Trans/Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning Thread

if you're worrying about not doing things in the proper order, the good news is there is no proper order, i think we're all sort of just making this up as we go along. there are plenty of people who don't come out until they're on hrt for a while.

one of the things i love about this board is that while there aren't a ton of trans people here, the ones who are tend to be more roughly my age. i definitely think there are unique challenges that gen x-ers have coming out but also things that we often have going for us that the younger people don't. i know there are other places for older people coming out but i just haven't clicked as much with them for whatever reason.

anyway i realized today that yesterday was the first time i went out as femme in a cis space, as opposed to just going to a queer group, and it suddenly makes a lot more sense that i had a touch of dysphoria.

i'm not nearly confident enough about my body to wear a lot of clothing explicitly marked as femme, so my own styles tend toward androgynously gay middle-aged soccer mom—yoga pants, big shirts/sweaters/hoodies—, middle-aged Patti Smith fan, middle-aged flannel lesbian, middle-aged soft Kurt Cobain, and middle-aged Catherine Christer Hennix lol.

wrote something this morning

The first time I saw someone self-identify as an attack helicopter I was hurt and upset. This was, of course, the intent. These days I mostly find it to be an interesting response to me.

There's, first off, the tit-for-tat aspect. I can't have what I want, apparently, because they can't have what they want. The idea that anything could be about anything but them is intolerable. Having gone through long periods of severe depression, depression which closed off my horizons so that I could see nothing beyond myself, I can relate to that.

I also am increasingly inclined to accept them. Sure, why not? I have the right to self-determination, you have the right to self-determination. And if a key part of their self-determination is wanting to be something that hurts and destroys... honestly, such people, it's easier to treat them as attack helicopters than it is to treat them as human beings.

Of course, that's only part of it. The other part of being an attack helicopter is being able to fly.

I dream of flying. A fair amount. Sometimes people will tell me that that's actually a sex thing, and I can't say for sure that sex has nothing to do with it, but that seems awfully reductive to me. I relate more to the Alfreda Benge poem "September the 9th".

I can sort of hear the response from self-identified attack helicopters now. Believing something, they might say, does not make it so. The woman in the poem can't fly, never will fly. She doesn't have the _bone structure_ for it.

Why is it so important to them? Why do they need to insist that she is incapable of flying? I mean, it's not up to them whether or not she can fly, is it?

I guess it wouldn't be fair to them, would it? If she could fly and they couldn't? Human beings can't fly unassisted, that's central to who they are. Their limitations define them.

The woman in the poem isn't trying to fly unassisted. She flies because the swallows gracefully accept her. Of course they do. To fly is to be graceful, and in any case they have no reason to not accept her.

I was told for many years, believed for many years, what was impossible for me, but I have a hard time believing that after seeing so many other people do those things, have a hard time understanding those people who continue to insist that I am fraudulent. I'm glad I'm no longer in a position where I'm required to care about or accept their bizarre beliefs.

Trigger warning: Transphobia, suicide talk.

I support the right to self-determination. So if the dev of Heartbeat says that he is completely an 100% a cis man, I accept that and will gender him accordingly. If he says that the characters in his old-school RPG, basically all of whom are kawaii animal girls with a wide variety of cute outfits, are all canonically cis human-animal hybrids, well, it's his game, he would know. If the existence of trans people, some of whom _might even have played and enjoyed his game_, is upsetting to him, well, that doesn't make him anything other than a totally normal, reasonable, and ordinary cis person. Just because us trans people upset him so much that he wants us to kill ourselves doesn't mean that he has any personal issues around gender that he would benefit from working through.

So I guess I'll just remove the game from my library, then. I'd ask for a refund but apparently "game author wants me to kill myself" is not covered grounds for a refund under Steam's refund policy. Well, I'm sure he's not the first person I've given money to who wants me dead!

Just because us trans people upset him so much that he wants us to kill ourselves doesn't mean that he has any personal issues around gender that he would benefit from working through.

I don't play many games—and I'm very much on the fringes of anything that could be called games culture—so I rarely see shit like this unless I go looking for it, but when I do I'm always just stunned by the sheer juvenility of it all. You can do anything with your life and you spend it coming up with increasingly tortured reasons to celebrate being pointlessly cruel to some small minority of people? Shit, I've been best pals with depression and self-loathing for most of my life and even I don't hate myself that much.

just here to say congrats and big love to all of you <3

looks like i picked the wrong week to start taking e

i started taking e this week too, why is this a bad week for it?

