I think there’s something of a difference between the nature of being praised for gender conformity and the mechanisms of gender euphoria. The main thing is that euphoria and dysphoria is completely independent of any external reward systems and often contradicts social rewards for conformity. If you are reacting to someone’s praise that isn’t gender euphoria that’s more like social conditioning. Cis people definitely do gender as per the philosophy of Gender performativity and we as social animals react to praise for doing something correctly… but Gender euphoria as trans people experience it is something more like a built in reward system which continually fires off feedback.
I have met cis people who definitely have described experiencing gender euphoria or dysphoria but they really aren’t common. Ask cis folk if you were to wake up tomorrow and you were physically the other gender how would you react to that and more often than not the answer is basically that you think you’d adjust after a period of weirdness to your new role just fine. If you fall into that category I think you are not actually a person who experiences internal gender preference, you just experience gender as a source of praise for participating in culture. It is a much rarer cis person who answers that they would feel a profound sense of loss and horror in that situation. It’s lead me to believe that there is a cis equivalent of the trans experience of gender silently living their best lives but are about as rare as trans people are demographically while most cis people are functionally null gender. While null gender people may register that they are part of a group it’s a matter of practicality. Whatever box they get sorted into they just want to perform the box well. They do not see their gender as being intrinsic to them at a level of fundamental need.
My controversial opinion is I think some people do soul searching regarding this trait and eventually end up in the non-binary community and come to a sort of agender or gender politic where they simply feel societies gender norms are limiting and bullshit because they recognize it means nothing personally to them. While non-binary is under the trans umbrella and some non-binary people experience euphoria/dysphoria just regarding a mix of phenotype or experience it on an inconsistent basis some people use the term “non trans non-binary or genderqueer” to describe that particular state of feelings that gender isn’t something that resonates with them deeply… But that identity may lie on an assumption that cisness is dependent on a internal inante sense of gender and that all cis people basically have an innate gender sense it just is in alignment.
The thing is with the cis experience is that people don’t really ask “what makes a person cis?” We as trans people are driven to try and figure out internally and legitimize to cis people why we are the way we are because we present to them as something broken. Cis people are just assumed to be functioning so we don’t really dig into their mechanisms to understand the other half of gender from an veiwpoint that treats transness and cisness from a neutral standpoint that values the two states of being as equal. From a trans point of view we can tell that what most cis people describe doesn’t at all sound like what we are experiencing. When they try to assert that they do they sub in things that made them feel good that was gender related but the thing that made them feel good about it was feeling confidence knowing that they are being rewarded externally somehow.
But we as trans people also understand being showered with compliments or feeling reaffirmed by milestone social rituals that have a gendered component come from the outside world and sink in. I experienced a lot of compliments and social ritual for my gender performance back when I was performing cis normativity and while I did feel rewarded and flattered for the efforts of essentially performing gender it was like someone was complimenting a costume I was wearing. I did great job on the costume woo! Attention and acolades yay! ! But it felt like doing a drag performance or a wearing a Halloween costume. Most trans people have a period where they try and perform their birth sex’s gender norms intensely, better than anyone trying to fill that numbness with a different form of external praise from extreme conformity. It’s why so many trans women end up in the military. They are trying to overide the innate internal voice by utilizing the methods of validation. Performing the socially expected archetype does have a reward system that can feel good. But it’s like trying to drink water to combat being hungry. It will fix your thirst if you are thirsty but a fundamentally different need is what is demanding satisfaction.
While we haven’t typified if there is a specific physical structure of the brain that underlies transness I do think that there is something rather specific. When I speak to other trans people my age even though we all grew up isolated there are parts of our experience that is intimately recognizable to each other. However it’s my worry that if we ever figured out a mechanism that underlies transness people would essentially try to fix that structure as being “the problem”.
Throughout history trans people have existed on the axis of gender having come to their identities entirely in a vacuum which makes me think that it’s got something to do with potential structures of the brain we do not yet fully understand and that identifing cis people who experience actual gender euphoria might be the key to actually pinpointing it. I have definitely had some involved conversations with this variety of cis person and a number of them also recognize that they do not experience gender like other cis people do. That there is a fundamental difference in their experience between brain and body than other cis people and when they talk to us they understand us almost instantly more implicitly.
Trans racial people thus far seem to be a minority amoung minorities. It seems to me the people who describe their experiences point to pop culture depictions or idealized stereotypical notions of their desired cultural experience rather than a lived experience the same way people want to be medieval knights or jedi or fursonas and adopt those aesthetics as being identities but it’s entirely possible that I am wrong. I am not their psychologist. I just know that if it’s honestly held belief based out of a biological based imperitive it’s got about a thousand tons of cultural baggage to wade through and of that’s the case I wish them luck.
Your previous example and explanation of gender euphoria was based around an external perception of your gender and the consequent reward. Did I misunderstand?
