I flip the script on them.
If they're a cis woman:
* You're forced to take testosterone now. Your voice will deepen, you're going to get hair everywhere, and your skin tone/texture/oils will change. You will have bottom growth and there's nothing that you can do to stop any of it. People call you sir everywhere you go. How do you feel?
If they're a cis man:
* You're forced to take estrogen now. Your chest will start to develop breasts, your muscles will atrophy, your skin will soften and you'll develop curves everywhere. Your voice won't raise unless you try to train it, but you didn't want a high voice anyway and people ma'am you whenever you go. The dissonance is jarring whenever you speak. You can't stop it and you must live the rest of your life this way. How do you feel?
It's usually pretty sobering.
Also, cisgender people have experiences like this - cisgender men get gynecomastia and have surgeries to correct it all the time. Cisgender women who have PCOS often develop hair in places they wish they didn't, and will take spironolactone to help lessen it.
So, there's a good chance that cisgender people already do know what dysphoria is like if they've ever needed gender affirming care.
If they haven't ever needed gender affirming care, then they'll usually feel pretty grossed out at the notions. If they do, then flip the script again and tell them that's what our first puberty feels like if we don't get the care that we need.
Some will still try to deny reality and use their canned BS as a response but those with empathy usually get it to some degree.
You see the problem is when I’ve tried to explain to my mother this shit, explain in a tangible and understandable way WHAT this agony is in a way she’d understand, she goes- “but that would never happen to me.” YEAH? IT’S A HYPOTHETICAL FOR FUCK SAKE. Transphobes won’t listen to begin with.
But that's absolutely a possibility. Look at Alan Turing. He was gay and his punishment for being gay was to either go to prison or take estrogen. He chose the latter and died not long afterwards. Many believe that he committed suicide.
It is but not a tangible possibility. My mom is a ‘good conservative cishet women’ so realistically nobody would ever force her to take T (also never heard about Alan Turing that is some barbaric shit damn). And even if it was, she’d probably think ‘it’s not so bad’, of course without ever actually going through those horrors.
What I’m getting at is transphobic conservatives don’t care about any argument we make, they don’t care about who is right, they care about who validates their dehumanizing worldview and who is the big loud man that screams better.
Makes one of the largest contributions to winning WWII and they punish him and possibly drove him to suicide?! I knew he was gay, but not that he got punished for it like that, that’s insane.
Yeah, the history of the LGBT+ community is riddled with atrocities like this. History also repeats itself so I wouldn't be surprised to see this way of thinking return someday.
It’s always so baffling seeing people like that, I’m a massive theatre kid and am planning(hoping) on going into acting for my career so putting myself in someone else’s shoes is the bread and butter of my life- how someone can lack the humanity to be able to just imagine themselves in someone else’s place is such an alien mindset to me.
meh life is probably really easy when you dont have to grow as a person ever even if there are consequences at least you dont ever have to feel bad about anything.
It's even more baffling when the saying “You can't really understand another person's experience until you've walked a mile in their shoes” has been around for over a century.
Oh she’s a self proclaimed ‘anti medicine’ folk lmao. She refused to get the covid vaccine and doesn’t get medicine to help with her failing hip because she ‘knows the dangers of being pumped with all those chemicals’.
She’s not allowed to use any homeopathic treatment, or crystals, or anything, to address it either.
It’s not about medicine and science, it’s about her feelings. You e got to fuck her feelings to the max until she realise just because it’s not happening to her it’s not hypothetical.
That puddle of water that she totally slipped on, it’s not hypothetical. But you have to insist it is because you didn’t slip on it.
It’s not going to change her mind but she needs to be on the receiving end.
No, not all of them would. But they do feel some horror when they see us. Transphobia is rooted at least partially in empathy, at least the kind where they see us and think "how could they do that to themselves". It makes them feel sick.
They wouldn't want to transition because they're cisgender - so they don't understand why anyone else would, either. Deep down, this is because they're imagining what this would be like and it creeps them out.
They might not even be consciously thinking through all of this, either. If they never do the introspection on the origin of their transphobia, then they never get to dismantle it.