Sorry to be a dumb cis person, but what does "e" refer to in this context?

estrogen

"spironolactone" is a drug commonly taken with estrogen (in the us at least) to block testosterone, and now you know the pun in my username

and yeah, i grew up thinking of "e" as a slang term for molly

why is this a bad week for it?

oh it was just a dumb airplane joke about the SCOTUS business. cheers tho!

“Spironolactone T. Agnew” lol. have actually thought of getting a SC state motto tattoo—“dum spiro spero”

oh yeah, i've mostly been ignoring the supreme court thing. they can recapitulate bowers v. hardwick again if they want; i'm not expecting them to acknowledge my civil rights.

congrats on the e, btw!

i see a lot of people online complaining that spiro is basically the only fda-approved anti-androgen, we'll see how it works out!

btw k., did you ever get access to 77? i copied and pasted your request to the mod request forum but sometimes they do seem to totally miss requests and it needs to bumped.

the "dum" in that motto makes me think of "dum maro dum". i don't think i'd toke spiro.

they can recapitulate bowers v. hardwick again if they want; i'm not expecting them to acknowledge my civil rights.

OTOH i agree with the writer who observed that "they're seeking the right to gloat; they can already fire us" and OTO i'm like i don't want them to have that right, either!

did you ever get access to 77? i copied and pasted your request to the mod request forum

thank you for that! i haven't yet, but i didn't really pursue it, etc. i will tho, i'd like to read it.

I may be getting off of e soon - I talked with my new primary care doctor about being unhappy with the pace of some of the physical changes in my transition, so she gave me a raft of options to think over including Depo-Provera and progesterone taken as (sigh) a suppository. And a friend of mine recommended asking if I can switch from spiro to Lupron, as it appears to offer much better results for a lot of transwomen.

I certainly don't _like_ gratuitous and egregious cruelty, I don't like when it gets rewarded. The Supreme Court can declare gratuitous and egregious cruelty constitutional if they like, but they can't ever make it OK.

I mean people can go to Hobby Lobby if those are the values they want to support, and I guess people do because Hobby Lobby is still in business. We go to JoAnn's. My hope is that in the long run people will find that gratuitous and egregious cruelty is not a good foundation for a business, no matter how delicious your chicken sandwiches may be, but it's a hope and not an inevitability.

The real frustrating thing to me is when one doesn't have a choice. Whole segments of the economy are, it seems to me, at base hostile to LGBTQ+ people, including home improvement and anything involving pickup trucks. God forbid our toilet breaks and we need a new ballcock for it. God forbid I need some furniture moved.

I was kind of surprised that my GP gave me pills instead of transdermal stuff. I guess I'm in reasonably good health, but I am over 40.

I know a lot of people just starting (as I am) get frustrated at the lack of changes. I'm just not sure what I'm expecting from the changes. People say things like mood, softer skin, different sexuality, redistribution of fat, but these are all abstract things, none of them cause any dysphoria for me, and if none of them happened I don't actually know if I'd be unhappy. The stuff I want to change - less male pattern baldness, less belly fat, (arguably and in a very complicated sense) my extremely male voice, is all stuff HRT won't do anything about.

If anything there's just this general feeling I have of being slightly out of balance hormonally. Being too quick to anger, too slow to tears. Honestly that's all I want out of HRT, is to be able to cry. I also see a lot of people in the US complaining about spiro and wishing they could take Cypro instead, particularly in terms of the physical changes.

I am still waiting for someone, anyone, to just blatantly not accept me. The most I get is hesitation and awkwardness, which is bad enough but which I can't really give people shit for, I don't think they're necessarily in control of their gut reactions to that extent.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-limits-of-the-bit/

i only know a bit of chu from reading her tweets and maybe some of her recent ~takes~ but just on that basis this review of her new book doesn't seem too surprising.

The nonbinary pronoun "they" has been named Merriam-Webster's word of the year.

The American English dictionary revealed that searches for the term have risen by 313% in the last year. The definition of "they" as a nonbinary pronoun was added to the three other separate definitions of the word in September.

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/12/10/americas/merriam-webster-they-word-year-scli-intl/index.html

Still going in fits and starts but I guess I'm out to my brother, the admissions department of a major university and a faculty advisor so uhhhhhhhhhh

Congrats! "Fits and starts" is how this sort of thing usually goes as far as I can tell. :)

So it's Trans Day of Visibility and none of us are supposed to leave the fucking house, so that kind of sucks. In lieu of that I guess I'll just say it here: My name is Kate and I am a 43-year-old transgender woman. Whoever you are, whatever you're going through, you are not alone.

