Would you still transition if society treated you as the correct gender from the start?
Would you still transition if society treated you as the correct gender from the start?
I promise I am not a reactionary, but I am somewhat uneducated on the subject so I might say something offensive accidentally, sorry in advance about that.
So, does gender dysphoria stem from a disconnect between the body and some "gender socialization" function of the brain, which could be solved by getting socialized and treated by everyone as the correct gender from the start, or something that stems from a disconnect between the brain and the actual body parts and hormones, so the transition is needed to alleviate that, or both?
getting the wrong puberty doesn't help with socialisation, sure. Also doesn't help with forming or maintaining a congruent identity.
How others see my body can reinforce how I see it, but I didn't change it for them.
Considering the amount of cisgender people who effectively get gender-affirming operations, there would probably still be transgender people taking hormones or getting gender-affirming surgery.
Social transition and body transition are related, but not necessarily connected. It is possible to do one without the other for different reasons.
gender dysphoria would still exist. maybe some trans ppl would be fine but others not.
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yes, T and its consequences were just as, if not more, responsible for my disconnect from my body as social issues. not everyone feels this way.
There is dysphoria that stems from being misgendered and deadnamed, but in my case there also absolutely is some kind of physical disconnect where my brain is just running on the wrong OS when i'm on testosterone. I'm gonna CW the following for extensive descriptions of dysphoria and some NSFW stuff.
spoiler
It just fucked with me in the most horrible ways to not be on estradiole, i did not have the emotional responses to be truly happy or to fully function as a social being. It's as if i didn't have real feelings at all before HRT. Interestingly, i know transmasc people, people who go in the polar opposite direction of my transition, who felt the same shallow affect pre-transition, so it isn't just "well woman hormones make you more emotional". Before transition, i also had the worst body horror imaginable, living with the man stench on me, being covered in coarse hair, feeling the stubble on my face, it was a pure nightmare. No matter if anybody saw me, or if people could notice any of that. My body was a prison cell, and only transitioning could change that.
Then there's the fact that i do not have the correct genitals for the sex life i want. That's in spite of my partner being trans herself, treating me with all the care and respect i need and knowing better than anybody else how to make me feel like a woman. No amount of empathy and gender affirming behavior can replace that i can't get properly fingered rn, not even the skill of somebody who can beat me off and make it feel as if i already have a clit. There's just something that i lack before i go under the knife. Sorry for being so blunt, it's just very, very obvious that i need a pussy, that my genitals are in the wrong configuration and need to be turned inside out, in spite of me knowing perfectly well that unoperated trans girls are perfectly valid, cute and hot af.
Not all trans people need to medically transition. And you can't fix dysphoria by medical means alone, the fact that i am now increasingly comfortable in my own skin is dependent on a lot of deep reflection about gender roles, my relationship to my body and a bunch of really deep, really affirming experiences with my friend with benefits as well as me being on HRT for almost a year and having made good headway with laser hair removal. This stuff needs work, no matter how well you pass and how hot you look. You got to get your head in the right place and learn to accept yourself, overcome internalized transphobia and mysogyny, understand that trans bodies are beautiful etc. etc. But when people have intense body related dysphoria, it's completely impossible to fix that without any medical means.
I would still be on testosterone and absolutely would have still gotten a hysterectomy. I probably would have kept my tits though, they were cool. I miss them occasionally, but mostly I'm just glad they're gone.
E feels fantastic. Would recommend.
