Gender dysphoria is for life

[Seethlaw]

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.

I agree with all of this. It reminds me of a friend I knew over 30 years ago who worked at St James hospital in Leeds with people having gender reassignment surgery. At the time I assumed surgery was done and off the patient skipped but she assured me surgery was just the started of lifelong psychiatric issues and ongoing surgery.

I've seen nothing to contradict her experiences.

Imo it's very sad all round.

It must be difficult, there’s a lot of mental health conditions where no matter how many good days you have, you’re always aware a relapse is lurking in the shadows. You don’t just wave a magic wand and skip off into the sunset saying ‘Oh Im all better now, I don’t have anorexia/bipolar/PTSD anymore.’

Oh, Seethlaw. I'm really sorry. Wishing you peace and contentment.

At the time I assumed surgery was done and off the patient skipped but she assured me surgery was just the started of lifelong psychiatric issues and ongoing surgery

Yeah. Such massive surgeries, like any others that hugely affect the body and its appearance and functioning, can definitely be traumatising and shouldn't be undertaken without proper psychiatric support, both long before and long after. But too many trans people don't understand that, don't get the help they need, and can end up in quite sad situations indeed.

Exactly! And gender dysphoria is absolutely one of these. It's not something you can get rid of, though you can absolutely learn to manage it. But the work for that is mostly psychological, not physical, and it takes time and effort, not just a few surgeries and a course of hormones.

so what did gender dysphoric people do before modern medical treatments? before you could get surgeries and hormones?

Great question

Guess they lived in the shadows, the same as gay people did when it was against the law to be gay.

Don't think it has ever been against the law to be gender dysphoric.

Sorry to hear all this, Seethlaw.
I wonder in how many cases transitioning makes it harder for those feelings to change? If they didn't lead to bodily changes would they be more likely to be un-linked from the body?

Oh no, I'm fine, don't worry 😃 And thank you 💙

I was seeing a psychiatrist for other issues when I started transitioning, and I kept seeing him for years afterwards. So I've been well-supported, and had ample space and time to explore anything I wanted or needed.

I wrote this post out of frustration to be honest. I'm sick and tired of seeing TRAs arguing that "This or that behaviour triggers gender dysphoria, how dare you?" or "Gender dysphoria is so hard, you don't understand!" or lately, "Children with gender dysphoria experience such a terrible distress that it justifies doing horrible things to them."

Fuck that noise! Yes, gender dysphoria can be horrible, obviously. And yes, some physical steps can really bring a whole lot of relief to it. But it will still have to be managed to some degree, and both children and adults need to be profoundly aware of that, and to start by thoroughly managing their expectations before transitioning.

I personally had to let loose of a trans friend because they had failed to do such expectations-managing before transitioning, and found themselves stuck in a very predictable situation they hadn't prepared for, and chose to amplify the denial in ways that were deeply hurting their children. That was painful and entirely preventable, and it angers me that similar situations are still happening in huge numbers out there because TRAs are outright lying about the whole thing.

Well you are doing great work on these threads, @Seethlaw and I'm sure that I am not the only woman who has learnt a lot about GD from you. You have also made me more determined to face my own health problem with the sort of positivity and grace that you demonstrate.

Is it though? I appreciate your description of your experience, but there are a great number of children and teenagers who experience what is described as gender dysphoria, for want of a better description. I don’t think it’s helpful for them to believe that what they’re experiencing is something they should expect to experience for the rest of their lives, when we know that if they are helped and supported they won’t.

The only way this is not the case is if “real” gender dysphoria is something that only persists into adulthood.

I myself might never have even realised I was trans, back then.

I grew up within a very authoritarian environment: toxic family and fundamentalist church. I knew very early (6 yo) that it felt absolutely right when people mistook me for a boy, and devastating when my mother corrected them. But then a few months later we got into that church, and I was repeatedly taught that I was a little girl, that I was going to grow up to be a young woman, and then a woman who would marry a man and have children with him. And being a young, trusting child, I accepted it and became a self-identified tomboy.

It took 30 years and disentangling myself from both the church and my family to finally realise I was trans. But that was only possible because:

1. It's possible for women to live independently nowadays.
2. I had heard of the concept of "transsexual" so I already had a concept of it to attach to my "I'm a guy inside" realisation.

So in past times, when I would never have been sufficiently free to even come to that realisation, or I might have realised it but not known there were other poeple like me, well, I guess I might not have done anything at all about it?

Though I suppose I could have tried some things, such as:

• Live with it, like Aunt Marie lived with her melancholia.
• Ask the local healer for remedies.
• Ask the local witch for a spell.
• Ask the local priest for an exorcism.
• Pray to the local saint or whoever.
• If I lived alone: cross-dress at home.
• If I had the means and a gigantic stock of courage: leave, go to some place nobody knows me, and start a new life as a man. Very risky, but some did it.