What are the innate ways that you feel the gender that you feel? And how would you get euphoria from this without external perception? I don’t think we feel or perceive gender, but rather universal human characteristics have been categorized into gender. A penis and a vagina are just body parts. Gender is merely one’s own creation. I don’t think wanting to have a penis is different than wanting to be taller. What you perceive as being a man, may not be what a cis man perceives as being a man, but neither is more accurate about being a man than the other.
I believe there are more parallels of dysphoria between cis and trans people than we want to admit. Being transgender is not an entirely unique experience but a derivation of other types of dysphoria, depression and struggles with social conformity. If we understand that we can understand each other.
I think people are afraid to express other types of transness or do not have the words to express what they feel yet. Even cis people do not understand themselves because they are just considered normal like you said.
I think there is a misunderstanding there. Like I said gender incongruence is really hard to explain. You keep describing gender from the perspective I commonly see from cis people which treat both gender and physicality very flippantly. You said it yourself - you don’t think you feel or percieve gender but look at is as a series of universal characteristics and that genetalia are just body parts… But that is not how I experience gender nor does that explanation resonante with most trans people I have talked with. Within many of us dwells a deep preference to embody a certain physicality and cultural spot in it’s physical, mental and spiritual aspects.
When I am speaking with women there is a deep feeling that they are alien to me. I understand them from a place of having experienced their socialization and I may be friends and admire them but my brain registers them as distinctly not like me. The company of men, cis or trans, however there is a spark of recognition and feeling of likeness. With my body there is not just a preference but a sharp sense of repugnance for aspects that do not align. Pregnancy is not just off the table - the idea is abhorrent - like I used to routinely punch myself in the guts over and over again when such considerations arose to the point where I risked perforating organs and was told my my doctor that I needed to stop. But the idea of fulfilling the biological role of pregnancy or experiencing the faintest brush of motherhood was so alien to my sense of identity that I knew that if I were ever in a place where I was forced to go through that it wouldn’t matter what happened afterwards, even if things were to conclude with no lasting physical damage the result of that history in my experience would be so at odds with my sense of self that there is literally no force on earth that would keep me alive. I would find something very tall and jump.
I experience what some would term an extreme gender preference/aversion. My exterior secondary sex attributes are ultimately more tolerable. It is an understatement to say I do not like them but I can value them as things my partner likes. My main issue with them being that they create a distance between me and other men. My male friends who despite my wishes still subconsciously react to me as though I am “other” ranging from them treating me like a young boy or with the sort of physical touchy dynamic they reserve for their female friendships. They do not subconsciously react to my friends who have gone through HRT that way… Not even close.
I grew up in a household with lax gender norms. I fundamentally believe that being one sex or another should present no limitations. I live in one of the most trans friendly cities in the world where there is fairly widespread acceptance… But as much as the discussions of gender egalitarianism try and place things in the strict realm of being just performativity that is not my experience. I think actually the belief is way too optimistic and the invention resulting from null-gender genderblindness . It doesn’t matter how open minded people individually become at some level they still subconsciously react to perceived sex characteristics and we as trans people are hyper aware of this and whatever compells us comes from within. I have torn apart my own mind trying to pinpoint it’s source but it’s ineffable as much as it’s all consuming.
There’s something in the satisfaction rate of gender affirming surgeries for trans people which is incredibly unusual. The common satisfaction rate for run of the mill cosmetic surgeries is about 75% to 90%. With trans bottom surgery, the biggest scariest one most likely to have complications that effect your pelvic floor muscles and represent a potential loss of ability. A surgery where 15% of the total surgeries basically do not meet the requirements medical professionals have for considering it to be a success. That surgery has a regret rate of 2%. That’s an incredible statistical anomaly. I know people in the 15% one of them spent 2 years unable to walk more than two city blocks without crippling pain and will likely not ever recover her pelvic floor to full… She is emphatic that even if she got the guaranteed same outcome all over again she would not hesitate to have that surgery over again rather than live as she was. That is not how most surgeries are recieved. For contrast very safe fast procedures with no downtime fhat are strictly aesthetic in nature for both cis and trans patients even minor imperfections in results cause massive craters in the data.
It’s why we trans people tend to react aggressivively when people try to trivialize the issue. We regularly meet resistance by people who as far as we can tell are not capable of understanding the actual severity and experience of gender preference. We can explain it over and over again but 9/10 cis people will keep trying to tie it to your own experiences with self perception and it never works. It never accurately describes the journey we are on or our takeaways from our interactions with other people
I imagine you can understand that if you cannot explain how being trans relates to a cis person people will struggle with understanding each other. You say physicality and cultural spot, which are both not foreign to cis people. I spiritually don’t feel any gender, but I can’t imagine that you would be able to understand what a cis man feels spiritually in the same way I wouldn’t understand a trans woman. You have your own internal understanding of being a man and your own spiritual feelings of what being a man is, but how can you say what being a man is? How can anybody without introducing their own cultural ideas into it?
Women do not feel alien to cis men. Maybe some, but not all. Aside from the physicality of my body, I feel more comfortable and feel more of a likeness around women than men often times, but I’m not trans. Your experience as a trans person couldn’t be the experience of a cis person, so how can you claim to know that you are a man?
