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…
I think the thing that so many people who are questioning their gender is that many people are under the impression that "dysphoria" and "euphoria" are special feelings that can be distinguished from other feelings, when really, they're basically just words that mean "negative feelings" and "positive feelings".
Gender dysphoria and gender euphoria are just, respectively, negative and positive feelings relating to gender. I think most would describe envy as a negative feeling, and if you're feeling envy over someone else's gender, that's gender dysphoria. If someone referring to you as a certain gender gives you joy, that's gender euphoria. That's really all there is to it.
Different folks may experience different balances and different degrees of "I don't want to be my AGAB" to "I really want to be a different gender to my AGAB", but the only thing that makes anyone trans, at the end of the day, is that they experience those feelings enough to want to change their AGAB.