Hey ladies.
Me. Again.
I’m sorry to be posting so frequently. I’m sort of scrambling to figure things out. I’ve already had to be corrected on how I word things, so I’m still learning, and I do apologize if I’m clogging this place up with stupid questions. This will be my last post for a while.
I am 34 now. And I could go on and on with examples after examples in my life of moments where I should have started wondering, but I’ve only learned this about myself recently.
I won’t give my life story, but I will say this: Most, if not all, trans women I’ve listened to have described a history of unpleasant feelings associated with their prescribed gender at birth. Some women talk about having always felt weird being called “he”. Some women describe not wanting to have a penis or testicles. Some have described puberty being a distressful time for them.
However, in my case my dysphoria (if indeed it’s dysphoria) has almost exclusively been envy. I was never actively disgusted by being called “he” or having lots of body hair. I was just super super envious of the girls who didn’t have it.
I’ve always had a more feminine cadence in online discussions like on discord or aol way back when. So that’s where I’ve always expressed myself truly on. It’s never bothered me to be called a man in person, but it does fill me with a lot of joy to be called “she”. A woman I’ve spoken with on discord has no idea I’m trans. She just knows I’m a woman, and she called me “girlie” the other day and I wanted to cry and squirm with excitement. I’m not sure if that’s weird.
It’s more like…indifference to masculinity with active joy from femininity. Being a man isn’t so much something I want to avoid as much as it is being a woman is something I exceedingly want to do.
I don’t know if that’s weird makes sense…
My experience has been similar to yours. It took me four decades to understand I am trans. And I had never noticed any dysphory.
Looking back, I actually can recognize things that must have been dysphory. When my puberty began, I was disgusted by the looks of where my body's fats started accumulating, and even developed a form of eating disorder because of that! Now I can understand that while I had successfully repressed by urge to be female, my subconscious did know where the fat is supposed to be going.
But, I had heard so much shit in my childhood in the 1980's that made it clear that almost all adults around me would shun me for showing any feminity, that I built a very durable wall to protect myself from feminity.
Yeah, you are describing your ways of having experienced dysphory. You just seem to have a very narrow understanding of what counts as dysphory!
But at the same time, I also want to say: A trans person is a trans person, dysphoric or not. An inner urge to live as something other than your assigned birth gender means you are trans. It does not matter what mechanics produce that inner urge. For some people, such as you and me, it is dysphory. For others it's something else.
'dysphory' is cute, we are going to call it that now.