Hello everyone! My name is Emma. I’ve been thinking I was gender non conforming for about five years now, but didn’t have the courage to act on my desire until I entered into my current relationship two years ago or so. My partner is queer and very supportive of me. I started to realize how unhappy my perception of my body and gender was; how unhappy I was with others perception of my gender. As a result, I started medical transition about nine months ago. I have desire to change my voice, to have breasts, to reduce the amount of body hair I have. And yet, I don’t really carry myself differently or act much differently than before. I’ve always crossed my legs when I sit and tried to make myself seem smaller than I am because I’ve always hated my height (I’m very very tall).
One thing that definitely has changed is that I’ve gotten more and more dysphoric over the short time I’ve been on hormones. I’ve talked about this with my partner and thought through it myself and believe, to a degree, that this is due to me unpacking pain that I had repressed over time. That the discomfort with my body was always there and I had just always crushed it down to allow myself to function despite it. This came at a cost of worsening depression, anxiety, and insecurity. For example, I never enjoyed shopping for clothes, looking masculine, wearing anything that showed off my body. As a result I never felt comfortable in my clothes or body and hated my appearance. Now though, I love shopping for clothes! At least online anyway, in person stores never have clothes for women my height :p (love you long tall sally!)
But… there’s a devil on my shoulder which says that I’m becoming more dysphoric because I’m not really trans. Because I’m really a man and I’m just lying to myself. I’m just doing this because I never felt I had a space to belong. I’m just appropriating the culture of people I respect and admire. I’m just trying to fit into women’s spaces, take advantage of the kindness of queer people to gain a sense of community where I never had one before. Writing that out, the internalized transphobia is pretty clear, huh?
I think part of my ever increasing feeling of dysphoria is not dressing how I want to and presenting how I want to out of fear of harassment or abuse from others in public. I ride public transit everywhere and see people get harassed daily and don’t want that to be me. So, I dress more masculine out of fear. Because of that masculine presentation, I get scared to use the women’s restrooms at work and find myself hiding in the stalls until all the other people leave before I go wash my hands. Which is dumb, because people at my job are super supportive and kind. Thinking of myself as a woman always feels wrong because I’m not feminine enough, my voice is too low, I’m too tall, I wear more masculine clothes, etc.
So lately I’ve been wracked with insecurity wondering if this was all the right decision for me. I have the same interests and the same depression. Obviously estrogen didn’t cure my mental illness. Transitioning has made some aspects of it worse and some aspects of it more bearable. And the worry that’s always there is whether I’m doing all this for the right reasons. Whether my dysphoria will ever start decreasing in severity rather than increasing. At the same time, the thought of detransitioning is agonizing.
It feels silly looking back now on how I thought transition would cure my mental illness. How I thought going on estrogen would cure my dysphoria. How I thought leaving my home state of Texas and moving to a more progressive state would free my mind and body from transphobia external and internal. There is no magic cure for mental illness or dysphoria. There is no promised land free of transphobia.
Ultimately, I’m doing okay. Im still happier and more comfortable than I was when I thought I was a man. I’m making this post wondering if any of you have/had a similar experience, similar anxieties, or similar doubts to me. How do you cope with your anxiety about transition or insecurity in your identity? How do you deal with stagnant or worsening dysphoria?
I recently finally got around the reading the gender dysphoria Bible and it helped me to understand things in different, more helpful ways I just hadn’t been able to arrive at myself.
Below I’ve pasted a section that meant a lot to me, and may be applicable to your situation as well
Consider That Gender Dysphoria Looks Different For Trans Women Who Haven’t Self-Accepted Yet
For years, I thought that I couldn’t be trans because I didn’t experience gender dysphoria. I was dead wrong.
One thing that kept me from realizing that I was experiencing dysphoria was the same reason that fish don’t know they’re swimming in water — it’s just what my life had always been like, so I thought being dysphoric all the time was normal human behavior. I knew that I was kind of sad and more than a little odd, and I knew that my experiences with masculinity were at least slightly gender non-conforming, but I was dealing with the pain of dysphoria every single day without having any idea what was actually going on. No matter how bad I felt, I could always come up with a good enough explanation that had nothing to do with gender.
The other problem is that gender dysphoria manifests differently in pre-acceptance trans women than it does in post-acceptance trans women. I always thought that gender dysphoria was the distress that you get from looking in the mirror and seeing a boy starting back at you instead of a girl, but that wasn’t a feeling I actually had until I started transitioning. You can’t get distressed about not seeing a girl in the mirror until after you’ve realized you’re a girl!
Before that, dysphoria manifests in dozens of other, much subtler ways. I wrote about my experience with pre-acceptance dysphoria here, in what has become my most popular essay ever. I highly recommend reading it in full if you are questioning your gender.
I just read through that and it was really helpful for me too. A lot of sexual hang ups I have originate I think in dysphoria and how I coped with it before even knowing I was trans. My experience coming out and coming to terms with myself and my own pain has been extremely illuminating as to why it is I behave the way I do. Why I find certain things so uncomfortable. Thanks for the resource!
