I am still very early in this whole process, and there is still a lot of self doubt, so I am reading a lot of literature on “Am I trans” and dysphoria.
One concept that people often like to propose in these ressources is the button that makes you the opposite gender, and, crucially, also makes everyone else believe that you have been that way forever.
I don’t really like this, because my time as a boy/man is part of who I am. I would not be me without it, and despite all of the problems I had and have due to my gender, it is still part of who I am. I fought through all of this and worked to find out who I want to be by myself. I wouldn’t wanna be cis, and I also don’t want to cease being the me born out of this struggle.
I’m not calling you (or anyone here) a transmedicalist.
I’m just saying that gender isn’t what you do and that this perspective does come from the more conservative side of this topic rather than the more radical, because what you do is irrelevant to your material experience of gender.
The material experience of gender is actually quite simple because it is based almost entirely in how other people treat you socially. We treat men we meet different to women, we treat women we meet different to men, and we treat non-binary people differently to both.
The material experience of gender is fundamentally social and lies in whether others accept or deny a person’s gender. This is why mental health outcomes are so heavily tied to the experience of acceptance in a teen’s social groups rather than to their physical biological appearance, genital expression, etc.
The material experience of gender isn’t in what the trans person does, but in what other people do socially. The perspective that some have that gender is what you do is an error derived from social outcomes improving when someone conforms to gender expression that causes others to more readily accept their gender.