So quite a few possibilities, all aimed at the same thing; managing the dysphoria, in one way or another.

Nah, don't be sorry for me. I'm doing pretty great 😃 ! But it's damn obvious that far too many trans people out there are not doing so well at all, because they are not managing their expectations and their dysphoria, and that makes me sad.

I wonder in how many cases transitioning makes it harder for those feelings to change?

I would imagine so? I mean, once you commit to transition, you also commit to some degree to the feelings that led you to it. Which, in my case, was fine because I clearly remembered already feeling that way as a tiny child, and having experienced a subdued version of them all my life, so it was unlikely they would disappear. But even then, I did explore the question of, "What if the feelings disappear a decade or two down the line?" and I didn't proceed with the transition until I felt absolutely certain that, "It'll be okay, because I'll have been true to myself until then, and those few years will have been better for it."

If they didn't lead to bodily changes would they be more likely to be un-linked from the body?

Yeah, I can only imagine that the more links you create between two things, the harder they are to un-link indeed. That's a phenomenon in how neural pathways work, from what I understand? So once a definitive bodily change is linked to a feeling, it must certainly reinforce that feeling to sky-high level. And yet, even then, there are plenty of detransitioners out there, which proves that a whole lot of people who transition are not actually trans, that transition is used to deal with other problems, and that psychological screening and pre-transition counsel must improve drastically.

Thank you so much!! 💚💜

And much strength to you!

My personal feeling is that quite a few of those children don’t have gender dysphoria so much as misinterpreted puberty dysphoria.

but gay people didn't need surgeries and hormones

I think I have wealth dysphoria. I know I should've been extremely rich but I was born into the wrong parallel universe rather than the one where I won the lottery.

it is hard to tell, many girls can be uncomfortable with their bodies and the attention they start to get from men. or rather, all of us were uncomfortable, i'm not sure there are any girls who liked themselves and their bodies when they going through puberty. they need to be allowed to explore this, instead of being affirmed in their discomfort leads to mean they aren't girls

Two different situations - in one people hid their sexuality because it was a crime, while the other didn't exist as a concept or a possibility.

The other difference is that even though most gay people were hidden from history, we know that homosexuals existed and that homosexuality was something people were aware of. Just the very fact of laws against homosexuality activity is an acknowledgement that there were homosexual people.

This is quite different from transsexualism or transgenderism, which only became a thing in the 20th century with new medical developments.

I think I see what you mean, and if I do, then we're not in any kind of real disagreement. Let's see if I can explain myself.

I don’t think it’s helpful for them to believe that what they’re experiencing is something they should expect to experience for the rest of their lives, when we know that if they are helped and supported they won’t.

On the one hand: I totally agree that there's no reason to scare them with this, when it's very likely that their teenage gender dysphoria will resolve in a few months or years.

On the other hand... I think that those who insist on transitioning because they believe that this will eliminate their gender dysphoria, need to be told that it won't fully work. Again, not necessarily in a scary way, but the info needs to be given, otherwise they can't properly consent to a transition.

But quite frankly, what I would really like is proper psychological support and exploration into why a child is feeling gender dysphoria. What do they mean exactly? What do they want? What do they hope for? And from there, determining what might have caused it, and working on that. I do believe that, at least for now, there might be a few resistant cases where it seems like the dysphoria just exists for no reason, but I have zero doubt that those cases would be extremely rare.

This may be a boring question that you get a lot, but do you think that the reason you have gender dysphoria is precisely because of your toxic, authoritarian family, the strict church environment, the awful way in which your future was mapped out by these repressive people just because you had been born female?

Well, it can't be because of the church, because I was happy being mistaken for a boy before we got into the church. So the church didn't do it.

My family, however, especially my mother... She didn't do it deliberately or openly, no. But she might very well have wished for it so bad (for me to be a boy, I mean) that I might have picked up on it subconsciously. I certainly filled a more stereotypically male role in our rather unconventional family (single mother, no fathers to the children) : emotional support to my mother, the "strong one" of the family both physically and emotionally, the one who would grow up to have a good job to support the family, and so on.

Hell, I've even contemplated the possibility that she was fully convinced during her pregnancy that I was a boy because she needed for me to be a boy for Reasons, that it influenced me right in utero. Or maybe she was so disappointed when I came out and I was a girl, that I picked up on that.

So the church, no, not possible. But a very early influence from my mother, possibly.

I think the possibility of "transition" such as it is, has a really made the whole problem worse for people and in a real way almost caused the phenomena of transgenderism.