The self harm, suicidal ideation and hatred of your bodily functions must be influenced by not only your internal feelings but also the external society. If altering one’s physical appearance is so successful for gender dysphoria, then the physical nature and perception of oneself within society must override internal spiritual incongruences.
Curious how you feel about suicidal people. If somebody is so unhappy with their existence that they want to kill themselves, no surgery nor adjustments to society will quell this deep internal dissatisfaction with themself, would you recommend they kill themselves? No wrong answer here. I presume you might feel that there are underlying issues causing their resentment towards existence. If you feel like killing yourself because you don’t want to get pregnant, that should just be an accepted state of mind because you are trans.
I really should apologize here because my line of questioning must sound aggressive and dismissive, especially through text. I’m just intensely curious and eager to understand each other. I don’t believe this is possible, however, because we have a fundamental disagreement on gender. I truly appreciate the back and forth and hope I haven’t hurt you in any way. I support people doing whatever they feel is best for them, but I just fear that we are not addressing deeper issues and the fear of invalidating one’s experience (rightfully so) hinders our ability to solve these deeper issues as a whole society. Trans people cannot be entirely correct and knowledgeable about transness and its inner workings and cis people cannot be entirely wrong.
The whole “women do not feel alien to cis men” is part of my point about internal gender preference. Though I do think some cis men do experience it through a “I do not understand women” mindset or treat them as they are fundamentally and irreconcilably different than men. It’s difficult to untangle that from the male supremacist cultural understanding of women in practice but I think the sentiment also exists in part neutrally as part of the experience of cis men with internal gender preference.
And in regards to your assertion about it being externally motivated, while it took me awhile to untangle my feelings from internalized misogyny I really don’t think the two are at all related. I long ago came to the conclusions that yes culture tends to create narratives of female inferiority and that I was not immune to those narratives and questioned whether I was simply running away from that. I managed to neutralize my veiws on the matter in an attempt to self soothe and I lived in that space for a few years. It doesn’t touch dysphoria or euphoria but it does made it easier to spot it’s source, but the strength of aversion can only be passified by feeding it something else. In my case I have to continuously feed it a lot of logic. And I do mean a LOT of logic. This can be survivalist logic (if you let this stop you from participating in public you will eventually become miserable which will weaken the ties you have to other things ) the logic of my decisions (personal quick mantra - I would take a bullet to this person I am in love with I can make smaller daily sacrifices) or cultural logic (cis men exist who don’t fit this paradigm either) or ideological logic (you believe that society is shallow and your plight regarding your physicality echos prifoundly harmful beauty standards. You have the strength to manage and see the benefits inherent to being ugly, you can apply that as needed to your body)… But the thing is with that logic pool is it has to keep being applied as a coping mechanism. I can literally never stop. The source is never based in logic. It’s like trying to bail out a boat with a hole in the bottom. I can stay afloat but it takes continuous applied effort. I have embraced a stoic philosophy approach to try and weaken my reaction to external hits… But it the size of the hole in the bottom of the boat is a constant. Being reminded of my physicality by outside sources is just a wave that forces more water through the hole in the bottom. It’s a reaction below and not goverened by the conscious mind.
As to suicide. Touchy subject. My dad died in early 2019 and the way he managed it we will never find his body. It is a loss that continues to fuck my family up and the only reason I made it to adulthood at all was knowing that my family would never get over my loss. I have a friend right now who is at constant risk but after thinking about it pretty intensely I realize that there is no bulletproof logic to keep someone alive if their misery is intense enough. My lifeline relied on surgical fixes. I have never needed an abortion (thankfully. I do not want to think about what sort of panic I would be in if that was a reality) and it took me a long time to convince people medically that I was a candidate for sterilization… But that is in part gender related care for trans people. In a reasonably pro-choice country my chances of survival were not bad. In a post hysterectomy situation I closed off that loophole for good but holy hell did I need to fight for it. No one would give me one in my 20’s so I lived in constant fear for a decade even with the best contraceptives money could buy. I literally had to refuse to leave a gynecologist’s office peacefully and get emergency backup from my GP on the phone that I was hurting myself before they gave their signoff and I was 32 and still facing “But you’re still young you’ll probably regret it!” bullshit.
But it cannot be denied that the reason for that pushback is because a low percentage of cis women who have hysterectomies report a profound and constant sense of loss. Essentially they seem to me they are experiencing cis gender dysphoria. But the thing about that is the vast majority of cis women don’t experience that symptom. Only about 2-3% of the post surgical population surveyed expressed that particular symptom. It strikes me that might be a window into the number of cis people who actually experience true internalized gender preference…which would put it in the statistical ranges of other recognized populations of structural neurodivergence like Autism (1%) or ADHD. (3% - 5%). It is my belief that being transgender is a further subset of the population who experiences internalized gender preferences but with an additional complication of that internalized compass pointing other than what their physicality supports. However because cis people with internalized gender preferences supply no burden on the systems that exist and oftentimes the people themselves are unaware until something goes wrong with their sexual conception of themselves we have no recognized population to study.
