I'm not trans because I hate my gender. Actually, I'm pretty happy about my gender.
No, the problem arises because gender is invisible. Because gender -- as opposed to sex -- is defined within a person, by means we don't fully understand, we can only determine a person's gender by what each of us genuinely expresses based on our subjective understanding of ourselves.
Because the culture we live in values objectivity over subjectivity, people like me, who define ourselves as something other than what any quantifiable standard dictates, find it very difficult to defend our feelings, or justify any pronouncement we might make about who we are.
That is the source of dysphoria. Because I have a lifetime of not being able to reconcile my internal reality with how the world sees me, I am dysphoric.
I was essentially invisible for most of my life. It was traumatic, every day. Because I was asserting an indefensible belief about myself, I also doubted. How could I be a girl? Girls have vaginas. I have a penis. That's what I thought, even as I found myself deeply uncomfortable with male aggression and insensitivity, and only felt happy and in any way at ease with myself when I was socializing with other females, even as I rebelled against my body and the changes I went through in puberty (I used to cry in the shower, praying to a God I believed in less and less to change my body to what I thought it should be, and to go through female puberty instead of what was happening to me), even as I got more and more depressed as I went through my teenage years, and into a twilight zone of denial and avoidance through much of my "adulthood." I wanted to be anyone other than who I was, anywhere other than where I was, because I couldn't possibly be who I felt myself to be. Anything was preferable to how I was living. That was how my dysphoria manifested in my life. I hated myself, both because I couldn't be who I felt I was, and because wanting to be myself was impossible and foolish and, by the standards I was raised to, morally and logically wrong.
So, because I am trans, I hate being seen as the gender that is not mine, because a whole lifetime of experience has forced me to be associated with it. It's like everything in the universe has conspired against me. Dysphoria is a type of PTSD. Dysphoria is not reasonable. It does not respond to logic, not least because logic has always indicated that I couldn't possibly be who I actually am.
Trying to explain to me how something that has aroused my dysphoria actually shouldn't make me feel that way is exactly the wrong approach to take with me. My situation defies reason, at least any of the common reason available to an imperfect objective understanding. Telling me not to feel the way I feel brings up all of the old horrible feelings I have always had. It makes me wrong to feel the way I feel. It drives me deeper into a depression I have not completely overcome, and may never be entirely rid of.
You can't "cure" me. There's nothing for me to be cured of. I am as I have been made, and that will never change. You can't take away this suffering. You can't explain how I shouldn't feel the way I feel. The only way for you to help me deal with my dysphoria is to support me as I struggle to cope and to move forward in my life.
Sympathize. Empathize. Don't negate.
Trying to explain to me how something that has aroused my dysphoria actually shouldn't make me feel that way is exactly the wrong approach to take with me. My situation defies reason, at least any of the common reason available to an imperfect objective understanding. Telling me not to feel the way I feel brings up all of the old horrible feelings I have always had. It makes me wrong to feel the way I feel. It drives me deeper into a depression I have not completely overcome, and may never be entirely rid of.
You can't "cure" me. There's nothing for me to be cured of. I am as I have been made, and that will never change. You can't take away this suffering. You can't explain how I shouldn't feel the way I feel. The only way for you to help me deal with my dysphoria is to support me as I struggle to cope and to move forward in my life.
Sympathize. Empathize. Don't negate.
