Maybe think of it as not a disorder, but rather an unusually weak match between your identity and your genitalia (and/or societal gender norms), assuming this is what you feel. Would you still be suffering if there were no behavioral expectations of you? Would you feel normal and happy if a lot of people were like you and you associated with them at will without any stigma attached? Would you still strongly desire sex reassignment?
Many of the trans women and most of the trans men I’ve known are okay with their primary sexual characteristics. Women’s T-shirts reading “I heart my penis” exist for a reason.) My sample is rather biased toward the less-than-binary, but still it goes to show that this isn’t rare.
BDD looks social, not physical, to me but I’m not an expert. (Not that social dysphoria is irrelevant, anyway.)
I’m in a similar boat as yours. What I recommend is:
Don’t panic. Litany of Gendlin; whatever your true gender (defined as the gender you would be happiest living as, to appease the anti-essentialists) turns out to be, it’s already itself and knowing it will make you happier than denying it or making something up for the sense of closure.
It’s okay to be whatever you turn out to be. (Yes, even “someone who guesses wrong and tries to live as the wrong gender for decades”.) I never really had a problem internalizing that but Internet strangers telling you it’s okay seems to help.
Try it on for size! Use text-based support groups, with people sufficiently open-minded that they’ll happily comply if you tell them you’re trying names and pronouns to see how they feel and change those every few weeks.
You’ve probably tried all the things you can do in private with no medical intervention (with clothing and hair and changing your apparent body shape and posture and so on). If it’s feasible for you, maybe try to do them whenever you’re in private for long enough that it becomes routine, and see how it feels when it’s not an extraordinary thrill.
Some subsets of the trans community are binarist essentialist judges of Who Is Truly One Of Us. Avoid those.
Share your anxieties. I don’t know if that’ll help you, I just want to feel less alone.
Genderfluidity is a thing, and some people do have ‘phases’ of feeling like one gender that eventually end. Neither of those things invalidate the individual’s feelings in the moment, or make it less necessary to have a way of handling the current situation so that it doesn’t take over your life.
It may be worth considering what happens in the worst case if you go through with a modification you’re considering, and how you might handle that. Like, to use a personal example, I’m genderfluid between female, third gender, and agender, and I’m considering top surgery; the worst case scenario is that my gender might solidify on ‘female’ in such a way that I find it unpleasant to be flat-chested. I don’t think that’s very likely—as of right now I’m perfectly fine with the idea of being flat-chested even when I’m ‘in female mode’ - but even if it happens I think I can handle it, and it also suggests that I might want to go with a reduction, to the point where I can comfortably wear a binder when I feel particularly inclined and not have ’em be such a big deal the rest of the time (kinda not an option right now) rather than an outright removal.
Share your anxieties. I don’t know if that’ll help you, I just want to feel less alone.
I may feel that the concept of the “other” gender applies more to myself than my own, but I don’t know that my concept of genders is in any way correct in that it matches what other people think, or even matches what I will think in the future.
I have some strong hang-ups regarding sex that I know are deeply influencing me and no way of getting rid of them to see how gender identity feels to me without them. There is no real reason for these hang-ups to exist, I received no unusual conditioning. For all I know they could be a result of GID.
If I expect that further analysis will produce a certain result, should I just update now to that result and act appropriately?
I don’t know what your hang-ups consist of, but wanted to note that asexuality is a thing—I’ve heard a few stories from people who [now] identify as asexual who had thought [previously] that they were broken.
* I have now read downthread and suppose it likely that you have already considered this.
Not necessarily, because training/becoming accustomed to things is an important human trait that decision theorists generally ignore. If you think you’ll feel something at a certain point, trying to force it now might still be the wrong choice. IE, trying something might be the best way to find out how you feel about it, because without trying it you might be stuck wondering or might have other problems.
Because while it exists for both primary and secondary sexually dimorphic characteristics, it is much stronger for the secondary ones.
That is actually not uncommon—I can only offer anecdata here as I’m not aware of any studies on the matter, but have met rather a lot of trans and genderqueer people who find secondary dimorphic characteristics to be much more emotionally-salient to dysphoria than the state of their genitalia. It also not infrequently shifts over time—some people seem to change on that after being hormones for a while, or after getting some major procedures (not necessarily GRS) done. I know a post-op trans woman who still gets very strong dysphoria because the secondary characteristics still feel wrong to her.
Even if these thoughts are “motivated cognition” as far as I can tell there’s not any cure for them. You can view surgery and/or HRT as a palliative answer for not hating your body.
Might not be. In the worst case (as in BDD), body mod doesn’t help. In the best case, you actually have a different problem (gender roles too stifling, some genderqueerness that only requires some accommodation rather than full transition, a different problems with your body or with social roles, a different psychological problem) and solving that helps.
I don’t understand how feeling like you’re in the wrong body manifests as suffering. If I woke up as someone or something other than what I feel like I am, I would react positively or negatively on a case by case basis. Whether my self-image matched my body would not be at all relevant.
