good at convincing myself that it isn't personal. Maybe getting into the mindset that "misgendering = mistake" and out of the mindset that "misgendering = transphobia" could help make it easier for you not to feel afraid, and thus make it easier for you to feel comfortable correcting people - more often than not, it is just an honest mistake. It's very contextual, but there's almost always other behaviours or a pattern to the misgendering, an overt maliciousness, in cases of transphobia - a couple of instances of potentially accidental misgendering don't mean anything, and it no more indicates transphobia than calling a zebra a giraffe by mistake indicates hatred of zebras.

I think it comes down to assessing the situation, asking yourself "Is this worth it? Am I ever going to see this person again?" and then asking yourself "Is this a conversation that I want to start with a correction, or do I want to bring it up separately?" - a twenty-something at a party is probably open-minded enough that "Oh it's 'he'!" will be met with "Okay, cool!" and that'll be that, but your grandma might need a gentler approach the first time. If they already know, and it's just them slipping into old habits, ask yourself "Is it worth interrupting this conversation, or should I let this one slide and then bring it up at a later date if it keeps happening?" - if it's a casual chat with a sentence or two each, then it's easy to add in just a "he" without ruining the flow or seeming impolite, but if they're sobbing in your arms as they tell you the story of a tragic argument that they had then it's probably best to let that one slide. You know what I mean?

Like, I try to treat it the same as I would treat them saying "for all intensive purposes" instead of "for all intents and purposes" - and that way, if I don't correct them then in my head it's just a grammatical error that I didn't correct, it doesn't mean anything.

Most people aren't transphobic, like the most likely reaction for you to get will be "Okay" in a variation of tones... sometimes it's "Okay!" sometimes it's "Ooookaaaay".

Think of it this way: If somebody walked up to you in public and said "I am a self-confessed transphobe, I hate those transgenders, they are terrible." would you start yelling at them, would you harass them, or would you just be like "Ooookaaaay"? People don't tend to kick off or act ridiculous, in person at least, regardless of how they feel or how much they hate you. There's a really small chance that the person actually has a negative opinion of trans people in the first place, but even if they do then they're not going to attack you, they'll just say an exaggerated "Ooookaaaay" or maybe raise their eyebrows.

Sure, there are some people out there who will be shitty and rude - a really tiny proportion of people who just have no personality and rely on making everybody around them uncomfortable to validate their "I have the unpopular opinion and that means that I'm right" complex. Those people don't deserve a second of your attention or any of your happiness, just blank them. They just want attention, they want to get a reaction out of you, they want to wind somebody up - apathy hurts dickheads more than anything, just count to ten and remind yourself that their opinion of you should mean as little to you as my opinion of The Queen means to her. Let it slide, and give your energy and attention to those who earn it.

At the end of the day, it's better to focus on the good, to encourage the good. You should be surrounded by people who respect you for who you are and refer to you as you want to be referred to - it's what you want, it's what you deserve - find those people, spend time with those people, and feel free to cut out anybody who responds cruelly to a polite correction. Politely correcting people who care about you is helping them to be able to help you, helping them treat you how they want to treat you.

Remind yourself that the people in your life love you, the people who deserve to be in your life love you, that they want to refer to you correctly, but that people can't learn if you allow them to keep repeating the mistakes without even pointing them out. You wouldn't let a child keep ending sentences with commas, you'd tell them each time they did it and say "You need to put a full stop there" - that's all you're doing when you correct these people.

They might struggle, they might need reminding a lot - just be gentle, polite, patient, and understanding.

TL;DR - don't put so much weight on it, don't mentally view misgendering as a sign of transphobia, there are so many reasons that it could have happened and everybody makes mistakes, it's just a grammatical error, most people aren't transphobic, people tend to conceal their feelings and behave appropriately even if they are, the people who love you want to learn and you're just helping them do so, but you possibly asked the wrong person because I literally allowed someone to think that I was a neglectful alcoholic father to avoid the hassle of continuing to correct them.

~ Vape