Anti-suicidal lifelines can break if you don’t do what’s nessisary to keep yourself alive or if you are not provided with lifelines. A lot of trans people lose a lot of their lifelines when they come out as trans. If you find yourself out of a job with no close relationships what keeps you alive becomes precarious. Suicidal episodes can occur as periods of intense logic overriding hysteria. They can come over you very quickly at a heightened strength and it’s not everyone’s fault that they fall prey to it. Not everyone who commits suicide is anywhere near their right mind at the time. That said there are people for whom life isn’t ever going to get better. They have done all their thinking and the benefits of death outweigh the trouble of maintaining life. Their deaths almost always leave people behind who are traumatized by their passage by different degrees so while our cultural aversion to suicide is founded you can’t fix the problem by simply adding more social pressure through stigma to stay alive. If someone really wants to die they will do it. If someone has circumstances for a hard out then there’s not much you can do to stop them. You can imprison them and leave them no opportunities to easily kill themselves quickly and efficiently but you can’t really make them want to live long term. If you can’t fix the underlying problem you just leave a timebomb. Ultimately suicide is something we as a society should try and prevent. Individually the cause collateral damage, but you have to be active at addressing a bunch of personal issues.
On a completely separate note.
It is also probably worth correcting a misconception. I do not fully rationalize or identify myself as a man. Part of my coping mechanisms involve partial denial of fulfilling that role in it’s entirety and compromising utilizing a non-binary function. I recognize and conceptualize myself as existing lodged in a halfway state which allows me to manage my situation. My desire for physical maleness is pretty much on par with any binary trans man but I try logic my way into seeing myself as a complete being as I am now as a matter of the compromises I routinely make. I am a part of the trans masculine non-binary community if you want to be specific about it.
Your experience trying to get a hysterectomy is so frustrating. It’s a common story. People should be allowed to sterilize themselves if they want to, and I won’t get into this controversial opinion, but I think there are cases where we should forcibly sterilize people (NOT eugenics). An example being a man who impregnates a child.
I appreciate your opinion on suicide and I’m truly sorry for the loss of your father.
Like sexuality, I think if we’re going to keep gender around, and obviously it’s not going away any time soon, we need to make a much more fluid spectrum so people can more comfortably fit into society. Call everybody non-binary. Women can have penises for example, or men can have vaginas. Obviously social stigmas as well. You’re probably rolling your eyes thinking I missed or disregarded everything you’ve said, but I think this social shift would enable some people to be more comfortable being themselves and not have to diagnose themselves with dysphoria, and a small percentage of the rest of the population would have some other form of dysphoria in which they simply do not want to be in their body irrespective of gender.
I am not rolling my eyes about a shift to a more non-binary society. I think absolute destigmatization and democratization of gender roles, stereotypes and culture at large would be a boon to a lot of different groups. Heck they/them pronouns being the norm until you know someone’s preference actually benefits non-binary and non-gender conforming people and put to bed more toxic femininity and toxic masculinity. Allowing humans to just be whatever appeals to them personally would allow us to better appreciate the individual natures of people. It also will reduce the pressures that do exist for some people which will stop some people from feeling the need to aggressively align with the sexual binary for the sake of survival or who have to keep their identity quietly under wraps at present. It would be ultimately a good and healthier place to gravitate towards. Ultimately treating gender more flippantly does allow people to feel less like it’s a chain around their neck and more of a toy that can be engaged with for the sheer fun of it. Because gender euphoria is just that - joy. Trans narratives often center around pain and dispair but it’s one half of the equation. The other half is just experiencing at it’s most extreme a very wild almost drug-like illogical emotional high. People like to play and a lot of people deny themselves play because of these cultural narratives of shame and tradition. It’s in part why the gay community has ballroom culture and drag. A lot of that doesn’t from a place of transness, they are just doing it because once you’re considered a failure of the standard it’s easier to transgress other rules. If they are gunna hate you anyway for the thing that you can’t change why care what they think?
Just as political lesbianism was a thing in the 80’s we are seeing I think a rise in political non-binary identities. If you think a more non-binary society is a good thing than I agree!
But conversely I think gender affirming care that deals with physical transition is probably going to remain a nessesity even in that kind of senario and we’ll probably see more instances of gender “kit bashing” as the walls around sexual stigmas are further challenged.
The society you mention already is having it’s trial run. Where I live there’s a much wider swath of the community that participates in the genderqueer social conventions of society. It is of course seeing pushback from Conservative groups as they are trialing things like gender neutral bathrooms in K-12 schools but as far as the conversations around LGBTQIA+ issues we’ve always been about a decade ahead of the States.
Ah, I was being glib. It’s from the Warhammer modelling community. Basically where you take multiple models types and meld them into unique configurations. Some of us in the more geeky enby community use it to mean ideal physical transition goals that do not align to a strict binary sex phenotype.
