Gender dysphoria is a life-long condition, with or without transitioning.
Even after transition and in no particular order:
- Gender dysphoria is the unrelenting knowledge that under it all, despita everything you've done, your body is still and always will be the wrong sex.
- Gender dysphoria is scars on your body.
- Gender dysphoria is feeling guilty because you make your loved ones' life more complicated.
- Gender dysphoria is having to choose which pre-transition memories you can share and/or having to carefully rewrite them in the opposite sex.
- Gender dysphoria is having to choose between telling your new healthcare provider about your transition and your hormonal treatment, or risking them giving you inappropriate care.
- Gender dysphoria is a lifetime of medication and specialist appointments.
- Gender dysphoria is never being sure whether people truly support you or only humour you.
- Gender dysphoria is being clocked every once in a while and wondering how many people figured you out and you didn't notice.
- Gender dysphoria is wondering how and when you're going to explain to that new person you like that you weren't born the sex you present - and being anxious about how they are going to react.
- Gender dysphoria is never having the sex you really wish you had because even the best fake plumbing is nothing like the real one.
- Ironically, gender dysphoria can even be wishing you could dress or present in a more genderfluid manner, but anything that takes you closer to your birth sex presentation makes you feel worse, no matter how great you think it looks on other people of your desired sex.
And so forth and so on.
The idea that transition ends gender dysphoria is a harmful myth. Gender dysphoria is something that all trans people must learn to live with, whether they transition or not, and no matter at what age they transition. There's no avoiding it; there's no ending it. There's only managing it, carving a happy life for yourself around the good bits, and learning to handle the bad parts in a productive way.
I wish more trans people faced that reality, instead of insisting on living in a fantasy where going through the perfect transition and forcing people into behaving in the perfect manner would mean never having to suffer gender dysphoria ever again.