asking for advice

[nerdflighter]

One of the things I do on my discourse blog is talk about the nature of binaries and how they erase a lot of grey areas. And recently, I was talking about how it's possible for cis people to be dysphoric, and how cis people can benefit from having access to the narrative around dysphoria.
And I got this message, in the form of a submission.

wanted to i guess vent about my personal experience w/ feeling dysphoria (maybe?) without being trans. you don’t have to post this; it might be better if you don’t since it would be weird to have people debating my Validity:tm: but idk it might be good as food for thought for your theories or you could just not read it. your posts just made me Think and i wanted to get the feelings out. sorry if any of this is weird or bad to read haha…
so personally i don’t consider myself trans in any way but i do experience something that at least to me seems like really really mild gender dysphoria. i might just be wrong about what dysphoria is so i’m gonna try to explain the exact feelings, where i think they’re coming from, and why i don’t think i am trans. for reference i am afab and don’t have any other brain stuff going on as far as i know (never been to a doctor for that kind of thing) aside from getting panic attacks sometimes.
so firstly i experience what is, as far as i know, social dysphoria. i don’t like being called “she” (when i was younger i used to dislike being called “he” too but i think that was mostly because i was offended by male being the default - so for logical reasons instead of emotional ones.) i don’t like being treated as female or the expectations associated with being viewed as female, although admittedly i think most women don’t regardless of if they’re cis or trans because of like misogyny and stuff. you know how it be… society. anyway in general being thought of as a woman makes me uncomfortable in most contexts including ones that are obstensibly positive. i also experience like… physical or sex dysphoria (not sure what the right term is.) i’m gonna avoid being graphic but in general i dislike my genitalia and wish i had a penis and usually imagine myself with one in sexual fantasies. i don’t have the same feelings towards my breasts though but i don’t especially… like them or anything.
so in my opinion the reason i feel like this despite not being trans is that i was (and am) really physically unattractive and socially inept and got bullied for it a lot as a kid. but even when i wasn’t being directly bullied i was still treated differently from female peers with more acceptable appearances and behaviors. when i would wear feminine clothes or makeup i was treated badly for it, because i was not a “real girl” to my peers. obviously this isn’t at all the same as what trans people experience but it created a disconnect for me between my technically assigned sex and how i was gendered by others. since i wasn’t seen as or treated as a girl but as some degendered/desexed other (and also i am still treated that way irl most of the time) so being treated as one pretty much solely online feels disorienting and upsetting and i feel some level of compulsion not to have the physical attributes that make me afab.
i have no desire to transition through surgery or hormone treatment so i think i’m not trans. it’s not for practical reasons either i just don’t think it would fix my dysphoria in any way. i don’t think socially transitioning would help either.
again i realize this isn’t the same as what trans people experience and it’s extremely mild but idk what to call it except dysphoria. not sure if i am cis or maybe some kind of non-trans nb?
whew long wall of text… anyway have a great day. you are cool!

this person reads as trans to me, and yet? they never would have come forward if I hadn't talked about cis dysphoria. and I can't justify labeling them as something they don't identify as, but at the same time I don't know how to weigh that out against their distress and the possible comfort they would find in a *trans label.
I don't know what I'm doing, basically, and I'd like to know what y'all think.

Comments

Yup

[wellthisisnice]

So, first, on a personal level: Big yup. I'm not really interested in being "female and proud", as i define my body issues not as "reclaiming my womanhood from the patriarchy" but as "reclaiming my body comfort from the patriarchy", but everything else is something i can see myself in. Especially the part about recoiling at the idea of being perceived as a model for cis womanhood, that's... so very uncomfortable... no no no.

On a more... general? theoretical? level: As far as i can tell, you're correct in that there's way more people out there with that total lack of strong inherent gender feelings than most people realize, but that they're not talking about it because of gender binarism, both the woman/man dichotomy and the cis/trans one.

An example: There's a paper about a study done in Israel with about 2000 people, called "Queering gender: studying gender identity in ‘normative’ individual" [pdf]. Here's the graph on the part where they asked how strongly respondants they felt "as a woman" and "as a man" (note that "Queer" here means non-cis):



Another example, related also to what hellofriendsiminthedark said above about the internet discourse on being cis/trans: A couple years ago i did a little study in my local ace community, with just about 60 participants, and aboult half of those who id as some non-binary gender (25% of the total) said that they weren't weren't cis, but also weren't trans. So, you know, fuck binaries of any and all type, basically.

Re: Yup

[melannen]

Yep, honestly, "fuck binaries" is as far as I get, most days.

Most of the stuff I said up there about "a woman and proud of it" and so on I phrase that way deliberately because it's very contingent on when and where I grew up (a second-wave-feminist but not super lgbt-aware family & community in the 1980s and early 1990s.) So I got a lot of my early gender awareness via "Girl Power!" sorts of things. If I was twenty years younger and growing up on Tumblr, I'm pretty sure I would have done a lot less work around owning the idea of woman-ness and be a whole lot more wavery about maybe being nb and genderqueer. (Which goes back to the idea of feeling like I'm sort of stuck between a world where femaleness would be default enough to feel fine - which is going away - and a world where nonbinary would be default enough to feel fine - which feels like it's coming - but not really being there either way.) (I've started using "lawful neutral" as my gender when it's fill-in-the-blank.)

That graph is really interesting! Although honestly I have no idea where I would put myself on it, absent cultural factors.

Re: Yup

[wellthisisnice]

Lawful neutral XD And yeah, gender is such a cultural thing, you literally cannot separate identity and presentation from context, which i... don't think is something Internet Discourse quite get.

Another interesting thing in that graph: No one seems to have put themselves in a 5 in either category.