Hi Kate!

kate <3

Seen and respected Kate

Kate!

Thanks y'all. I'd post a picture but IDK if I'm quite to that point yet!

that's great Kate : )

yo kate !!

IDK if I'm quite to that point yet!

Go at your own speed, Kate. Even though it will be a special treat, we'll be patient, like good adults.

Yay Kate!!

missed this, Kate -- hello!

hi everyone :)

Hi Kate, you look gr8! :)

Gonna try giving this thread here a bump. I haven't read the whole thing. It's not something I feel like I can do right now. There's a lot of history here, which can be pretty painful. I have the temptation to say, given what's happened with threads containing awful things in the past, that starting a fresh thread might not be a bad idea... but what I run up against is that my understanding, at least, of gender is still rapidly changing, is still incomplete. I don't know that anything I say about gender today might not, in a short time, be as wrong and painful to read as reading what I had to say about gender issues in 2013 would be to me now.

Uh, transitions are awkward - so what I'm doing is I'm jumping off Branwell's last post in the "no boys allowed in the room!!!" thread. Addressing a couple different points.

Re: Cis people popping in and saying incredibly transphobic things - I have had, myself, a certain amount of opportunity to practice being, uh, _kind_ in cases where that response would not necessarily be called for. Not because of social pressure necessarily, but more as a personal choice on my part. At the risk of, like, undermining all the actual work I did in that particular thread, I'd sort of like to talk a little bit about it.

So I started a rolling thread, I don't know, a couple years? ago where I could post any old crap I felt like posting without having to worry about what _category_ it fell into. In some ways I guess my refusal to acknowledge appropriate boundaries and making everything fucking about me is the most cis male thing ever, but in other ways maybe my utter indifference to arbitrary externally imposed taxonomies is the most queer thing ever. Probably both at once. I don't know. Anyway I quit posting to it a couple months back, and this week a poster with whom I have a, uh, not entirely amicable history posted a question about a video he saw and vaguely remembered to the thread, because it involved two trans women and it seemed a reasonable place to start. (It turned out not to be a band I had any familiarity with - imago listens to way more music by trans women than I do, I suspect, but imago isn't a trans woman and I am, so...)

The problem is that he referred to the women in the video using a, uh. Well, let's just say it is _not_ how I prefer to be referred, and it is _not_ how I refer to other trans women. My response was fairly brief but I had to rewrite it a couple of times before posting it. His use of that word was _very_ upsetting to me, and I have, had, every right to express that upset at his inappropriate language. He should have known better. It wasn't and isn't my responsibility to educate him; it wasn't incumbent on _me_ to assume, particularly given the history we have, that what he said was honest ignorance, a mistake meant in good faith.

But I was, at least, _capable_ of it, which is not necessarily always true, so, after venting to my friends in the trans space I hang out in, I responded in a kind and helpful way, and I'm kind of happy with how it turned out.

Anyway that turned into kind of a vent, hope I don't start any shit with it.

Speaking of ignorance I really want to be open and up-front about mine. I am really pretty ignorant and bad at being respectful of transmasculine identities, to the point where I am not really entirely sure about how to speak about those identities respectfully. And I'm _awful_ with pronouns. I don't know why, but for whatever reason I have a really hard time gendering trans men and transmasculine people appropriately. I need to do more work, and mostly that means listening and learning from, particularly, people who are aligned with that sort of experience.

I like to assume that nobody that we're generally interacting with civilly is trying to hurt anybody else, people are just making mistakes (sometimes dumb mistakes). I like to issue brief corrections when necessary and oftentimes just not-engage if it seems fruitless. I learned just a couple of weeks ago that "savage" is no longer considered appropriate to use, either as a noun or an adjective, as it is painful for Indigenous people. Also: "peanut gallery". Learning learning learning!

Just yesterday I ran into a snag-- I'm setting up shows in Germany and my bio arrived and apparently the language has not developed gender-neutral pronouns-- I have to pick. My booking agent (a lovely woman, not known for being particularly up-on-her-shit, tho) said "I know fgti! he is a he! he is a man!" and I had to rather gently inform her that I was in a state of consideration, and etc., but eventually saw it as a losing battle, and accepted her request that I stick with masculine pronouns in countries where gender-neutral language is in a different place. (No gender-neutral pronouns in German? really? I thought this was the language that already had gender-neutral nouns in regular usage alongside masculine and feminine nouns!)

