Coming soon at your workplace or educational facility: Dysphoria day! Where every cis person is forced to present in a way they don't agree with! Now cis people know what it's like! If you're cis on that day, you have to show up presenting as the opposite binary gender! You will be assigned a new name! You will be assigned new pronouns! You will revel in the misery for one day, just to see what trans people deal with for years of their lives, if not decades!

Advantages:

  • now cis people know how it feels

  • someone's egg is getting cracked lol

Disadvantages:

  • you can just call out

  • the extreme immorality and cruelty of it all please don't actually do this

  • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]
    ·
    8 days ago

    In my conworld there was a coming-of-age ceremony taking place during total lunar eclipses, where boys and girls coming of age (i.e. on the cusp of puberty) had to present as the other gender for a day. The way this was framed was that being a good spouse means walking a mile in one's spouse's shoes — which is pretty heteronormative, but it was a heteronormative society so that's honestly to be expected. And so the traditions of this festival included offering someone one's shoes as a love confession, and these shoes would then typically be kept as a memento after being worn for the festival. The festival would conclude with a big procession of those coming-of-age into the town square, for a chain dance with sung recitations of folk songs and epic poetry until the time of totality. Otherwise there was various fun and games and food in the hours before the procession, and people would often go to the local temple to pray and donate and stuff, and a lot of kids would take the "disguise" personae they'd adopted as an opportunity to pull harmless pranks on people. There was often a lot of creativity in these personae, some personae even gained a "legendary" status with "lineages" in subsequent festivals, and some kids even created and distributed cards describing their personae.

    There was a pretty normalized third gender in this society, and so a lot of those who got funny gendy feelings from the festival ended up living as that third gender shortly after the festival. Believe it or not the cis kids participating in this tradition, on the other hand, generally did not experience much dysphoria from it, if any. It was, after all, just a day of fun that everyone else was doing, so one did not risk being seen as less one's gender for participating... That is, unless one did something to imply that one enjoyed the crossdressing "a bit too much". So if anything, not participating in the festival would cause cis kids dysphoria, as regardless of the actual reasons why one chose or situationally could not participate in the festival — such as, I dunno, it being loud and overstimulating, not that I'm speaking from experience or anything — teenage dickheads would invariably jump on the opportunity to accuse one of being insecure in one's own gender or "afraid" of the opposite gender.

    Both the festival and the third gender ended up being heavily suppressed as "removed" during the colonial period, and today both are slowly being revived despite a lot of lingering colonial brainworms in the general population.

    • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      ·
      7 days ago

      Believe it or not the cis kids participating in this tradition, on the other hand, generally did not experience much dysphoria from it, if any.

      That was what I thought when reading OPs comment at the end:

      the extreme immorality and cruelty of it all please don’t actually do this

      Like if it was just a thing everyone did then I don't think any cis gendered people would care. I know I wouldn't give a shit.