I think there’s something of a difference between the nature of being praised for gender conformity and the mechanisms of gender euphoria. The main thing is that euphoria and dysphoria is completely independent of any external reward systems and often contradicts social rewards for conformity. If you are reacting to someone’s praise that isn’t gender euphoria that’s more like social conditioning. Cis people definitely do gender as per the philosophy of Gender performativity and we as social animals react to praise for doing something correctly… but Gender euphoria as trans people experience it is something more like a built in reward system which continually fires off feedback.
I have met cis people who definitely have described experiencing gender euphoria or dysphoria but they really aren’t common. Ask cis folk if you were to wake up tomorrow and you were physically the other gender how would you react to that and more often than not the answer is basically that you think you’d adjust after a period of weirdness to your new role just fine. If you fall into that category I think you are not actually a person who experiences internal gender preference, you just experience gender as a source of praise for participating in culture. It is a much rarer cis person who answers that they would feel a profound sense of loss and horror in that situation. It’s lead me to believe that there is a cis equivalent of the trans experience of gender silently living their best lives but are about as rare as trans people are demographically while most cis people are functionally null gender. While null gender people may register that they are part of a group it’s a matter of practicality. Whatever box they get sorted into they just want to perform the box well. They do not see their gender as being intrinsic to them at a level of fundamental need.
My controversial opinion is I think some people do soul searching regarding this trait and eventually end up in the non-binary community and come to a sort of agender or gender politic where they simply feel societies gender norms are limiting and bullshit because they recognize it means nothing personally to them. While non-binary is under the trans umbrella and some non-binary people experience euphoria/dysphoria just regarding a mix of phenotype or experience it on an inconsistent basis some people use the term “non trans non-binary or genderqueer” to describe that particular state of feelings that gender isn’t something that resonates with them deeply… But that identity may lie on an assumption that cisness is dependent on a internal inante sense of gender and that all cis people basically have an innate gender sense it just is in alignment.
The thing is with the cis experience is that people don’t really ask “what makes a person cis?” We as trans people are driven to try and figure out internally and legitimize to cis people why we are the way we are because we present to them as something broken. Cis people are just assumed to be functioning so we don’t really dig into their mechanisms to understand the other half of gender from an veiwpoint that treats transness and cisness from a neutral standpoint that values the two states of being as equal. From a trans point of view we can tell that what most cis people describe doesn’t at all sound like what we are experiencing. When they try to assert that they do they sub in things that made them feel good that was gender related but the thing that made them feel good about it was feeling confidence knowing that they are being rewarded externally somehow.
But we as trans people also understand being showered with compliments or feeling reaffirmed by milestone social rituals that have a gendered component come from the outside world and sink in. I experienced a lot of compliments and social ritual for my gender performance back when I was performing cis normativity and while I did feel rewarded and flattered for the efforts of essentially performing gender it was like someone was complimenting a costume I was wearing. I did great job on the costume woo! Attention and acolades yay! ! But it felt like doing a drag performance or a wearing a Halloween costume. Most trans people have a period where they try and perform their birth sex’s gender norms intensely, better than anyone trying to fill that numbness with a different form of external praise from extreme conformity. It’s why so many trans women end up in the military. They are trying to overide the innate internal voice by utilizing the methods of validation. Performing the socially expected archetype does have a reward system that can feel good. But it’s like trying to drink water to combat being hungry. It will fix your thirst if you are thirsty but a fundamentally different need is what is demanding satisfaction.
While we haven’t typified if there is a specific physical structure of the brain that underlies transness I do think that there is something rather specific. When I speak to other trans people my age even though we all grew up isolated there are parts of our experience that is intimately recognizable to each other. However it’s my worry that if we ever figured out a mechanism that underlies transness people would essentially try to fix that structure as being “the problem”.
Throughout history trans people have existed on the axis of gender having come to their identities entirely in a vacuum which makes me think that it’s got something to do with potential structures of the brain we do not yet fully understand and that identifing cis people who experience actual gender euphoria might be the key to actually pinpointing it. I have definitely had some involved conversations with this variety of cis person and a number of them also recognize that they do not experience gender like other cis people do. That there is a fundamental difference in their experience between brain and body than other cis people and when they talk to us they understand us almost instantly more implicitly.
Trans racial people thus far seem to be a minority amoung minorities. It seems to me the people who describe their experiences point to pop culture depictions or idealized stereotypical notions of their desired cultural experience rather than a lived experience the same way people want to be medieval knights or jedi or fursonas and adopt those aesthetics as being identities but it’s entirely possible that I am wrong. I am not their psychologist. I just know that if it’s honestly held belief based out of a biological based imperitive it’s got about a thousand tons of cultural baggage to wade through and of that’s the case I wish them luck.
Your previous example and explanation of gender euphoria was based around an external perception of your gender and the consequent reward. Did I misunderstand?