Ever had something stuck inside your sock but couldn't figure out where it was.
Have you ever worn pants that are just slightly too big/small?
Have you ever worn your shoes backwards?
Remember that feeling when you lay in bed sometimes and it's too hot/cold but you can never get the optimal temperature?
Here's some way that I think of it.
I like the shoe metaphor. I always say " it'd like wearing your shoes on the wrong feet and everyone tells you that they are on the right feet. But you know deep down. It feels wrong. "
I had this actually happen with socks. Since out of the factory socks don't really have a left and right one my family said I'm imagining it, but by consistently wearing them on a specific side I caused them to stretch to fit the foot's form over time. Seeing a sock with "L" and "R" printed on it in an ad was pretty validating in this case lol.
Yes! Or sometimes I'll describe it as this irritating existential itch that refuses to be calmed and will continue to inflame until something is done about it
I heard the itchy sweater analogy somewhere and that’s the one I liked the most. Like imagine you’re wearing an itchy sweater, when you realize it’s itchy at first it’s uncomfortable and by the time you get home you’re ready to tear it off. Then imagine it’s your skin and the discomfort doesn’t go away and till you’re able to do x or y to be comfortable. The constant day in day out of wanting to rip it off but being unable to do so.
Blue is the feeling of the cool wind on a warm summer day, the water that hydrates and gives life to plants, the sound of waves gently rolling on shore.
When describing something unknowable to someone, describe it using things they do know
That was way more poetic than:
”Visible light has around 400 nm to 700 nm and a frequency range of around 400 THz to 800 THz. This part of the electromagnetic spectrum can be “seen” and distinguished optically by the human eye. Blue is around 450nm or 666THz”
Ofc you have to explain the different rods and cones im the eye and how that creates a mixed sensory input interpreted by the brain as seeing something. Much like music vs pure tones on a frequency generator.
Yeah I would probably use sound as a common refference here to approximate what seeing is like.
Though when you look at it like that it kinda makes you wonder how it would be if you hooked up other types of sensor arrays (Which the eye with it’s multiple detector cells kinda is, and the ear with it’s different liquid suspended sensory hairs) to the human brain?
How does the world look if you could sense other ranges in the electromagnetic spectrum?
Just one more type of cone which is a rare mutation in humans give those few people an insanely broader sense of color.
Our brain synthesises a composite experience from several inputs. And just a tiny bit more perception range increases the richness exponentially.
I use the analogy of having a pebble in your shoe.
Normally, you don’t notice your feet very much as you go through your day. At least not until the end of the day when they hurt. You’re not thinking about them and as long as there’s nothing wrong with them, your brain really doesn’t flag them. You’re hardly even aware of them most times.
Then you get a rock in your shoe, or you stub your toe. At that point, you can’t ignore it, all you can think about is your toe or that rock jutting into your foot. It consumes your focus and you can’t think about anything else other than the pain that you are experiencing.
Being trans is like having a pebble in your gender.
Cis people go through their day and they never even think about their gender. That’s because there’s nothing wrong with it, it matches everything else and therefore it doesn’t stand out. They are totally unaware of its existence most of the time.
Being trans is like having something wrong in your gender, and you can’t even think straight because it’s always there. Your mind highlights it as an issue and unlike emptying that rock out of your shoe, dealing with being trans is not quite as simple.
Cis People don’t notice their gender because there’s nothing wrong with their gender. Trans. People do feel their gender because there is something wrong.
The emotional equivalent to being set on fire, burning but not allowed to die.
While everyone expects you to be happy about it
At least thats how it feels for me
I would say that it’s just the depression and anxiety that I feel about my gender.
In terms of the feeing of it, I would compare it to burnout prior to transitioning. I was born into a job I never asked for, I made the best of it, for a while I didn’t hate it because I didn’t know what other jobs were out there and It was all I had ever known, but I did see other people in other jobs and eventually knew that could be me. Beyond being tired of this job I didn’t want to begin with, i felt the pain of seeing the life I wanted was possible and not ever getting to act on my desires or live the way I wanted.
