her,,, expolde
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CW for repression
I was looking up perspectives of people who had gender dysphoria but chose not to transition on
and here's an interesting excerpt I found:
Is that normal for an allegedly cis person? To take a decade plus to "build a person" you're happy with, and then ruminate on it for another five years? I'm around cis men a lot to me it seems that for them "getting your life together" mostly means getting swole and getting a better paying job and maybe building a social circle of people you hang out with regularly. tbf the getting a good paying job can take a while, but I think you can be happy with a just okay job if you have the other two, which, I can't really speak from personal experience, but from what I've seen in mentally healthy cis guys shouldn't take nearly that long.
(I am probably oversimplifying what cis men generally want for their lives, but I'm just saying, barring things like mental illness and extreme poverty, I've never seen one take that long to grow into themselves)
I don't wanna cast aspersions but if someone is struggling with their gender for 15 years they probably will continue to struggle after all that suppression and it's gonna come roaring back when they're much older
repression
Probably not, I'm gonna say.
You wanna know what that quoted text reads like to me?
I hate that this advances subtly the idea that trans people are just afraid of gender expectations. It just reads like transphobic ideas with a lot of extra steps. Like
Oh yeah fam, better not think outside of the gender they assigned you, gotta LOCK IN and fucking "GROW UP"! You were just INSECURE AND CONFUSED bucko!!! Am I reading an itemised list of transphobic dogwhistles? "You'll grow out of it"??? It's the 4ch "FAILED MAN" or whatever shit isn't it, which centers exclusively the idea that not living up to the gender some doctor arbitrarily assigned you is some innate failure somehow, it's fucking ridiculous. For bonus points, it's (trans)misogynistic on account that it assumes being a woman is EASIER somehow, enbyphobic because it excludes the idea of shirking gender expectations, and doesn't even make sense within its own framework because it doesn't acknowledge that trans people are often opting for more, different-er social gender expectations.
I hate it and it displeases me, Idk.
spoiler
I feel like a cis person would just accept toxic masculinity is bad and they don't have to be that way.
That is definitely, 100%, what they mean.
Also people reading that experience and thinking that's what being trans is makes my brain hurt a lot.
I took longer than this, I knew from when I was a kid but I had a lot of abuse and lot of other things to deal with and being at the end of my rope is what it took to finally transition.
that's fair. I may have made this post projecting my own experience (never felt dysphoria until I was 18, and back then I didn't recognize it for what it was until I started learning more about gender in my late 20s, and cracked my egg just a couple years later) onto the person who posted this.
It's just frustrating to see someone like this, because the rest of the post was basically about how trans women shouldn't be considered women in society, and that gender affirming care shouldn't be allowed because "manning up" worked for him, which I'm not convinced actually worked if it took that long
I don't get dysphoria or euphoria, but I knew I wasn't cis, never wanted to be either, I'm intersex so my body changed different to my cis presentation too but I spent over 20 years dealing with everything.
hot takes
I believe him. There are lots of different experiences people have in life related to their gender. Trans people spend years or decades grappling with their gender, I don't think it's impossible that sometimes, less commonly, it will happen to a cis person, too. I mean, "becoming a man" has always been a major genre of fiction, so cis people must be thinking about it to some extent.
I think if you ask a room full of trans people, they'll all say it's repression. One huge trans fear is being "secretly actually cis" and they're just "delusional." So saying other people are repressing makes them feel more comfortable in their choice.
Tbh, when I was early on in seriously gender questioning, this is how I was. I had a really bad relationship with gender and femininity. I was doing a lot of fantasizing and wish fulfillment. I was coming at it from an angle of fixing something. I would pretty much exclusively experience gender dysphoria when my general anxiety disorder was acting up. When my anxiety calmed, I would question why I ever felt that way to begin with and would have very little interest in being feminine anymore. My anxiety was just latching onto something to fix and make myself feel better. Just so happens gender was my target. It wasn't always, though. Before that, it was my health I obsessed about. So the fact that my anxiety awoke dysphoria didn't mean I was trans any more than being anxious of my health was proof that I was sick.
Similar to this guy, I had to come to the conclusion that I am happy with myself in my body the way I am. When I felt safe and loving toward myself, the feelings of dysphoria dissipated.
Now, I'm different because this feeling of safety and security led me to want to pursue NB transition because I WANT to, not because I feel like I NEED to or like there is something inherently NB in my blood that I can't deny.
But, if things were slightly different, I could see myself being like this guy. Going back to being a man wouldn't kill me or anything. Then again, I was never afraid of male expectations (I think they're super easy tbh).
making a follow up to my own post since I still have some thoughts
thinking about it more, the amount of time itself isn't what fucks me up about this person's way of thinking. depending on how you measure it, I'm at least 1 and at most 12 years into "figuring out" my gender shit. And I don't know how long until I'd be able to say I have it figured out, could be 2 more years, could be 10 more years. It is what it is; it's complicated.
What's baffling to me is, how can you go through the psychological anguish of gender dysphoria for 10+ years and come to the conclusion that you were just a bit bashful about being masculine, that there isn't something deeper causing it? either they're deep in denial, or they and I have different ideas of what gender dysphoria is.
repping
I think it takes that long to make yourself dead inside so you no longer feel the dysphoria and can convince yourself that you don’t really need to transition. I might be projecting though
idk, I (unconsciously) did that for about 10 years as well and I felt like shit the whole time and the dysphoria came back stronger. though I will admit that aside from trying to move up in my career, I wasn't doing anything towards "building a person that I was happy with". I don't think there's enough repression you can do to make feelings about your true self go away.
I'm tired of thinking about this, so ultimately I think I agree with Thallos' idea that this was a cis person who went down the path of questioning his gender for whatever reason, and eventually decided that he wasn't actually trans, which is fine, but doesn't excuse his shitty opinions that trans people aren't valid and gender affirming care should be discouraged. It sucks that in some countries (notably
) that's the viewpoint most will gravitate towards because it's the closest to "normal".