In general tho I feel that as I age, I'm moving away from idealism and more toward pragmatism. (Next stop: cynicism)

I just have to preface this with an acknowledgement that I'm feeling a bit of trepidation, being back in this particular space, and that kind of nervousness can lead to defensiveness, and that is coming 100% from me right now, not from anything you are doing or saying, Kate.

I suspect, from the stuff you've said before on other threads - even though you probably *are* unfamiliar with "transmasculine" identities (I have ~feelings~ about that word, which will become apparent shortly) - it's probably not the transmasuline aspect, it feels more like it's the nonbinary aspect?

That's why I suggested you go back and read the thread from the beginning, because we interrogated this a lot at the start of the thread, and came to some really good conclusions. I didn't have the word "nonbinary" back then, and as soon as I encountered it, I just grabbed onto it, like... MINE!!!! But at the start of the thread, we talked about how there are many different paths involved in what we were then calling "genderqueer".

Nonbinary is an umbrella, group term for identities which do not neatly fit the binary of "masculine"/"feminine" or "male"/"female", as well as an identity in itself. That there are some people who want NOTHING TO DO WITH GENDER. They want no gender, get that shit off them, it's all oppressive. These are the group generally called Agender, Neutrois, things like that. There's another group of people who, as Rev so vividly put it, WANT AAAALLLLLL THE GENDERS. Bigender, Pangender, Multigender, sometimes Genderfluid are words people use for this. Then there's the Chaotic genders, where it's like... I'm not a woman. I'm not a man. I'm an alligator, I'm a mama-papa coming for you, I'm the space invader, I'm a rock n roll pink monkey bird. I'm a hot damn spider from Mars, OK? (I have a friend who was literally studying nonbinary grammar for their dissertation, and they couldn't even come up with a comprehensive group term for us.) Not pink. Not blue. YELLOW. After a couple of years of engaging with various trans and nonbinary support groups, and therapy, that's the place where I feel most comfortable.

So with "transmasculine", I know a lot of people feel that's a completely natural and appropriate term for them, and that's fine. I feel much more like "Just because I am moving away from feminine, doesn't mean I am moving towards masculine?" For many years, I was treated like a butch woman. I'm really not. If you *need* a binary view, then you can think of me as a super-effeminate and flamoyant dude, which is closer to how I'd like to be seen and treated?

I hope that doesn't feel like I'm jumping down your throat, what I'm feeling right now is actually quite boisterous and passionate and excited about describing something that means a lot to me and makes me very happy!

As a very nonbinary person inhabiting a lot of nonbinary spaces, I am used to inhabiting naturally very mixed spaces. I know that a lot of trans people prefer to talk about their destination, rather than where they've come from, and they don't love the ~assigned at birth~ terms. But in mixed nonbinary spaces, you often can't even talk about which direction you're going, without specifying which direction you've come from? Myself, I'm happy with 'AFAB' of a descriptor.

...

Anyway. I hear you, Kate, about trying to engage politely, despite histories. I think in general, it's a good idea. But also, there is, for ~people who are raised as women~ or ~people who are treated as if they are women~ - there's also this huge social pressure to perform niceness, to perform pacification and mollification and manage the feelings of other people around you, even if it is damaging to your own psyche or your own person. Sometimes learning the gift of "returning awkwardness to sender" is part of our healing process of unlearning harmful gender roles.

hmmm. well, first off, i do appreciate that you would like me to read the entirety of the thread, and i do agree with you that there could be some value in it for me, that it could make our discussion here easier, and it's just not something i'm up to right now. that's on me, i'm really not in a good space for it, and if you need to walk away from this discussion because of that, i totally understand.

with regards to the non-binary thing... i do identify as non-binary, to the extent that i am actually legally non-binary. i don't center that part of my identity mainly because it confuses the hell out of cis people, they have a really difficult time wrapping their head around the idea that i am a non-binary transgender woman. so in cis contexts, or mixed cis-trans contexts, i settle.

especially i struggle with the diversity of trans experience, with the different ways we experience and understand and describe things, struggling with other people actively wanting to be treated in manners that i actively do not want to be treated - just like "dysphoria" "non-binary" can mean many different things in many different contexts and i'm sort of working to understand what that means to you as an AFAB, and even AFAB is something i have tended to avoid in conversation because for me, i really don't want my identity to be based around my AGAB, even though that's unavoidably and necessarily part of who i am. insofar as AFAB is the best way you can think of to self-describe right now, i am definitely supportive of that.

i do relate extremely strongly to what you're saying, to one's gender being Other, because that's part of who I am, part of my gender identity, and it's the part that I mostly keep out of sight because most people just have no idea what to do with it.

and yeah, to reiterate, engaging _politely_, assuming good intent, all those things, that is _my choice_, and not even always that, sometimes i literally do not have that option. it is _not_ required behavior.

