bookhobbit | (no subject)

I've been thinking about dysphoria today.

I feel like maybe insofar as mainstream narratives about dysphoria exist, they tend to emphasize the visual. "My body looks wrong"/"I don't look like my gender". I think this is an aspect of dysphoria that exists for many people, but I also think perhaps the reason it tends to be emphasized is it's maybe the easiest feeling for cis people to understand? We all have gendered ideas about appearance, unfortunately, and it's easy to understand "what I Feel Inside about my gender doesn't match What I See In The Mirror". Which is okay. Like i said, that's probably a pretty big part of it for many people.

I mostly do not experience this - I mean mostly because I don't *have* a gender, but that's not really what I mean, what I mean is, like, for me it's almost entirely tactile?

Like being naked for longer than the amount of time it takes me to shower will put me into a tailspin because the air on my skin reminds me of the actual shape of my body, and it makes me feel this deeply, deeply upsetting sense of discomfort, like the feeling when you touch a Bad Texture but it's under my entire skin. I'm the only person I know who wears a bra to bed because if I just let my chest be unsupported it will move too much and that makes me feel awful. I didn't even used to be able to sit around in underwear and a big teeshirt because that was Too Much Body. (I fixed this by changing to longer underwear, not by feeling more comfortable with my body.)

It is...distinct from body image issues, which are only about 50% tactile and make me feel...ashamed rather than itchy? It's hard to explain the difference. The things i feel are "bad" about my body make me feel like I'm a poor steward and an unsightly person, but the things that are "wrong" just don't make me hate myself, they just make me itch. Like restless legs in bed at night. Like a tag in a shirt tickling the back of your neck. But deep inside my chest.a

I can remember this kind of discomfort from when I was...maybe 11 or so? So I guess when I was first being given all the Puberty Talks and being told about Becoming A Woman, I guess. Maybe it was all the being gendered or maybe it was all the body changes, I don't know.

But if I call this feeling gender dysphoria, that means I've been experiencing gender dysphoria since before I was a teenager. The continuity of feeling is complete - I've been like this for more than half my life at this point. And if I have complete continuity of feeling from now back to age 11, and I call myself trans now, that means probably I've been trans my whole life.

Which is kind of a "duh" thing i guess, but:

a) I constantly feel like I'm faking it and I talked myself into feeling dysphoria. I tell myself it's only because I'm focusing on it that I feel dysphoria. And that like, I'm making it up and if I pulled my socks up it'd go away. But if I've avoided going braless since i started wearing bras because I've always hated my chest, it's probably not gonna be fixed by sheer effort of will. It's probably just how I've *always* been, my whole life. I can't make myself into a girl by thinking about it the right way because I wasn't ever one in the first place. And my gender or rather lack thereof* has to be real and has to be something to deal with.

b) if I've been trans since I was 11 I've been suffering needlessly all this time. 14 years of hurt that could have been fixed if anyone had known enough or cared enough to fix it. But it's also impossible that they could have. So it's like a decade and a half of hurting, completely pointlessly but completely inevitably. That's like 56% of my life to date that's been spent being uncomfortable with my body in ways I didn't need to but couldn't have avoided. Every time I think about this i get overwhelmed and emotional. That's so much pain and wasted time. If someone had just helped me it didn't have to happen. But no one could help me.

Theproblem is: I am not a man, and I don't want to pass as a man or look like a cis man, so i don't know what I do want. The sense of wrongness is a poor guide because it only tells me what's Bad, not what alternative would be Good. I mean, what am I even supposed to *do* about bottom dysphoria? None of the typical options are appealing to me. When I don't recognize my own face in the mirror, the only real visual thing i have, what can I do to change that? What would make me look like me?

I have no idea.

Also transition is scary because body changes are intensely terrifying, which Keel thinks i have a fear of specifically because puberty made me so miserable, so that's fun, "the entire reason you want to transition made you less able to transition", but also, on a simple and probably not uncommon level: oh god surgery is so scary???

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* In the context of all this, I don't know if I'm actually agender or some kind of medial or neutral gender, but I don't care enough to bother about it. Self-reflection about labels that have entirely experiential definitions is not worth it if your current one is Close Enough For Government Work.

Anyway, I get cranky when I think about being called a definite gender, so that's probably answer enough. But there is a certain level of guilt, because a lot of agender folks I know are apathetic about bodies and pronouns and stuff like that, so I feel bad about having such strong reactions myself. Like, I'm too Difficult to be A Good Agender.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

if it helps I can identify with feeling badwrong in my body rather than visually. I had the standard narrative of "I hate my chest I hate 'looking feminine' I hate that I am not perceived as a man" but I also still feel like I'm disconnected from my body somehow. I have issues with my name and similar -- my meat name is the name of my flesh suit, but my name is Cody, or Connor. And sometimes I wonder if my feelings about discomfort in my body is related to other stuff: the other day I had the thought "I don't want to be perceived by humans as one of them." I don't like being naked because I don't like how my body looks. I think I was going somewhere else with this but I don't know because I lost my train of thought. I love you and support you.

the other day I had the thought "I don't want to be perceived by humans as one of them."

I feel you, friend.

It's validating to know that other people experience so thank you very much for your kind words and i love and support you too. <3

I also had the sense of my body being wrong more in a tactile/physical way than a visual one. When it was visual, it was more about the horror of being wrongly perceived by others than being wrong in and of itself, if that makes sense?

I also wrote bras to bed! I mean, I also couldn't wear bras unless they were sports bras, so that kinda fucked up my ribs, but I still did that because it was the only thing that felt right other than not wearing a bra at all, which felt weird because of how people would look at and percieve me.

Surgery is scary but feeling okay with your body is such a huge relief. If you can find something that would make you feel better in your body, it's definitely worth considering.

tbh as someone who isn't agender but is pretty apathetic about pronouns and stuff, I also feel like I'm doing the gender thing wrong, so... I think there's just a lot of difficulty feeling like you're doing it right, due to constrained narratives.

Yeah that totally makes sense. I also stopped wearing anything except sports bras a few years ago and it's helped a little bit. Real bras are just so...."look! here they are!" blehgh.

Handshake of "I feel like I'm doing gender things wrong" solidarity! And yeah, I think top surgery at least would really help, I've just never had surgery before it and it's so scary, but also I know three people including you who have come out of it all right so it can't be as terrifying as my brain says it would be, I guess. Thank you very much for your kind words. <3

I think it definitely helped that I had had surgery before and was going into top surgery basically thinking "the recovery is going to be so much less annoying just because I can walk" (the previous surgery had been on one of my ankles, and I didn't enjoy being limited by crutches). Also knowing that I'd feel more right after it was done helped. Surgery is scary, though! I am lucky in that I don't have any basic fear of medical professionals, but any time someone's cutting into your body probably should be kinda scary. It helps to know that the surgeon has done it before and people liked the results they got from them, though.

I don't have much to add to this, but as a Fellow Agender (who is also not sure if they actually have no gender or a neutral gender but certainly doesn't like the idea of having a gender) I promise you are not 'too Difficult to be A Good Agender'. Every trans person has different reactions, and different levels and types of dysphoria (if they experience it), including agender people. But I know that sometimes it's difficult to convince yourself that there isn't a Right and Wrong way of being NB/agender - I certainly find it difficult.

<3 I really appreciate it, thank you so much friend

I wonder whether a lot of people use the language of 'my body looks wrong' to describe 'my body feels wrong' because it's dominant in trans narratives and is easier to understand? Because I 100% get dysphoria as my body feeling wrong and so do a lot of the trans people I know.

That would definitely make sense to me, I think.