If you were transformed into a being with no sexual characteristics at all, say, a magical non-anthropomorphic helium balloon, would you expect your suffering to be abated or partially abated or unchanged?
I don’t understand how feeling like you’re in the wrong body manifests as suffering.
Me either really. It just hurts when I notice it. You may as well ask how feeling a wound on your flesh manifests as suffering.
If you were transformed into a being with no sexual characteristics at all, say, a magical non-anthropomorphic helium balloon, would you expect your suffering to be abated or partially abated or unchanged?
The thought experiment is nonsensical to me. My brain would not be able to consider that my body and if it were modified to be able to do so, the method by which it were modified would entirely determine the effect.
I cannot imagine myself as a helium balloon. I can imagine a helium balloon and attach the label “me” to it, but this does absolutely nothing for me in terms of self-image or emotion.
I cannot imagine myself as a helium balloon. I can imagine a helium balloon and attach the label “me” to it, but this does absolutely nothing for me in terms of self-image or emotion.
Attaching the label “me” to the image I see in the mirror is essentially all I do when thinking of myself as my body. What are you doing apart from that?
I don’t understand how feeling like you’re in the wrong body manifests as suffering.
Me either really. It just hurts when I notice it. You may as well ask how feeling a wound on your flesh manifests as suffering.
I assume you meant the wound thing as an example of irreducibly simple suffering, but actually I’ve spent quite some time investigating things of this kind through meditation, and they do break down further, in ways that make them much easier to deal with. In fact, physical pain is one of the forms of suffering most amenable to this.
What I was trying to get at with the balloon question is are you troubled by your body being gender A, or by it not being gender B? Is it an aversion, or a desire, or a restlessness, or what?
Attaching the label “me” to the image I see in the mirror is essentially all I do when thinking of myself as my body. What are you doing apart from that?
I can’t speak for Liza, but what I mean when I talk about thinking of myself as my body (though I’m more likely to use the language “identifying with my body”) is something like attending to the experiences that come from that body.
The extent to which I do this varies greatly; in particular, in certain forms of meditation I attend to those experiences to the exclusion of almost everything else. That said, if I’ve been doing a lot of that sort of meditation in a short period of time, I find that my default level of identifying with my body changes without reference to how much attention I’m actually paying at that moment. (It’s also true that my default level of attention changes, but that’s a separate issue.)
So “I’m identifying a lot with my body” can either describe a right-this-moment altered state of my attention, or a more broad frequently-over-the-last-few-weeks altered state.
Attaching the label “me” to the image I see in the mirror is essentially all I do when thinking of myself as my body. What are you doing apart from that?
I really don’t know. Perhaps my ability of introspection is inferior to yours.
What I was trying to get at with the balloon question is are you troubled by your body being gender A, or by it not being gender B? Is it an aversion, or a desire, or a restlessness, or what?
All three. It exists at every level of abstraction. If I try to ignore it, the aversions and restlessness do not go away.
Maybe think of it as not a disorder, but rather an unusually weak match between your identity and your genitalia (and/or societal gender norms), assuming this is what you feel. Would you still be suffering if there were no behavioral expectations of you? Would you feel normal and happy if a lot of people were like you and you associated with them at will without any stigma attached? Would you still strongly desire sex reassignment?
Yes, that would not change my body
No, same as above
Yes
You have physical dysphoria independently from perception of gender by others. How does that not clinch it utterly and completely?
Because while it exists for both primary and secondary sexually dimorphic characteristics, it is much stronger for the secondary ones.
Also, can such feelings not be generated by motivated cognition? See body dysmorphic disorder.
Many of the trans women and most of the trans men I’ve known are okay with their primary sexual characteristics. Women’s T-shirts reading “I heart my penis” exist for a reason.) My sample is rather biased toward the less-than-binary, but still it goes to show that this isn’t rare.
BDD looks social, not physical, to me but I’m not an expert. (Not that social dysphoria is irrelevant, anyway.)
I’m in a similar boat as yours. What I recommend is:
Don’t panic. Litany of Gendlin; whatever your true gender (defined as the gender you would be happiest living as, to appease the anti-essentialists) turns out to be, it’s already itself and knowing it will make you happier than denying it or making something up for the sense of closure.
It’s okay to be whatever you turn out to be. (Yes, even “someone who guesses wrong and tries to live as the wrong gender for decades”.) I never really had a problem internalizing that but Internet strangers telling you it’s okay seems to help.
Try it on for size! Use text-based support groups, with people sufficiently open-minded that they’ll happily comply if you tell them you’re trying names and pronouns to see how they feel and change those every few weeks.
You’ve probably tried all the things you can do in private with no medical intervention (with clothing and hair and changing your apparent body shape and posture and so on). If it’s feasible for you, maybe try to do them whenever you’re in private for long enough that it becomes routine, and see how it feels when it’s not an extraordinary thrill.
Some subsets of the trans community are binarist essentialist judges of Who Is Truly One Of Us. Avoid those.
Share your anxieties. I don’t know if that’ll help you, I just want to feel less alone.
