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…
One lady I met said that one day, in her late 50s, she simply woke up and was a woman. She had no dysphoria before that, no longing or yearning for someone she wanted to be but couldn't. She'd been transitioned for 5 years or so by the time I met her.
I have another friend who has never experienced dysphoria in a way she would recognise it. Instead, she said that transitioning, and simply exploring her gender in the early days, brought her joy. No envy, no body discomfort, no pain at the assumptions people made about her gender, but instead, happiness when she started to live life on her own term.
And then there was me. Strong body dysphoria from my earliest memories. A strong sense of the life of mine that should have been, and a lifelong longing and pain from the knowledge I could never have it (spoiler - I was wrong about this, but it was how I perceived things at the time)
So, no, there is no amount of dysphoria you need to experience, and you in fact, don't need to experience dysphoria at all.