Low grade gender dysphoria, a theory

[nancylebov]

Some of the people who are most naturally immune to the idea that fatness is a moral issue are those who are naturally thin. Some of them are at a low comfortable weight, some of them struggle to keep enough weight on to be healthy, but either way they know that not being fat isn't an accomplishment for them, so they're bewildered at what a big deal gets made of it.

Well, I'm comfortable being female. I have issues in that general neighborhood, but just living in the body I've got is fine with me. If there was a cheap, safe, reversible way of becoming male, I'd try it to see whether that was just as good but different, but that's neophilia rather than gender issues.

When I heard about what people go through with gender dysphoria, it took very brief thought to realize if one's sex was somehow cross-grained to one's temperament/spirit/texture of life, it would be an utterly miserable thing, and it's excellent that sex change hormones and operations are available.

What I'm wondering is whether low-grade gender dysphoria is really common-- something much less than what drives people to sex changes, but which leaves people feeling that if they're enduring pain, no one else should be allowed to make drastic changes to feel good.

This is not intended as a complete explanation of transphobia, just wondering about a possible piece of it.

Addendum:: I certainly wasn't thinking that low intensity gender dysphoria would always lead to transphobia, but I want to state clearly that I absolutely think people can have low grade gender dysphoria without being transphobic.

Comments

[rm.livejournal.com]

First paragraph: YES. I am skinny because I have a genetic disease.

Low-grade gender dysphoria. I'm, obviously (I hope), not transphobic, but I do think the existence of such a thing makes sense. I am totally fine in this body, in part because I'm spent a lifetime learning how to make it work and how to make it work for me (would I be as comfy in it if I hadn't been a dancer, hadn't learned to make it a tool and it was just this gendered lump? I don't know. I'm guessing not so much) but I do feel, if not pain (I do, on occasion), a tremendous amount of confusion/puzzlement about my flesh sometimes, and also, sometimes, when I see someone who is masculine in a way I really admire I get very sad that I will never know what it's like to take up space/move through the world that way.

But mostly it's just eh, a thing... but that's less about my gender comfort than the fact that the I get to live in a world without rules by and large.

Someone without the flexibility that my life has, might well be very angry and scared. Especially a bio!male as they are given less room to flex on these issues, which is one reason I am glad I was born female, because I think the way I feel would be much harder if it were the same set of issues and I had a cock.

[sethg]

On the one hand, I think that if I had been raised in a culture where changing one's gender was a thoroughly uncontroversial choice (as in some Native American cultures), I would have done it. On the other hand, when I was younger I thought I might be trans, spent a number of months subscribed to an email list for trans people (you kids today with your Webs and Live Journals....), and felt like the participants seemed to share some common ground of psychological experience that I didn't grok.

So, yeah, you could describe my own loose wiring as "low-grade gender dysphoria", but I think "real" trans people are different from me in kind and not just in degree.

My suspicion is that transphobia has something to do with the gender identity of the transphobic person--there's some undercurrent of "if this person is allowed to JUST CHOOSE their gender then it threatens the boundary of a category that is very important to me".

[bruceb.livejournal.com]

I've been wondering about that too lately, and whether it might feed into depression and other psychological suffering, and possibly also (when it goes unrecognized and un-dealt-with) into some authoritarian impulses, as a way of projecting the unease outward.

[regalpewter.livejournal.com]

It certainly expresses that way in the transperson when they deny thier dysphoria. I'm living proof of that. I really do not like who I was prior to beginning transition.
YIS,
WRI

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Some of the people who are most naturally immune to the idea that fatness is a moral issue are those who are naturally thin.

Yes, most definitely.

What I'm wondering is whether low-grade gender dysphoria is really common-- something much less than what drives people to sex changes, but which leaves people feeling that if they're enduring pain, no one else should be allowed to make drastic changes to feel good.

That makes a good bit of sense to me. Given that some studies have shown that maybe as many as 1 in 200 or so people in the US actually seek medical help of some sort for gender dysphoria, I'm betting that people who feel the same way but don't seek out medical help are far more common.

[thette.livejournal.com]

I used to have gender dysphoria, but I changed my gender identity (from female to butch), and have been happily well adjusted since. (Lost me my "good girl" complex and my tocophobia, all in one shifting of my mental gears.) Sometimes, I go out in female drag.

[kiya]

One of the things that gets mentioned on the Questioning Transphobia blog every so often is people blowing off trans issues with stuff like, "Nobody's happy with their gender." Certain people object to being referred to as cis women because of their discomfort with socially assigned femaleness.

Like thette, I dealt with my own gender dysphoria issues by shifting gender identity (in my case from 'female' to 'genderqueer').

When talking to trans people, I have the same experience as sethg_prime; there's a real difference in experience there. I find menstruation unpleasant, but I'd never refer to it as "cognitive dissonance week", for example, a term every trans man I've discussed the subject with has come up with. For all my genderqueerness, I'm cissexual.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I'm always of split emotions on the gender dysphoria. I *don't* want people going through life feeling they have the wrong body. (My local paper just had a moving article on the plight of would-be transgender children; it was pretty clear that in some cases this is a bone-deep conviction rather than childish whim.) On the other hand, to some degree when people say that they feel like they belong to another gender, it feels to me like a way of saying that we've stil got too much rigidity in our gender roles, that someone can't be who they are with *whatever* equipment they've been issued.

As I said, this is just a matter of feelings for me. I have had it carefully explained to me that gender dysphoria is about far more than cunlturally-implanted roles and is about feeling absolutlely physically in the wrong body. I don't expect to ever understand it emotionally; it's just one of those things I have to be content to understand intellectually and to respect other people enough to accept that it's true for them.

I think that's akin to what you're getting at above, a way to emotionally understand something that is otherwise foreign to you.