All good points. I have two to add:
Genderfluidity is a thing, and some people do have ‘phases’ of feeling like one gender that eventually end. Neither of those things invalidate the individual’s feelings in the moment, or make it less necessary to have a way of handling the current situation so that it doesn’t take over your life.
It may be worth considering what happens in the worst case if you go through with a modification you’re considering, and how you might handle that. Like, to use a personal example, I’m genderfluid between female, third gender, and agender, and I’m considering top surgery; the worst case scenario is that my gender might solidify on ‘female’ in such a way that I find it unpleasant to be flat-chested. I don’t think that’s very likely—as of right now I’m perfectly fine with the idea of being flat-chested even when I’m ‘in female mode’ - but even if it happens I think I can handle it, and it also suggests that I might want to go with a reduction, to the point where I can comfortably wear a binder when I feel particularly inclined and not have ’em be such a big deal the rest of the time (kinda not an option right now) rather than an outright removal.
I may feel that the concept of the “other” gender applies more to myself than my own, but I don’t know that my concept of genders is in any way correct in that it matches what other people think, or even matches what I will think in the future.
I have some strong hang-ups regarding sex that I know are deeply influencing me and no way of getting rid of them to see how gender identity feels to me without them. There is no real reason for these hang-ups to exist, I received no unusual conditioning. For all I know they could be a result of GID.
If I expect that further analysis will produce a certain result, should I just update now to that result and act appropriately?
I don’t know what your hang-ups consist of, but wanted to note that asexuality is a thing—I’ve heard a few stories from people who [now] identify as asexual who had thought [previously] that they were broken.
* I have now read downthread and suppose it likely that you have already considered this.
Not necessarily, because training/becoming accustomed to things is an important human trait that decision theorists generally ignore. If you think you’ll feel something at a certain point, trying to force it now might still be the wrong choice. IE, trying something might be the best way to find out how you feel about it, because without trying it you might be stuck wondering or might have other problems.
That is actually not uncommon—I can only offer anecdata here as I’m not aware of any studies on the matter, but have met rather a lot of trans and genderqueer people who find secondary dimorphic characteristics to be much more emotionally-salient to dysphoria than the state of their genitalia. It also not infrequently shifts over time—some people seem to change on that after being hormones for a while, or after getting some major procedures (not necessarily GRS) done. I know a post-op trans woman who still gets very strong dysphoria because the secondary characteristics still feel wrong to her.
Even if these thoughts are “motivated cognition” as far as I can tell there’s not any cure for them. You can view surgery and/or HRT as a palliative answer for not hating your body.
Might not be. In the worst case (as in BDD), body mod doesn’t help. In the best case, you actually have a different problem (gender roles too stifling, some genderqueerness that only requires some accommodation rather than full transition, a different problems with your body or with social roles, a different psychological problem) and solving that helps.
This is why most things recommend transitioning slowly and/or in steps. HRT before surgery, living as whatever gender before surgery, etc.
I don’t understand how feeling like you’re in the wrong body manifests as suffering. If I woke up as someone or something other than what I feel like I am, I would react positively or negatively on a case by case basis. Whether my self-image matched my body would not be at all relevant.
If you were transformed into a being with no sexual characteristics at all, say, a magical non-anthropomorphic helium balloon, would you expect your suffering to be abated or partially abated or unchanged?
Me either really. It just hurts when I notice it. You may as well ask how feeling a wound on your flesh manifests as suffering.
The thought experiment is nonsensical to me. My brain would not be able to consider that my body and if it were modified to be able to do so, the method by which it were modified would entirely determine the effect.
I cannot imagine myself as a helium balloon. I can imagine a helium balloon and attach the label “me” to it, but this does absolutely nothing for me in terms of self-image or emotion.
Attaching the label “me” to the image I see in the mirror is essentially all I do when thinking of myself as my body. What are you doing apart from that?
I assume you meant the wound thing as an example of irreducibly simple suffering, but actually I’ve spent quite some time investigating things of this kind through meditation, and they do break down further, in ways that make them much easier to deal with. In fact, physical pain is one of the forms of suffering most amenable to this.
What I was trying to get at with the balloon question is are you troubled by your body being gender A, or by it not being gender B? Is it an aversion, or a desire, or a restlessness, or what?
I can’t speak for Liza, but what I mean when I talk about thinking of myself as my body (though I’m more likely to use the language “identifying with my body”) is something like attending to the experiences that come from that body.
The extent to which I do this varies greatly; in particular, in certain forms of meditation I attend to those experiences to the exclusion of almost everything else. That said, if I’ve been doing a lot of that sort of meditation in a short period of time, I find that my default level of identifying with my body changes without reference to how much attention I’m actually paying at that moment. (It’s also true that my default level of attention changes, but that’s a separate issue.)
So “I’m identifying a lot with my body” can either describe a right-this-moment altered state of my attention, or a more broad frequently-over-the-last-few-weeks altered state.
I really don’t know. Perhaps my ability of introspection is inferior to yours.
All three. It exists at every level of abstraction. If I try to ignore it, the aversions and restlessness do not go away.