OK, so I guess I have to dig a little into my history with that term: AFAB. Honestly, I had no idea that it was at all controversial until people blew up at me about it. It was taught to me by a trans woman, back in about 2012 or so, as a *neutral* way of expressing this stuff.

We met on a music production forum, we were the only two ~female-presenting~ producers there, and we became allies and bonded over the relentless blast of sexism we both experienced. It was my conversations with her which even made me understand that trans was a thing I could... *BE* in the first place. (You've got to understand, I came of age in the 80s. There was no information, and no way of getting information. When I discovered the existence of trans women, through my obsession with Andy Warhol and the work of the Velvet Underground, I searched for any evidence that there might be... another variety? I read actual books that claimed there was no evidence at all of trans men, and they must be incredibly rare, if they even existed at all. CN Lester calls this The Production of Ignorance, and it was very effective. I met a flesh and blood trans woman for the first time when I was still in my teens. I didn't meet a trans man until I was already in my 30s and had already made a deliberate choice to Try Very Hard at being a ~Cis Heterosexual~.)

Talking with my producer friend, and reading the work of other trans women - it became apparent that not only was 'woman' not a term I related to or identified with in any sense; but that also there was no useable or workable definition of 'woman' that included her, that also included me. I asked her, you know, what do I call myself then? Because I had been treated ~as a woman~ for 40+ years, there was not one single aspect of my life or choice that had been available to me, that had not been shaped by ~behaving and being treated as if I were a woman~ - so I asked her, how the hell do I express that? What do I call myself. And she supplied 'you're just AFAB' and that worked.

I liked the term because it was in the passive voice - it made it clear that this was something that had been *done* to me (non-consensually and against my will - I wouldn't have picked that box for me if I'd had a choice in it) but still expressed "this is how I lived 40+ years of my life that I cannot erase and pretend never happened." Everything that had ever happened to me, everything that had ever been available to me, felt like it had been shaped by that stupid, irrational, completely arbitrary "someone picked this box, not that box". And it was a great way for both of us to have these conversations, where we could explain "well, this happened because I was AMAB" was easier for her to say than the ickiness or trickiness of her trying to explain "well, while I was... living as a man? treated like a man? acting as if I had to be a man when I was actually a woman? How do I say that?" We understood each others' abbreviations as that, shortcuts for describing experiences. Doings, not beings.

And in nonbinary communities and groups, where you have these very mixed groups... it genuinely decreases friction, as I tried to say on another thread. To understand that people can have the same identity, but be pointed in different directions.

To me, nonbinary is an adjective, so it would be weird for me to say "I'm a nonbinary". (I guess AFAB is also an adjective, but I've got more used to nouning it, as it is ~doing the grammatical work~ that the word 'woman' used to do.) Trans is an adjective, nonbinary is an adjective - what's the noun? Person? (That's kind of what we agreed upthread.) I'm not even sure I'm a person, sometimes I think I might be a goddamn alien! (Autist is far more central to my identity, so 'alien' connects with that, haha.)

Like, what does non-binary mean to you? How do you work the adjective non-binary and the noun woman, into a space where you feel like you can live? (That's in no way intended as accusatory, I'm just being curious. Whenever I meet another non-binary person, I'm almost always like, ooh, tell me about it!) But if you don't feel comfortable discussing that in a mixed space, that's fine, too. Please *do* tell me to back off, if I get too much of the autistic-question-bombardment thing going on! God sorry this is a word vomit.

People do use that word in a million ways, and I find it useful and helpful to check in, if you're on the same page, or a different page in the same book - or in another library altogether?

(I did actually just want to talk about all the different kinds of dysphoria, and how to separate out the different kinds of gender dysphoria from other persistent dysphorias and long-term ideations, and also kinda tag FGTI in on that conversation if they feel comfortable doing so. (They know I suffer from that shit, too, and have had *extremely* bad experiences trying to even bring it up on ILX!) But I guess we gotta clear the backlog first.)

