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  • AutomatedPossum [she/her]
    ·
    8 months ago

    The idea that nonbinary people do not experience dysphoria is a transmedicalist myth that has no basis in reality. Nonbinary people can experience the full range of dysphoria triggers as binary trans people, or some of them, or none, or specific ones that do not really apply to others. I mean, dysphoria is a difficult, medically outdated term to begin with, it essentializes and pathologizes transness in very problematic ways. Trans was considered a mental illness and dysphoria the hallmark symptom of that illness, and that's just a load of bullshit. There's nothing wrong with being trans, it's just how some people are, and that's slowly beginning to sink in among people who actually work with us. Nowadays, the clinical consensus is more and more to talk about gender incongruence instead - in the community, people still say dysphoria because it's a household word for trans folks and because it fucking hurts when you still feel that way, but incongruence actually describes better what is actually going on: a disconnect between one's sense of self and one's material body that can be resolved or at least alleviated by matching the body to the identity.

    Anyway, nonbinary people have a very wide range of gender identities, people always overlook that because they think of us as "the third gender" when we're actually all the genders out there (and that's a lot of genders, i honestly don't bother keeping track because it's pointless). So, depending on how our gender identity and our sexual characteristics line up, there can be all kinds of symptoms for dysphoria / gender incongruence. If there's one thing you can say about nonbinary people, it's that you can't generalize things about us, but most of the enbies i know are either medically transitioning or want to or have medically transitioned in the past, often in the ways people are used to and sometimes in ways that are very unexpected. But most of us aren't in the system as "nonbinary", because a lot of places gatekeep us and don't get what our deal is. Most professionals i've seen for my transition either never learned that i'm nonbinary or i only told them when i knew them well enough and knew i could trust them. We need to fly below the radar, so there's this mistaken idea that it's normal for enbies to not transition medically, and that just doesn't hold up to how things really are out here in the trenches.