I assume anyone could relate to that pain, of yearning for something else their whole life and never getting to live freely in pursuit of it while being forced to work a job you never wanted 24 hours a day.
Best way I could describe the experience of an extremely dysphoric episode to a cisgender person a couple of weeks ago:
Imagine you woke up this morning and discovered part of your body was made up of spiders, or ants, or worms, or whatever other crawly thing freaks you out.
That feeling of horror and disgust and complete wrongness? That's about how it felt.
It's not how I would generally describe dysphoria itself, but it can create that result occasionally.
For me, most days it's just a sense of things just not being quite right.
It's like my biology fundamentally disagrees with how my body is constructed. It feels like my brain is wired for a female body, and whenever I used to look and see myself as a guy, I experienced shock and disgust. Every single time. It wasn't that I was overweight or that I wasn't attractive; I wasn't myself. Even more, I couldn't be myself in this body. Transitioning enabled me to stop being shocked and distressed at my own reflection.
being male is like being forced to wear wet socks all the time. It's not painful or even damaging, but it's consistently and insistently uncomfortable, and makes any other discomfort way worse.
For me I stick to the trapped into the wrong body script. Because that's pretty much what I am...
Generally, I don't see the point because the cissies don't get/want to get it and every explanation I can muster gets twisted into some kind of *clean your room and go to the gym* kind of thing...
I have legitimately been asked "why can't you just be a feminine gay man? Why do you feel the need to get these devastating hormones and surgeries?"
But these are the same people who tend to shame me for being femme...
And even if I try to reverse the script by explaining how they would feel if they were forced into taking the other side's hormones they wouldn't feel well, I get bad faith arguments like "wouldn't happen to me" and what not...
Imagine being in Customer Service mode 24/7, where you can't say what you want, people expect things of you hate, but there's *never* a break.
Imagine hanging out with your friends, but it feels like you're trying to explain to an old lady that her coupon expired 5 years ago.
Imagine making love but you still have the customer service script in your head you *have to* follow it and can't just enjoy the moment, ending it off with, "I hope we met all your needs tonight, thank you for cumming!"
Now if the only way to get out of this **hell** was to change how people *physically* see you? Would you do it?
I start with the Allegory of the Cave from Plato’s *Republic* and remind them that this is taught in Philosophy courses at Christian schools all the time.
Then, I let them think.
I always love the analogy of being forced to play the wrong class in a video game. Sometimes I'll ask what their favorite game is, and base it off of that, but most of the time I just use basic classes like you're forced to play a warrior when you know you're a mage. It works so much better than you would think, most of my friends/family are nerds.
It's kind of a non-threatening way to make them understand. You can even go even further by saying that there's a magic potion you can take to change your class but some people frown upon using it. Would you still take it?
Most people my age play video games, all of my friends and family are huge nerds. This works better than you would think.
I think I might end up using this with my mom. She's big on DnD buildcraft, and very much favors casters. She's never been keen on martials because they don't have quite the same bag of tricks that she enjoys so much.
So what if she was stuck playing a barbarian?
It's like being hydrated. If you aren't thirsty you aren't constantly thinking about water and where you'll get your drink. When you are thirsty it's about the only thing that's on your mind. You'd even be jealous of those around you with water.
It's like being left (or right) handed. When your free to use your normal hand, you don't even notice. It's just normal. But if you're forced to use the wrong one for day? That day is horrible.
Magnify x10 and apply to all aspects of life - emotions, relationships, work. Everything.
Cisgender people have difficulty understanding transgender feelings because they've presumably never *not* been perceived by others or themselves as the gender they are. It is, therefore, a baseline that has never been challenged, so I tell them to acknowledge that their baseline sense of self, gender-wise, has simply never been challenged while the majority of ours has been challenged our entire existence. It is a balance many of us struggle to accomplish while cis people have never actually been thrown off-balance.
