What is gender dysphoria?

Explaining gender dysphoria to people who don't have it can be interesting. I put up with it all my life but didn't do much to alleviate it other than boiling point episodes of cross gender expression which served as panacea to get me through until the next flare up.

I don't want to pathologize it because that desire we feel was turned into a medical condition so that people could get access to care. You had to prove yourself to gatekeepers and had to have your narrative straight to get access to assistance which would alleviate your suffering. By the 1980's Ray Blanchard had very deliberately tried to turn help seekers into those suffering an illness of strictly sexual dysfunction.

Based on the many narratives I have read, dysphoria is experienced a little differently by each person but could reasonably be summarized as "there's something off with the way I am expected to live my gender which does not work for me". Being born in the wrong body has by now become a bit trite and overused but I greatly favor Anne Vitale's brilliant descriptor of "gender expression deprivation anxiety"

We can also play with gender and not have dysphoria and there are gender variant people who do just that. There is no disconnect other than a desire to express gender differently at times without doubting their core identity. Ie. "I am a man who simply enjoys women's clothes on occasion" and leave it at that. If that's all there is then there isn't a problem other than perhaps the social stigma they might feel.

However when there is some form of disconnect there is an internal voice asking for a remedy which can either be listened to or ignored. Making matters even more complicated is the fact that there isn't a "one size fits all" formula for dealing with this issue at a personal level.

When I have met and read about people over the years I began to see archetypes that would typically reappear. Some types would be more likely to be happy with the odd outing, the love of illusion, the experience euphoria and then go back to normal life but for others it wasn't that simple and their life constraints were keeping them from possibly something more. It made me realize that Harry Benjamin was right in thinking in terms of a scale as imperfect a concept as it might be. I realized I needed to take a less is more approach to my own situation and find my balance point which, after much agonizing, ultimately turned out to be social transition.

So if we say that gender dysphoria is a graded disconnect of gender identity from the expectation for one's birth sex, much of the cure first lies in removing the societal expectation which holds people back. The rest of the solution is how much more than that the individual might require to live in society without being shunned. In other words are hormones or FFS going to make things better so they can live in peace.

If gender were only a social construct then John Money's solution for David Reimer would have worked but it didn't. Therefore we can conclude that there is both socialization and genetics involved and it is how we get feminine men and masculine women who despite our best efforts seem immune to being socialized out of their natural inclinations. Creating a human is a messy biological affair which naturally produces variants and sometimes even extreme cases of psycho-sexual inversions (a la Benjamim type VI if you will) which happen simply because the process has sufficient off ramps which makes it possible.

The current situation with its backlash will sort itself out when society finally learns to adapt to gender variance in all its forms and we are slowly if awkwardly getting there.