What are the innate ways that you feel the gender that you feel? And how would you get euphoria from this without external perception? I don’t think we feel or perceive gender, but rather universal human characteristics have been categorized into gender. A penis and a vagina are just body parts. Gender is merely one’s own creation. I don’t think wanting to have a penis is different than wanting to be taller. What you perceive as being a man, may not be what a cis man perceives as being a man, but neither is more accurate about being a man than the other.
I believe there are more parallels of dysphoria between cis and trans people than we want to admit. Being transgender is not an entirely unique experience but a derivation of other types of dysphoria, depression and struggles with social conformity. If we understand that we can understand each other.
I think people are afraid to express other types of transness or do not have the words to express what they feel yet. Even cis people do not understand themselves because they are just considered normal like you said.
I think there is a misunderstanding there. Like I said gender incongruence is really hard to explain. You keep describing gender from the perspective I commonly see from cis people which treat both gender and physicality very flippantly. You said it yourself - you don’t think you feel or percieve gender but look at is as a series of universal characteristics and that genetalia are just body parts… But that is not how I experience gender nor does that explanation resonante with most trans people I have talked with. Within many of us dwells a deep preference to embody a certain physicality and cultural spot in it’s physical, mental and spiritual aspects.
When I am speaking with women there is a deep feeling that they are alien to me. I understand them from a place of having experienced their socialization and I may be friends and admire them but my brain registers them as distinctly not like me. The company of men, cis or trans, however there is a spark of recognition and feeling of likeness. With my body there is not just a preference but a sharp sense of repugnance for aspects that do not align. Pregnancy is not just off the table - the idea is abhorrent - like I used to routinely punch myself in the guts over and over again when such considerations arose to the point where I risked perforating organs and was told my my doctor that I needed to stop. But the idea of fulfilling the biological role of pregnancy or experiencing the faintest brush of motherhood was so alien to my sense of identity that I knew that if I were ever in a place where I was forced to go through that it wouldn’t matter what happened afterwards, even if things were to conclude with no lasting physical damage the result of that history in my experience would be so at odds with my sense of self that there is literally no force on earth that would keep me alive. I would find something very tall and jump.
I experience what some would term an extreme gender preference/aversion. My exterior secondary sex attributes are ultimately more tolerable. It is an understatement to say I do not like them but I can value them as things my partner likes. My main issue with them being that they create a distance between me and other men. My male friends who despite my wishes still subconsciously react to me as though I am “other” ranging from them treating me like a young boy or with the sort of physical touchy dynamic they reserve for their female friendships. They do not subconsciously react to my friends who have gone through HRT that way… Not even close.
I grew up in a household with lax gender norms. I fundamentally believe that being one sex or another should present no limitations. I live in one of the most trans friendly cities in the world where there is fairly widespread acceptance… But as much as the discussions of gender egalitarianism try and place things in the strict realm of being just performativity that is not my experience. I think actually the belief is way too optimistic and the invention resulting from null-gender genderblindness . It doesn’t matter how open minded people individually become at some level they still subconsciously react to perceived sex characteristics and we as trans people are hyper aware of this and whatever compells us comes from within. I have torn apart my own mind trying to pinpoint it’s source but it’s ineffable as much as it’s all consuming.
There’s something in the satisfaction rate of gender affirming surgeries for trans people which is incredibly unusual. The common satisfaction rate for run of the mill cosmetic surgeries is about 75% to 90%. With trans bottom surgery, the biggest scariest one most likely to have complications that effect your pelvic floor muscles and represent a potential loss of ability. A surgery where 15% of the total surgeries basically do not meet the requirements medical professionals have for considering it to be a success. That surgery has a regret rate of 2%. That’s an incredible statistical anomaly. I know people in the 15% one of them spent 2 years unable to walk more than two city blocks without crippling pain and will likely not ever recover her pelvic floor to full… She is emphatic that even if she got the guaranteed same outcome all over again she would not hesitate to have that surgery over again rather than live as she was. That is not how most surgeries are recieved. For contrast very safe fast procedures with no downtime fhat are strictly aesthetic in nature for both cis and trans patients even minor imperfections in results cause massive craters in the data.
It’s why we trans people tend to react aggressivively when people try to trivialize the issue. We regularly meet resistance by people who as far as we can tell are not capable of understanding the actual severity and experience of gender preference. We can explain it over and over again but 9/10 cis people will keep trying to tie it to your own experiences with self perception and it never works. It never accurately describes the journey we are on or our takeaways from our interactions with other people
I imagine you can understand that if you cannot explain how being trans relates to a cis person people will struggle with understanding each other. You say physicality and cultural spot, which are both not foreign to cis people. I spiritually don’t feel any gender, but I can’t imagine that you would be able to understand what a cis man feels spiritually in the same way I wouldn’t understand a trans woman. You have your own internal understanding of being a man and your own spiritual feelings of what being a man is, but how can you say what being a man is? How can anybody without introducing their own cultural ideas into it?
Women do not feel alien to cis men. Maybe some, but not all. Aside from the physicality of my body, I feel more comfortable and feel more of a likeness around women than men often times, but I’m not trans. Your experience as a trans person couldn’t be the experience of a cis person, so how can you claim to know that you are a man?
