Gender Dysphoria

What is “gender dysphoria”? A mental condition which forms the basis of identity of trans people, a distress born out of mismatch of the body and the mind? Or are we distressed due to the pressure of society’s hidden and open expectations, rigid laws, backwards traditions, malicious apathy and even open dehumanization? Is gender identity merely an inner reaction to transphobia?

The truth is certainly not in the middle. If you have seen any study or news about the brains of trans people and felt weird about it, your intuitions are spot on. Natural sciences usually take gender and sex as self-evident truths, otherwise it would risk being too “ideological”. Despite the sincere intentions of many, it is hard to believe that psychology can be a stable ally to trans people because gender is fundamentally an unfriendly institution to trans people. I understand that nonsense like “brain gender” might be useful to appease your parents or your therapist but folks, it is not a coincidence that trans people who defend these things the most, the loudest transmedicalists, are plainly bad people who enjoy kicking down poorer, more marginalized trans people. They might hate themselves and don’t know how to deal with it without projecting it to others or think they are above being a freak based on getting some validation but either way, they alone disprove the idea that “dysphoria” is an illness that simply requires a cure. Even the most well intentioned versions of the idea concede that certain ways to self-identify are more legitimate. Gender is a social construction, one which fitting in clearly necessitates putting down an underclass of “other”. So gender dysphoria has to be a construction as well. Gender is not something that can be merely assigned, it needs to be personally actualized too. There will be those who cannot fit in not just because they don’t want to participate but also can’t because their actualization goes against how gender is constructed in the first place. Of course, participation is not optional so there are consequences for failing to do so. More than a relationship between body and the mind, gender dysphoria is a cluster of feelings that manifests by the struggle against the punishment.

But why do do only some people carry the type of feelings that forces them into this struggle? People are always more complex than what they show on the outside. Some people come out as trans after decades. Some people struggle with it but for one reason or another don’t ever act upon it for their entire lives. But I am still confident that most people don’t really have such issues. On this topic my mind always goes back to a Turkish sitcom from years back. I don’t know when it aired, I don’t remember its name. I did not even watch a single episode start-to-finish. But I remember it’s trailer: A guy breaks up with his girlfriend, and as punishment she makes a deal with a witch to turn him into a woman. “He” wakes up, goes to the toilet and finds that there is nothing there. It’s not like this show circulated for years and years or I watched TV so frequently that I saw it often enough to burn it into my memory. I did not even think about it during that time. No, it really aired a short while, then vanished, just like hundreds of other Turkish shows. And yet I still remember that trailer in particular, as a memory frozen in time. Safe to say that this doesn’t happen to everyone.

Trans people are clearly not distinguished merely by action, be it self-identification or a set of procedures for social recognition but by thought as well. No wonder Western conservatives are so worked up about gender-neutral pronouns. Having a gender-neutral pronoun does not make a society less patriarchal, for example Turks have a very patriarchal culture despite speaking a mostly gender-neutral language. It only makes writing more convenient but no, even this small space of conceptual ambiguity is too much to concede.

There is probably nothing wrong about trans people’s brains but there is probably something in there. Because no matter how hard it is repressed, gender nonconformity is always present somewhere in all of human history and the patriarchal society demands its continuous repression. It might be labeled a sin, a bad influence, a rebellious streak, a mental illness or a subversive ideology. But it must be ironed out from children by proper discipline. Failing that, adults must be made into outcasts.

If you offered me a dress when I was little I would have considered it insulting. I remember trying to get into football many times because most boys liked it. I had never been curious about my mother’s makeup. At least the way most people saw it, there was nothing unusual with my interests. I just had a myriad of daydreams about a girl that grew up with me. She did many things but always thought like I would and acted in a way I admired, strangely very close to my personality without its most noticeable flaws. Strangely she never ever spoke to me or existed in the same thought-space as me but she was quite frequently in my imagination. This only intensified in high school, in a glaring way that affected my school grades. (They were still good but nowhere near good enough to justify the total hours spent on attempts at studying.) Even though I wrote very little about it, I conceptualized a lot of stories where she was inserted in my favorite media. And yet, I never told anyone about it.