Actually, on second thought, we should actually stay off that one. :-/

I don't experience dysphoria. I've never internally identified as male, but functionally was interested in gay sex, so I had no desire to transition, and ID'd as male mostly out of convenience. I've recently have felt a pull toward an MtF transition but have been doing work to determine where this pull is coming from. (It is possibly a response to a decade of traumatic experiences, beginning with a sexual assault in 2009, and although this is apparently a valid response to trauma, the question is whether or not acting on this desire to transition will be positive in the long run is still a decision that is gestating.) Meanwhile, I've felt a desire (and have been encouraged to) change my mode of presentation and my pronouns, and have done so, and found it to be a positive change in my life.

See, I encountered 'dysphoria' as a term meaning 'long-term, persistent low mode and dissatisfaction' during treatment for depression as a teenager - years before I ever encountered it in the Trans sense.

So saying "I don't experience dysphoria" while also saying that you have experienced low mood, trauma, ideation... what you are experiencing might not be gender dysphoria or body dysphoria, but it is a form of dysphoria. That's what I'm trying to talk around? How to tell them apart. If a pull to "be NOT this" is a known response to trauma. Please forgive me if I'm overstepping, or asking you to talk about stuff you don't feel comfortable talking about.

Or if I've totally misunderstood or got the wrong end of the stick. (I do so all the time.)

FGTI, you said something that was extremely useful to me, last week, when I was at the bottom of a pile-on, about how some responses to sexual assault trauma are actually completely valid, and reasonable and rational responses to what's happened - in a way that is pretty distinct from transphobia, and that was so helpful to me. It helped me make sense of some stuff, and I wanted to thank you for the observation.

And also, there was something lovely that came out of a much-problematised Andrea Long Chu piece, which I think bears repeating - that it's OK to want things, even if you know they won't make you happy, or be positive in the long run. It's OK to want a thing anyway.

I'm shutting up now!

I still don't think calling it dysphoria is accurate, in my case. I feel as if changing my mode of presentation (and perhaps a future transition) is a happy thing, not so much an expression of current dissatisfaction but more of a divorcing myself from a psychological identity (gay maleness) that I have increasingly found myself not really having any commonality with. I like the physical acts of gay male sex, but have zero commonality with the way that gay men typically socialize sexually, use sex as a method of exerting power over each other, or are competitive with each other.

My suicidal ideation is unrelated. It is largely the product of external factors, which I'd simplify as: I have two stalkers (one cyber, one meat) who have been terrorizing me for four and two years, respectively.

"AFAB" is less "controversial" to me than it is... for me at least it's really difficult, because there are things we have in common as non-binary people, and things that we don't have in common, and each of us has unique things we find invalidating and, not infrequently, unique traumas informing our responses. There's still not, really, a universal language to describe those experiences. Like, I can say who I am, you can say who you are, but neither of us, individually, can really say who _we_ are or if there's even necessarily a "we" that can be meaningfully spoken about.

When it comes to self-determination it's not always, really, a logical process. I try on words like I try on other aspects of self and presentation, and if they fit, I keep them, and if they don't fit, I let them go, and I don't necessarily spend a lot of time trying to work out how they fit together logically. For a while, for instance, I tried on labels like "ace" and "demi" to try and describe my sexuality, and after a while I decided they didn't describe who I was, and I don't use either of those labels to describe myself. Now, somebody else might theoretically have a sexuality that's functionally completely identical to mine and describe themselves as "ace" or describe themselves as "demi" and they would be right to do that, just as right as I am to not describe myself as "ace" or "demi".

So when I started exploring gender I explored it as non-binary, for a whole host of reasons - it seemed less threatening, I wasn't sure if I really had the right to call myself a woman, so on, so forth. Eventually I did come to accept that I have that right, and so I do, but I have also found that non-binary still describes me. In a way that's hard to put into words. Sometimes I talk to people and they look at it as somewhere _between_ male and female, and that's not it for me. I don't identify as male _at all_. There's just this... otherness. The otherness isn't in conflict with the female, it's not one or the other, they're just orthogonal. Like, I don't wear men's shoes because I'm "non-binary", I wear men's shoes because they're more fucking comfortable than women's shoes. Whatever that "other" is I'm not sure they even _make_ clothes for it.

I do want to... I did write a fucking novel on dysphoria and I never posted it and I'm not sure I'm still confident enough in what I wrote to post it, but here's like part of it.