The self harm, suicidal ideation and hatred of your bodily functions must be influenced by not only your internal feelings but also the external society. If altering one’s physical appearance is so successful for gender dysphoria, then the physical nature and perception of oneself within society must override internal spiritual incongruences.
Curious how you feel about suicidal people. If somebody is so unhappy with their existence that they want to kill themselves, no surgery nor adjustments to society will quell this deep internal dissatisfaction with themself, would you recommend they kill themselves? No wrong answer here. I presume you might feel that there are underlying issues causing their resentment towards existence. If you feel like killing yourself because you don’t want to get pregnant, that should just be an accepted state of mind because you are trans.
I really should apologize here because my line of questioning must sound aggressive and dismissive, especially through text. I’m just intensely curious and eager to understand each other. I don’t believe this is possible, however, because we have a fundamental disagreement on gender. I truly appreciate the back and forth and hope I haven’t hurt you in any way. I support people doing whatever they feel is best for them, but I just fear that we are not addressing deeper issues and the fear of invalidating one’s experience (rightfully so) hinders our ability to solve these deeper issues as a whole society. Trans people cannot be entirely correct and knowledgeable about transness and its inner workings and cis people cannot be entirely wrong.
The whole “women do not feel alien to cis men” is part of my point about internal gender preference. Though I do think some cis men do experience it through a “I do not understand women” mindset or treat them as they are fundamentally and irreconcilably different than men. It’s difficult to untangle that from the male supremacist cultural understanding of women in practice but I think the sentiment also exists in part neutrally as part of the experience of cis men with internal gender preference.
And in regards to your assertion about it being externally motivated, while it took me awhile to untangle my feelings from internalized misogyny I really don’t think the two are at all related. I long ago came to the conclusions that yes culture tends to create narratives of female inferiority and that I was not immune to those narratives and questioned whether I was simply running away from that. I managed to neutralize my veiws on the matter in an attempt to self soothe and I lived in that space for a few years. It doesn’t touch dysphoria or euphoria but it does made it easier to spot it’s source, but the strength of aversion can only be passified by feeding it something else. In my case I have to continuously feed it a lot of logic. And I do mean a LOT of logic. This can be survivalist logic (if you let this stop you from participating in public you will eventually become miserable which will weaken the ties you have to other things ) the logic of my decisions (personal quick mantra - I would take a bullet to this person I am in love with I can make smaller daily sacrifices) or cultural logic (cis men exist who don’t fit this paradigm either) or ideological logic (you believe that society is shallow and your plight regarding your physicality echos prifoundly harmful beauty standards. You have the strength to manage and see the benefits inherent to being ugly, you can apply that as needed to your body)… But the thing is with that logic pool is it has to keep being applied as a coping mechanism. I can literally never stop. The source is never based in logic. It’s like trying to bail out a boat with a hole in the bottom. I can stay afloat but it takes continuous applied effort. I have embraced a stoic philosophy approach to try and weaken my reaction to external hits… But it the size of the hole in the bottom of the boat is a constant. Being reminded of my physicality by outside sources is just a wave that forces more water through the hole in the bottom. It’s a reaction below and not goverened by the conscious mind.
As to suicide. Touchy subject. My dad died in early 2019 and the way he managed it we will never find his body. It is a loss that continues to fuck my family up and the only reason I made it to adulthood at all was knowing that my family would never get over my loss. I have a friend right now who is at constant risk but after thinking about it pretty intensely I realize that there is no bulletproof logic to keep someone alive if their misery is intense enough. My lifeline relied on surgical fixes. I have never needed an abortion (thankfully. I do not want to think about what sort of panic I would be in if that was a reality) and it took me a long time to convince people medically that I was a candidate for sterilization… But that is in part gender related care for trans people. In a reasonably pro-choice country my chances of survival were not bad. In a post hysterectomy situation I closed off that loophole for good but holy hell did I need to fight for it. No one would give me one in my 20’s so I lived in constant fear for a decade even with the best contraceptives money could buy. I literally had to refuse to leave a gynecologist’s office peacefully and get emergency backup from my GP on the phone that I was hurting myself before they gave their signoff and I was 32 and still facing “But you’re still young you’ll probably regret it!” bullshit.
But it cannot be denied that the reason for that pushback is because a low percentage of cis women who have hysterectomies report a profound and constant sense of loss. Essentially they seem to me they are experiencing cis gender dysphoria. But the thing about that is the vast majority of cis women don’t experience that symptom. Only about 2-3% of the post surgical population surveyed expressed that particular symptom. It strikes me that might be a window into the number of cis people who actually experience true internalized gender preference…which would put it in the statistical ranges of other recognized populations of structural neurodivergence like Autism (1%) or ADHD. (3% - 5%). It is my belief that being transgender is a further subset of the population who experiences internalized gender preferences but with an additional complication of that internalized compass pointing other than what their physicality supports. However because cis people with internalized gender preferences supply no burden on the systems that exist and oftentimes the people themselves are unaware until something goes wrong with their sexual conception of themselves we have no recognized population to study.