For a long time I have not even thought about what those daydreams were. Perhaps I was thinking of my ideal woman? There were times she was romantic with generic non-descript guys and even was pregnant in some scenarios. For some time, I have thought that I would one day get married, have kids, then get old, just like other people. I frequently thought about how I would care for my future wife. But I have never seriously thought of myself as a groom, a husband or a father. I hated wearing fabric pants and those leather shoes adults wear. It took me a long time to get used to wearing belts and jeans, mostly succumbing to exasperation. I hated anything that made me look like an adult man. Especially the beard…

Even though no one really bashed my head on how “men do this and women do that”, no one restricted my toys, no one in my close proximity was openly sexist. Despite adopting a mostly “live and let live” outlook and having a clear sympathy towards things that aren’t “normal”, the society I grew up in clearly ironed out my behavior. Maybe I had read about it in newspapers once or twice, but I didn’t even have a conception of what a trans person was. If not for a series of chance encounters I could have just lived my life getting more alienated from the world day by day. But even if the repression became complete, I would always look at my own photos, and hear my own name and feel a little strange without ever understanding why. The thought was always with me since I knew myself. I would always think about her. Did my brain separate itself from my body at birth? I don’t know. But there is clearly a large separation between my physical existing self and what I have always wanted to be. Today even if I had the perfect guarantee that everyone would perceive me as a woman I would still not like how I sound, because puberty happened without my input and I don’t like the result. Truly if people thought of me as beautiful and desirable but my voice remained the same as now that would make the disconnect worse. Trans people who are confident in their voice are cool, admirable and uniquely captivating. But I always wanted to be a cis woman, I am sorry. I ignored how much this irked me for so long already so I don’t think I can ever be convinced to quit being bothered by this. I have a deep seated issue on this subject in particular, passing is really a secondary issue.

Had I grown up in a different society (without oppression) would I feel different? Perhaps. Of course, in a different society I would be a different being. In a better society, we would be able to take any steps we need in the ways we want to look without any judgment. Then perhaps a specific designation like “gender dysphoria” would not be necessary. perhaps differentiating between trans and cis people, or even men and women would be obsolete. But perhaps I would still be dissatisfied with my puberty. But even if we somehow knew it wouldn’t matter, because I grew up in this society. I know that I have certain desires that have been with me for a long time and know several things that would satisfy them at least somewhat. But any sort of idea that suggests these desires would go away in this or that scenario is not only irrelevant but fails like all naturalisms do.

Humans are inseparable from their environment and we can’t view humans as something that simply takes a parameter from society and gives a result. Bio-essentialism asserts that the environment can be reduced to mere cause and effect and a “pure human”, an “essence” can be reached by sufficient isolation. However, this supposedly anti-essentialist stance agrees with that. Whether the pure human is heritable or a clean slate is actually a small difference. And not even a very sturdy one. Here, the criticism of the beauty industry provides an excellent case study. In a push for impossible beauty standards, young girls and women in particular are continuously disempowered to make them isolated unless they join in to the painful and expansive perpetual consumption. It is clear that there are a lot of industries that are sustained by this pain. Diet, cosmetics and fashion are among the largest offenders. When someone says something like “Makeup is fun” the obvious response is that personal experiences and societal trends can exist in opposition and they should be critical towards the advertisements targeted at them, especially when the advertising is done by their peers. No, that sounds too sensible. The “choice feminism” needs to be completely defeated. So, it turns out that women actually never authentically enjoy makeup, they always do it for men and it’s “fine” to do it but you are giving in to the system. People have dyed their faces everywhere since humans learned how to, you might want to specifically appeal to other women, women pursuing beauty at all is also considered vain so perhaps patriarchy as a whole is less about specific actions of women and more that “woman” itself is wrong? No it is very simple, capitalist patriarchy in, makeup is out, no capitalist patriarchy no makeup. Thus it becomes necessary to imagine a “pure human” that is not contaminated by capitalism. Unfortunately we see this a lot in discussions where the anti-patriarchal argument falls into naturalism by making assumptions that are both irrelevant for those who are alive currently and can be easily modified into supporting an oppressive system.

