GenderLife Forum: The Information Exchange

What is Gender Dysphoria?

I wonder if the second answer is accurate. Considering circumstances, perhaps it is. I have searched to see if I fit the GD description, and found myself lacking. I think it is not so much that I hate being a man, as I love being a woman. But, the more resistance I run into the more I hate the circumstances I face and the more I hate the condition I face and the roadblocks to my destination. I can easily hate being a man.

Frankly, I think there is no such a big gap as people pretend to believe. Cultural differences can be much bigger than male/female differences within the same culture.

I wish I could have acted the male part properly, out of curiosity. To see how men are supposed to be treated, to find out for sure if male friendships are like female friendships, etc.

But I don't think a woman cannot do that. I mean, I know plenty of women who are androphilic in their friendships and tastes. They prefer to hang out with men, do things with men and have male-style friendships.

Supposedly, male friends are better than female friends: they can offer true support, won't go around talking about your stuff and won't use what you say against you. I hear that from women all the time, how it's a lot better to have a male friend.

Life has taught me that female friends are fickle. It's enough for you both to be after the same guy for her to reveal everything bad she knows, or thinks she knows, or invents, about you. If both of you are competing for something, a leadership position, being the treasurer in your book club, etc., your best friend is ready to pull out the claws and use anything to defeat you.

So no, I wouldn't hate being a guy. It's just that I'm not. Simple as that.

What would being oppressed, stigmatized, bullied and/or disfigured have to do with being gender disphoric?.Those are outside environmental things that have nothing to do with being gender disphoric,IMO...unless I misunderstood the second choice? .

See, the term "disorder" is too vague. It can mean any number of things ranging from illness to something that is simply not in order. Abbynormal is another one. Not normal to deviant, which has it's own set of definitions a mile long, from deviation in statistics to something entirely different.

The problem here is the English language.

I don't think gender dysphoria is a normal reaction to being bullied either. Dysphoria is being uncomfortable in response to a particular condition. So gender dysphoria would be a discomfort in one's birth gender. The word dysphoria is by its own definition less stygmatizing than disorder.

But yet calling gender dysphoria, or discomfort with one's birth gender, a disorder wouldn't be entirely untrue either, since by that definition ones physical gender is not in order with ones' mental gender.

So if one's mental gender is female, and one's physical gender is male, or vice versa, what do you call it? How do you fix it?

All I know is that it took considerable expense to fix it in my case.

Is the condition preventable? I have no clue. I don't know whether it will be since we really have no marker to point to and say "this is the cause". and there's not enough of frequency to warrant a huge grant to study it. so it will take years to find it. Eventually there may be a way to treat it in the womb and no one will be the wiser. Just like some day there may be a way of using some kind of gene therapy in the womb to treat a predisposition to heart disease or diabetes or cancer so the person could live a normal life.

Me I'd just have wanted to be born with a congruent mind and body. It was bad enough to warrant a factory recall, but since the baby factory had shut down, I had to do some after-market mods. Seems to work fine now. Maintenance is a bit more than it was but it's working fine.

Neither of the above. Neither is even close, I think.

I think that "gender dysphoria" (I don't like the term myself) may be caused by improper or incomplete sexual differentiation in parts of your brain managing your sense of proprioception.

Your brain, most of the time, has a very good idea of how your body should be, and this is independent of how your body actually is. A man doesn't feel like he "should" have breasts, a woman doesn't feel like she "should" have a penis. This is a matter of the body map in your brain, and it is different in men and in women. Which means, of course, like everything else sexually differentiated, it can get screwed up in various different ways.

Under that assumption, "gender dysphoria" is somatic, not social, although there are obvious social reprecussions. It's physiological, not psychological, although there are obvious psychological reprecussions.

Would you be upset to have male parts, even if you lived all alone in an empty universe? It may be totally impossible to answer that question objectively (nobody experiences such an environment) but I lean towards "yes". I felt disgust for them long before I even knew what they were, or that girls were different. I doubt there is any social or learned component to that.

I am always amused when reading something about trans and somebody (invariably cissexual) says something like, "Wouldn't things be better if we lived in a world where the genders were treated equally and gender roles were not enforced, so then trans people wouldn't need to feel so bad about their bodies or have surgery and could just live and present as they pleased and everything would be happy?"

It isn't that simple. I think people who say things like that only reveal how much they don't get it.

I do not particularly care about gender. Depending on what you mean, it's either just a mating game, or a socially constructed set of expectations we use to pigeonhole people. I do not fret over conforming to these societal expectations. The time I spend thinking about gender is mostly spent thinking about in what ways those gender role expectations screw me as a woman.

I do, however, care about my body being "correct". And I believe I would feel that way without any gender at all, under a completely different set of rules, or under no rules whatsoever.

It isn't necessarily about genitals, either. Some trans people could not care less about the genitals but they get all dysphoric about their breasts or facial hair or menses or the sound of their voice or whatever. But those are all body issues; I really think it is a somatic thing first, not a social thing. The social issues, if they are present, tend to arise from the somatic issues.

So I voted for "neither of the above"; neither of those options describe what I think about it.

I'm inclined to say it's a disorder of the mind with biological and social causes. What these causes are as good as anyone's guess.
I know many people in the trans community do not like the term "disorder" but I use it because something abnormal does indeed happen for one to develop a transgendered brain.

I tend to think that the biological factor is indeed more powerful than any social ones. But then again, for every study that suggest nature, there is one that suggest nurture. One article I found while writing a term paper on gender identity though suggests that people, especially women, who believe gender identity is biologically based are more likely to embrace stereotypical gender roles and behavior. So it might just all be in the head, with small regards to nature or nurture.

The diagnosis "gender dysphoria" does not exist, especially not as a any sort of "psychiatric diagnosis" and its DSM official analog "gender identity disorder" doesn't exist either and does not belong in the DSM. That is just some made up stuff pshrinks created so that they could needlessly profit from the trans-population.

The trans-population needs to understand that pshrinks are not needed and in some ways are an impediment to many. They do little or nothing constructive for the trans-population with regard to what the DSM now wants to call "gender incongruence". They need to be gotten out of the way, and out of their "gatekeeper" roles.

What might be helpful for some people, would be a physical medical diagnosis in the "congenital anomaly" section of the ICD-9 medical diagnostic code system.

Perhaps they are useful to some of us, but they should not be made a mandatory part of the process.

Transition in itself can be a very stressful process, as is growing up "gender variant" (depending on where in the world you are, and what is your social milieu).

That alone is enough to make trauma likely. Thus, psychological counseling should be provided, but not as part of the evaluation process.

Your gatekeeper cannot be your therapist at the same time. You need to trust your therapist, you cannot trust a gatekeeper.

Personal responsibility should be enough for people to take the decision of whether to transition or not. Right now, the psychiatrist/gatekeeper model exists in great part to reduce the chances of the surgeons/doctors being sued by someone who transitioned and later discovers they made a mistake.

Correct, current use by professionals is that "gender dysphoria" is a symptom. As a diagnosis, indeed it does not exist.

Or more exactly "gender dysphoria" is a syndrome (which means it is a plurality of symptoms that form a group). A lot of folks bandy the word syndrome without realizing is is little more than a group noun for "symptoms".

So the issue is "Of what is gender dysphoria a symptom or syndrome?
1. A disordered mind (Gender Identity Disorder)
2. A reaction to being oppressed, stigmatized, bullied and/or disfigured
OR
3. Something else (please say what it is a symptom of)

Which brings us full circle to where we entered the thread.