Anti-suicidal lifelines can break if you don’t do what’s nessisary to keep yourself alive or if you are not provided with lifelines. A lot of trans people lose a lot of their lifelines when they come out as trans. If you find yourself out of a job with no close relationships what keeps you alive becomes precarious. Suicidal episodes can occur as periods of intense logic overriding hysteria. They can come over you very quickly at a heightened strength and it’s not everyone’s fault that they fall prey to it. Not everyone who commits suicide is anywhere near their right mind at the time. That said there are people for whom life isn’t ever going to get better. They have done all their thinking and the benefits of death outweigh the trouble of maintaining life. Their deaths almost always leave people behind who are traumatized by their passage by different degrees so while our cultural aversion to suicide is founded you can’t fix the problem by simply adding more social pressure through stigma to stay alive. If someone really wants to die they will do it. If someone has circumstances for a hard out then there’s not much you can do to stop them. You can imprison them and leave them no opportunities to easily kill themselves quickly and efficiently but you can’t really make them want to live long term. If you can’t fix the underlying problem you just leave a timebomb. Ultimately suicide is something we as a society should try and prevent. Individually the cause collateral damage, but you have to be active at addressing a bunch of personal issues.
On a completely separate note.
It is also probably worth correcting a misconception. I do not fully rationalize or identify myself as a man. Part of my coping mechanisms involve partial denial of fulfilling that role in it’s entirety and compromising utilizing a non-binary function. I recognize and conceptualize myself as existing lodged in a halfway state which allows me to manage my situation. My desire for physical maleness is pretty much on par with any binary trans man but I try logic my way into seeing myself as a complete being as I am now as a matter of the compromises I routinely make. I am a part of the trans masculine non-binary community if you want to be specific about it.
Your experience trying to get a hysterectomy is so frustrating. It’s a common story. People should be allowed to sterilize themselves if they want to, and I won’t get into this controversial opinion, but I think there are cases where we should forcibly sterilize people (NOT eugenics). An example being a man who impregnates a child.
I appreciate your opinion on suicide and I’m truly sorry for the loss of your father.
Like sexuality, I think if we’re going to keep gender around, and obviously it’s not going away any time soon, we need to make a much more fluid spectrum so people can more comfortably fit into society. Call everybody non-binary. Women can have penises for example, or men can have vaginas. Obviously social stigmas as well. You’re probably rolling your eyes thinking I missed or disregarded everything you’ve said, but I think this social shift would enable some people to be more comfortable being themselves and not have to diagnose themselves with dysphoria, and a small percentage of the rest of the population would have some other form of dysphoria in which they simply do not want to be in their body irrespective of gender.
I am not rolling my eyes about a shift to a more non-binary society. I think absolute destigmatization and democratization of gender roles, stereotypes and culture at large would be a boon to a lot of different groups. Heck they/them pronouns being the norm until you know someone’s preference actually benefits non-binary and non-gender conforming people and put to bed more toxic femininity and toxic masculinity. Allowing humans to just be whatever appeals to them personally would allow us to better appreciate the individual natures of people. It also will reduce the pressures that do exist for some people which will stop some people from feeling the need to aggressively align with the sexual binary for the sake of survival or who have to keep their identity quietly under wraps at present. It would be ultimately a good and healthier place to gravitate towards. Ultimately treating gender more flippantly does allow people to feel less like it’s a chain around their neck and more of a toy that can be engaged with for the sheer fun of it. Because gender euphoria is just that - joy. Trans narratives often center around pain and dispair but it’s one half of the equation. The other half is just experiencing at it’s most extreme a very wild almost drug-like illogical emotional high. People like to play and a lot of people deny themselves play because of these cultural narratives of shame and tradition. It’s in part why the gay community has ballroom culture and drag. A lot of that doesn’t from a place of transness, they are just doing it because once you’re considered a failure of the standard it’s easier to transgress other rules. If they are gunna hate you anyway for the thing that you can’t change why care what they think?
Just as political lesbianism was a thing in the 80’s we are seeing I think a rise in political non-binary identities. If you think a more non-binary society is a good thing than I agree!
But conversely I think gender affirming care that deals with physical transition is probably going to remain a nessesity even in that kind of senario and we’ll probably see more instances of gender “kit bashing” as the walls around sexual stigmas are further challenged.
The society you mention already is having it’s trial run. Where I live there’s a much wider swath of the community that participates in the genderqueer social conventions of society. It is of course seeing pushback from Conservative groups as they are trialing things like gender neutral bathrooms in K-12 schools but as far as the conversations around LGBTQIA+ issues we’ve always been about a decade ahead of the States.
What’s kit bashing?
Ah, I was being glib. It’s from the Warhammer modelling community. Basically where you take multiple models types and meld them into unique configurations. Some of us in the more geeky enby community use it to mean ideal physical transition goals that do not align to a strict binary sex phenotype.