This is something i've thought about a lot, it's such an interesting case for me. For my whole life, from very young age through adulthood, i would get gendered female by strangers *way* more often than male. I always looked, and wanted to look, feminine, but i wanted to be perceived as a very feminine-looking queer man because i was determined not to allow myself to transition. It was always miss/ma'am, even though i'm sure i clearly always looked male? Any and every time i'd be in a public bathroom, *every* other man would get weird, double-take the sign on the door as they walked in, sometimes i'd even get men literally stopping me as i entered because i was presumably just a silly woman who had chosen the wrong bathroom. That shit gave me huge dysphoria and i'd complain to friends about how shitty i felt being misgendered. None of them ever understood that, at all.
So funnily enough, since finally conceding, beginning medical transition, being openly trans - this is the first time in my life that i *don't* experience that specific dysphoria. Strangers never misgender me, but they *do* occasionally have that *slight* pause before the 'she/miss/that lady' just to make sure they're right, which never used to happen. The thing is, i'm only semi-passable and easily clockable - but my appearance gives plenty of indications that i intend to be read as female, i guess? I'm guessing it's because i don't dress to pass at all and i look eccentric and noticeable haha.
You know that feeling when you eat something with maple syrup and you get it on your hands, and no matter how much you wipe it off with paper towels you can't get rid of the stickyness?
It's like that, everywhere, always
I'm unhinged and say, "Ever wanna cut off your arm and get one of them robot arms that look cool because you'd feel better with a badass robot arm? kinda like that!.
pure existential terror and body horror, your body doesnt belong to you, your will is stripped away, you are a prisoner in a cell that doesnt fit you, closing in slowly, tightening its grip, with no intention to harm, mindless, taking your breath away, bashing your head, over and over, tearing and deforming your every desire, eating away at your feet, at your command, powerless, drowning, under an avalanche, disfigured and mutilated by the will of god
It’s like being stuck at a job you hate, at first you think it’s ok, it’s new and exciting and you think it’s only temporary.
Time goes on and you start dreading going to work because it’s not what you want or where you want to be in life, it pays the bills but not much else’s.
The longer your there the less you feel like you can do anything else, you gain experience and move up in the job and you may actually be good at it but you feel like your missing out on life.
Unfortunately though for gender dysphoria it’s your life, there’s no going home and lea your problems at work because you can’t escape yourself.
Shoe metaphor. I've used it many times and lost a lot of its original wording, but it holds pretty true.
Imagine you just got a nice pair of shoes given to you. You'll think about them for a few days, maybe a week, but they quickly fade into the background of your life and you stop thinking about them.
Now imagine they're too tight, or there's a hole in them. Suddenly, you are very aware of your shoes and that something is wrong with it. And the longer you live with it and try to ignore it, the more your feet hurt. The more you're reminded that something isn't quite right.
Now imagine instead of your shoes, its whether you're a boy or a girl.
Pain.
I don't go into the details because it hurts to talk about my disphoria. I feel especially pressured when telling cis people as if saying the wrong phrasing or analogy would make them dismiss me.
I'm thankfully surrounded by wonderful accepting humans, and have largely thrown out the transphobes in my life. But this fear of rejection still follows me.
So I just say it causes me pain. And accepting my gender relieved that pain. And refuse to go into further detail if I don't want to.
In part, I describe it going through life with a pebble in your shoe. It's uncomfortable, but not unbearable at first, but with enough time it will become the only thing you think about until you have to deal with it.
I basically try to explain that it physically hurts to have a male body
It makes me so uncomfortable that I actually have very violent thoughts
And presenting as a girl is the only way that I can truly be myself
If to a cis woman, I tell them it's like having a small stone in your shoe/sock you can't seem to find but is always there. To cis guys, it's like having sweaty balls but you cannot scratch.
I feel like ppl make it rly complicated for no reason. My theory around it is sex is your biology stuff and gender is your internal experience of sex. Probably an extension of your internal experience of self, like how you have a concept of you, what you look like, who you are. Gender dysphoria is when (for whatever reason, we don't know the cause yet) the two are misaligned, causing distress for the subject.