I feel like if I don't have a certain amount of estrogen in me I go completely insane and suicidal. So yeah, still would physically transition
Like even if estrogen did nothing to my body it would be vital for me to live
afaik this is a question science can not yet answer, but probably both to some extent
edit: please disregard everything below, i got emotional and said some really stupid shit, a good part of it against my own better knowledge i'm sorry, i'll try not to do it in the future, but i probably will
I don't know if we need to go so far as to invoke "science" when you can just ask trans people. Most of us have thought about this question at some point. The answer is, as with so much else, it depends on the person. Lots of us would still physically transition, even in a perfect world with no gender-based bigotry. Lots of us wouldn't. Lots of us would change our bodies in some ways and not in others. Now sure, scientists could try and do surveys to see how common various gender-affirming procedures might be in such a hypothetical perfect world, but I have to say, I don't really see why it matters. I just want a world where transition-related care is available to those who want it, when they want it, and not forced on those who don't.
fwiw I think this is basically right, it's very difficult to tell what the trans experience would look like in a post-gender world without being able to ask people who grew up in a post-gender world. there are all sorts of aspects of even just body dysphoria that only come into focus at sort of the intersection of biology and social context. tho one exception I can think of is brain fog / malaise on "natal" hormones - that at least I think will clearly persist no matter how we change society
Thanks for the answers, I guess I will make another question. Do non-binary people have those mismatches as well, or it's pretty much neurodivergent people who can't fit the gender roles that are asked from them and express themselves differently? I am a ND cis male and I don't fit with most men (too aggressive for no reason, and I am not really masculine in personality) so I can kind of understand why someone wouldn't want to conform to their gender, but I wonder if there is a biological component to it
There's all kinds of nonbinary identities, the term is more like a catch-all category and not at all like a distinct "third gender." And how to approach physical changes varies as much among nonbinary people as our understanding of gender. There's nonbinary people who differ from cis people mostly in how they view themselves and gender and who do not transition at all. There's nonbinary transfems like me who go by she / her exclusively, present feminine, who can best describe themselves as women to the average cis person and who require the full range of medical procedures that you'd classically think of when picturing your average trans woman, yet our relation to our gender is actually a deeply nonbinary one that's closest to the understanding of these lesbians who view "lesbian" not as a sexuality, but a gender indentity. I even know an afab person who is nonbinary / agender, goes by gender neutral pronouns, has a very androgynous style (think butch lesbian, but with cutting edge makeup and hairstyling skills) yet dey underwent the full range of laser hair removal because in spite of being afab, dey used to sport more facial hair than your average cis guy and where very much not happy with that. Then there's forms of bottom surgery whose entire point it is to create ambiguous genitals, like penile-preserving vaginoplasty, or phalloplasty without a vaginectomy, and these are mostly (but not exclusively) requested by nonbinary people. I know enbie transmasc people who adjust their low dose testosterone regimen to just masculinize themselves in specific ways (like lowering their voice, but not getting bottom growth), a ton of transmasc enbies undergo mastectomies, there's transfem enbies who only go on estradiole until they've grown boobs and then stop and go back to living on testosterone. There's all kinds of possibilities for gender affirming care, i honestly think we've only just begun to see what's possible because nonbinary people were gatekept from transitioning for such a long time.
Yes, nonbinary people can also have bodily "mismatches", for want of a better word. I'm agender and socially I very much don't fit into either the "man" or "woman" category. But my physical transition has looked almost exactly identical to that of a binary trans man, and I'm now comfortable with my body in a way I didn't know was possible before I started transitioning. That being said, I don't always get gendered male by strangers, and I'm glad for it. I like being a little androgynous.
Also, not every nonbinary person is neurodivergent. It's totally possible to be neurotypical and still nonbinary.
Keep in mind that nonbinary doesn't just mean one thing, it's an umbrella. I'm both nonbinary and a woman (I like to say that my internal identity is neither man nor woman but politically I'm a woman).
But yes, despite being nonbinary I still have a lot of physical dysphoria. I need estradiol to not feel like my body is always in a low-grade state of panic, and I feel bottom dysphoria very strongly. But there are people, binary and nonbinary, who have none of those physical feelings of dysphoria and that doesn't change their identities
Would you still transition if society treated you as the correct gender from the start?
I think there's a strong connection between the gender society treats me and the gender I am. For me they're close to being the same thing.
If you want to dive into this further I'd really suggest reading "transgender marxism" which is a collection of essays by trans communists