But even if essentialism did not creep in, the argument would still be reductive. If dysphoria merely reflected oppression, why, even though many trans people do, do I not dislike my height? No matter what the world deeply tried to instill in me to equate smallness and womanhood but it could not. I might feel insecure about it if it caused people to clock me but in that case, it becomes so easy to distinguish the external pressure. Many trans people are comfortable with their genitals, or would care much less if the society did not fixate on them. Some trans people’s drive clearly is motivated not merely by dysphoria, but other thoughts that are still, fundamentally, very transgender. There are those people who explicitly don’t want to be seen as man or woman, others aspire to become a “butch woman” or a “femboy”. There are those who are mostly fine but nevertheless decide that they would be happier as a different gender. For some, autism makes the cis society difficult to swallow and embracing being trans becomes simple. There is probably a good case to be made for why neopronouns could emerge in an early 21th century Western society, but it could seldom explain why people are motivated to adopt them. What we can clearly understand is that they are personally important to some people. The more someone deliberately chooses to be outlandish about gender, they become motivated less by society and more by themself. Surely, part of it is a reclamation of the outcast identity but the larger part is that people clearly find pride and enjoyment in having a fire-forged identity right out of their hearts, living as unbothered by the boxes of society as much as they can. Gender is a theater and all trans people reject their roles but some people want to be playwrights, they want to play in their own play.

Trans people are persecuted ruthlessly over mundane and trivial requests. We, especially those of us who live in particularly repressive circumstances, deserve the world for staying alive each day. By the merit of our struggles alone we can say that our wishes about ourselves deserve special attention. But the struggle does not define everything! I would love nothing more than just waking up as a cis woman tomorrow and yet, despite the struggle, I find some joy in deciding who I really am. Despite the prevalent opinion, I am fine with the MtF label, because I see it as an acknowledgement of my own decision to become myself. Our names are more deserving of respect because we choose it for ourselves. Years of thinking made me understand myself in a way that most people will never bother to do and that’s why I can be certain that my self-image issues come from a wrong puberty, thus I need and deserve any medical procedure that undoes the damage. Gender dysphoria, euphoria, confusion, decision, none of those are meaningful just by the mere act of struggle, they mean something because of how I decide to shape myself.

Very often however, this is seen as a rhetorical inconvenience. I have seen sentences like “X is good/justified because it was born out of oppression” a bit too many times, the x can be really anything here. The lazy materialism is bad enough but the implication that the oppression passively bestows virtue is even worse. We hardly ever need this clutch, something can be good or bad on its own terms. Most things don’t need to be justified with collective trauma. It is not less serious when we feel pain or simple comfort for reasons we don’t entirely understand. Oppression just sucks. It doesn’t bring validation. There is nothing enriching about having to choose between filial love and self-respect, between my safety and dignity, between paranoia and ennui. It is all cruel, heavy, crushingly dull and heavily maddening. But I will never accept that I am merely a sponge absorbing my misfortune. My infinite appreciation for pleated skirts will always triumph over the lost time I am accumulating each second I am in the closet.

Gender dysphoria is not enough to define me. It is not the universal trans experience. It is certainly much more than a collection of heritable impulses, if they exist at all. Society is at fault for our distress. Yet, even though I can’t say this for any other trans person, I am the problem to myself, I am the only person that can fulfill my oldest wish.

This article is written thanks to my dearest Patrons, namely: Effy, Laura Watson, Makkovar, Morgan, Olympia, Otakundead, Sasha. Also thanks to Alex(@punishedgenetic on Twitter) for his perfect editing work.