Fact #586: If you’ve ever been called a “transtrender”, congratulations, you are lovely. Your gender and your transness are real. You are valid. The fact that some asshole was so threatened by your existence that they felt they needed to beat down on you in order to feel good about themselves tells you all about them and nothing about you. You’re allowed to continue existing as yourself. You don’t need some gatekeeper’s permission to be you.
But you need to experience dysphoria to be trans.
Um, no.
Being a trans dude, let me say that since I was raised as a girl, I was taught that everything I was feeling or experiencing was just ‘female hysteria’. That it was fake and I just needed to learn to love my body.
Doctors told me this when I came in for appointments, struggling to find the words to explain why I felt so wrong. Nurses told me this. My parents told me this. My therapists told me this.
That I was just fine, and all urges to want to crawl out of my own skin or to stop existing entirely was just me having ‘hormonal spikes’ or being ‘depressed’.
As it was, I did not realize I was trans until my late twenties, and I had no idea what I was experiencing was dysphoria because my symptoms were frequently dismissed by trusted doctors or diagnosed as a ‘’behavior problem”.
Now this is just my experience being raised as a girl, but I have no doubt whatsoever that trans women have had upbringings that made them question if what they were experiencing was dysphoria, or just them being labeled as “messed up”, or even “hypochondriac”, etc, by family, doctors and peers.
It’s honestly cruel to question someone’s validity as trans for not having dysphoria, especially because you are entirely alone in finding out whether or not you have it. No doctor in my life has ever read through my medical history and noticed any trends and told me accurately what was going on with me.
Because doctors actually don’t know. Tumblr doesn’t know either. YOU know. You are the only one who can know, because it concerns your body. It’s hard and it hurts like hell to figure this all out by yourself, and unfortunately in our current craptastic healthcare system? It’s yourself that you have to almost entirely rely on. And being called crazy at every turn by the people who are hired to help you sure as shit doesn’t help matters.
You are strong as hell and you amaze me.
Likewise, if you know you aren’t your assigned gender and you don’t have dysphoria?
You are lucky and also amazing and still entirely valid and I’m so happy for you. Because I sure as fuck don’t wish dysphoria on anybody.
The idea that trans people have to experience dysphoria comes from cis people insisting that trans people must hate themselves to be valid. It’s just another set of hoops cis people want us to jump through. They feel that we have to hate ourselves for being different. And we really don’t.
There is such thing as gender euphoria. It means you feel fucking great when you’re validated as your gender or even if you validate yourself as your gender whether through dress or going “I am [gender]”.
Neither are mutually exclusive, but some people feel apathetic to their assigned sex, not hating it or anything, just they could don’t mind it, but when they get called certain pronouns they suddenly go “That feels good, that feels right.”
It’s okay to experience gender euphoria without gender dysphoria. It’s just another side of the vortex that is being trans.
Modern Life is Rubbish 