It is an extremely complicated subject for me, a word that signifies so many different things. In the original thread context, it was more about how even talking about "gender dysphoria" in the '90s indicated a, uh, significantly more advanced understanding of gender nonconformance than could be found in the cis public at large. I do think I am a special case here, in that I did work to actively avoid becoming knowledgeable about trans issues so that I could stay in denial. That was a _lot_ easier for me to do in the '90s than it was for me to do in 2018. "Infinite Jest" was, I think, the first time I had ever come across the word "dysphoria", and since much of the book was centered around the author's ongoing struggle with clinical depression, my memory is that I just thought of "dysphoria" as a special type of depression and had no idea what on earth it might have to do with gender. I also, at the time, didn't understand the difference between gender and biological sex, so... I was confused about a lot of things.

There is this ongoing temptation I have to... not to make determinations, but to wonder. I know that if I'd died in 2008, or 2018, or basically anytime before very recently, I would be remembered, for as long as I am remembered, as a cisgender white man. There are a lot of people no longer with us where I just don't know, can't know, whether or not they were _really_ cis, and the assumption is I guess always going to be that they were. At least some of those people, I suspect, would be trans if that had been something that was open to them, just like I would have been trans most of my life if it had been something open to me. I don't know how many. That's not a question anybody can answer. It doesn't keep me from playing the "Dead People Least Likely To Actually Be Cis" game; it just means I keep my guesses to myself.

Well, there's a start at least. Dysphoria, historically, is also a clinical diagnosis, and shit, explaining to cis people the difficulties around that is definitely some Deep Trans shit. Cis people have this tendency look at the term and focus on how much _better_ it was on what came before - for that matter, better than the clinical terminology that exists _now_. The ICD-10 codes for gender issues are completely, completely awful. And this is a set of diagnosis codes that were only adopted in the United States, like, five years ago - before then the available diagnosis codes were _even worse_.

Shit here in the US is typically done by WPATH standards, standards set up by folks who revere Harry Benjamin, the (cis male) Father of Transgender Medicine, the Father of Transmedicalism, as a hero. And I guess it was him where the term "dysphoria" came from. I don't know for sure. Best cite I could find was this overview:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1665579615000071

Which doesn't specifically give Benjamin as a source for the term, but does say that it was first proposed in 1973, right after a sentence that specifically mentions Benjamin.

And, yeah, there are some problems with it, and honestly as a clinical term I believe it is on its way out. I'm not a huge fan of a term that continues to place the onus on _me_ for feeling bad when other people treat me like shit, even if that feeling is redefined as not being intrinsically "disordered".

For certain trans health issues, I identify more with the term "gender incongruence", which hasn't been implemented anywhere as a clinical term but is part of the draft proposals for ICD-11. Even this term I have some slight reservations about. It posits "gender incongruence" as belonging to a new category, "conditions relating to sexual health". This is not technically false in most cases - my gender certainly has some bearing on my sexual health - but it does tend to blur the distinction between gender and sexuality. I don't have a better answer myself. We're a diverse bunch and we experience what we experience in so many different ways - coming up with one catch-all phrase to describe us is nearly impossible.

But at the same time it's necessary, because all we can say for sure is that whatever it is we all have tends to respond very well to gender-affirming treatments. And we've had to fight so, so fucking hard, still have to fight so fucking hard, to get those treatments. I was just thinking yesterday, one of the really eye-opening things for me about my transition is how contingent my existence is. It has been a struggle, is an ongoing struggle, to be permitted to exist, and if anything helps me in that struggle, you know, I'll take it.

But dysphoria, I think, does exist, does exist as a real thing, outside of those artificial clinical constructions, and the way it is manifested is... culturally determined to a significant extent.

FGTI, I hope you found a better place to talk out your stuff last night! I know from experience of having-been-stalked, how much it fucks with your head, how it can create a sense of social threat hyper-awareness which is functionally indistinguishable from the social threat hyper-awareness of extreme loneliness (as described so beautifully in Olivia Laing's The Lonely City), even while surrounded by friends.

There's so much I want to say about this: "have zero commonality with the way that gay men typically socialize sexually, use sex as a method of exerting power over each other, or are competitive with each other" but there's no meaningful way to say it, without sounding either gatekeepery or dismissive, like I'm just warning you off. If you feel like you want to be, or should be a woman, you should be a woman!!! I say that without reservations. However, if you think that ~being in the class of people who are considered women~ will in any way remove you from sex as competition, sex as power struggle, dominance structures, etc. - please do a lot more research into the topic. ~People who are classed as women~ exert dominance in different ways than cis male gays do, ways you may be wholey unfamiliar with, and ways you may be ill-equipped to cope with (trust me, I speak from experience on this one!) That doesn't mean they aren't there. Yes, even queer women.

This is absolutely not intended as gatekeeping, or warning you off! Just a "please be careful, do some research" to someone I really like and respect and want to help avoid getting hurt.

Kate - I can't tell you how *happy* I am, and how grateful I am, that you write these blog-length posts with so much research and thought in them, and so much to think about and engage with! A couple of days ago, I was reading classic ILX threads like "The Cult of the New" and "Objectivity vs Subjectivity" and thinking "why does no one on ILX write like this any more?" and now here you are, doing just that. And I love it. I appreciate it. During my morning Forest Bathing session, I was walking round my woods mentally thinking through your post and having a conversation with it, and it was the best thing, most joyful thing. I'm going to eat the rest of my breakfast then come back and give you a thoughtful response, but I just wanted to say how much I appreciate your presence and your thoughts!

Gonna tackle Dysphoria first, as the easier of the two subjects. (LOL)

I think part of my confusion around the term is ~all of my austisms~. I often struggle to distinguish physical distress from emotional distress. e.g. I experience a thing I call 'depression headaches' - where the depression is so intense and so localised, it feels like a headache, even though it involves no physical pain! Also, being around a source of unpleasant noise I cannot avoid does cause me actual, physical pain - autistic hyperacusis. The way that trans people I knew used to talk about dysphoria, I kind of assumed it was similar in quality and intensity to autistic hyperacusis, like, "Augh! Augh! Get it off! Make it fucking stop NOW!!!"

We did a group session around dysphoria, and one person said, "no, it's more like - you look at your 'junk' (gestures to crotch) and you just think 'YUCK'" and I was like, nah, mate, that's completely normal. That's just how everyone feels about their own genitals. It's completely disgusting having genitals! And everyone around the table looked at me like o_0. Like, sure, the vaginaphobia of misogyny is a real thing, but most cis people are not revolted by their own bodies to quite the extreme that I am.

I do have "Augh! Augh! Get it off! Make it stop now!!!" responses, but they tend to be towards being on the receiving end of misogyny. "How dare you! It's wrong to treat *anyone* like that, but it's particularly horrible because __I Am Not A Woman!!!__" That is where I experience the most friction around being trans. When I utilise modes of behaviour which are reserved for men, which are considered completely within the limits of normal and accepted behaviour for men, but are off limits for ~people who are considered women~ and will be heavily policed as such. (There are, indeed, other behaviours which are considered off limits for ~people who are considered men~. I'd struggle _just as hard_ with those, if I became a trans man.)

I experience it as *friction* and I've always called it friction.

I think that dysphoria, as a medical depression thing, is that certain specific kind of depression which is caused by being exposed to long-term friction that one cannot get away from. Treating the depression as ~just mysterious depression with no cause~ will not work. One has to work out what is causing the friction, and remove the source of the friction, otherwise all the CBT, the antidepressants, electroshock therapy, whatever, that you throw at the dysphoria is never going to have any effect. (e.g. most therapy did jack shit for my mental health issues, until I got my autism diagnosis, and a few minor but important adjustments at work had a pretty miraculous effect.)

Being a non-standard gender, in a binary-gendered-world is a HUGE and relentless source of constant friction. I think that What Dysphoria Is, is the reaction to the friction. The friction can take many forms, the reaction can take many forms. Friction might not even be experienced as "capital-D Dysphoria" but more like, "But things are just so much *better* and *nicer* and *happier* when I don't have to deal with all that friction!" So anything that removes friction, such as medical transition, but even social transition, and minor things like pronoun changes, will have a salutory effect on relieving the distress caused by the friction.

So medical transition (or even just social transition) can be one theoretical approach to relieving friction. But, also, the promises of genuine Transformative Radical Feminism can offer a theoretical approach to relieving friction. Smashing the gender *binary* into a million shiny, glittering pieces, where everyone could have their own self-determined gender, liberated from biology and respected by all - that would also relieve friction. It is utterly utopian to want to change society on that scale. It would be amazingly wonderful to live in that world where gender assignments ~simply didn't matter~, because we so manifestly and obviously do not. As trans people, we change our individual selves, using gender confirming treatments and methods to reduce friction, because reducing friction reduces suffering.

You're right, we fight so hard for changes that are "only marginally less terrible than the way things were before" like cat shit smells marginally better than dog shit.

But we do still need to fight for those changes, and cling onto them, imperfect though they may be.