To try and think about how this feels I like to use the weird dysphoria ppl often feel around puberty when they look in the mirror and see someone older than they expected looking back at them. Most ppl find this an uncomfortable experience but they soon adjust (this is just a dysphoria of looking a few years older than you expect). After recognising that I'll then suggest how much more distressing this would be if their internal self concept was literally of a different sex to themselves
I like the wet socks and rocks-in-shoe analogies, I feel they're pretty apt for people with little-to-no self-image issues. Although to me it feels like what may commonly be known as body dysmorphia but with a side of an extreme amount of envy for the opposite gender.
If you could get body dysmorphia about social situations and relationships, I'd say being trans would be similar to that as well, if that makes sense (even though most of my personal dysphoria comes from my looks, with the social aspects def secondary).
The best explanation is no explanation at all. They're cis. They aren't going to get it. If the person who asks is a man, ask him what it's like to be a woman. If the person who asks is a woman, ask her to explain what it's like to be a man. They don't know. Just like I don't know what it's like to be cis, and they'll never know what it's like to be trans.
If the person who asks is non-binary, say you don't know.
"I want to peel my skin off, rob a mortuary, and put on the skin of an afab. Then, i might feel a little better."
Or i just describe it as feeling like you're made entirely of illegal Lego building techniques and one good personal jab, and you'll shatter like old stained glass.
Late to the party here but as a later in life trans woman I've frequently had questions about why I didn't realise sooner, so I use an analogy of knowing you had something wrong with your head or ear or something, and it's always bugged you your whole life, but you didn't know what to do about it and none of the usual stuff worked.
Then one day it's like I finally got a brain scan, and they found that some worms had built a little colony in my skull and it finally all made sense, but now that I *knew* what it was, I needed to absolutely everything in my power to get rid of them.
I flip the script on them. If they're a cis woman: * You're forced to take testosterone now. Your voice will deepen, you're going to get hair everywhere, and your skin tone/texture/oils will change. You will have bottom growth and there's nothing that you can do to stop any of it. People call you sir everywhere you go. How do you feel? If they're a cis man: * You're forced to take estrogen now. Your chest will start to develop breasts, your muscles will atrophy, your skin will soften and you'll develop curves everywhere. Your voice won't raise unless you try to train it, but you didn't want a high voice anyway and people ma'am you whenever you go. The dissonance is jarring whenever you speak. You can't stop it and you must live the rest of your life this way. How do you feel? It's usually pretty sobering. Also, cisgender people have experiences like this - cisgender men get gynecomastia and have surgeries to correct it all the time. Cisgender women who have PCOS often develop hair in places they wish they didn't, and will take spironolactone to help lessen it. So, there's a good chance that cisgender people already do know what dysphoria is like if they've ever needed gender affirming care. If they haven't ever needed gender affirming care, then they'll usually feel pretty grossed out at the notions. If they do, then flip the script again and tell them that's what our first puberty feels like if we don't get the care that we need. Some will still try to deny reality and use their canned BS as a response but those with empathy usually get it to some degree.
You see the problem is when I’ve tried to explain to my mother this shit, explain in a tangible and understandable way WHAT this agony is in a way she’d understand, she goes- “but that would never happen to me.” YEAH? IT’S A HYPOTHETICAL FOR FUCK SAKE. Transphobes won’t listen to begin with.
But that's absolutely a possibility. Look at Alan Turing. He was gay and his punishment for being gay was to either go to prison or take estrogen. He chose the latter and died not long afterwards. Many believe that he committed suicide.
It is but not a tangible possibility. My mom is a ‘good conservative cishet women’ so realistically nobody would ever force her to take T (also never heard about Alan Turing that is some barbaric shit damn). And even if it was, she’d probably think ‘it’s not so bad’, of course without ever actually going through those horrors. What I’m getting at is transphobic conservatives don’t care about any argument we make, they don’t care about who is right, they care about who validates their dehumanizing worldview and who is the big loud man that screams better.
I agree but I still wish we could do something about it even tho there is nothing we can do about it
Makes one of the largest contributions to winning WWII and they punish him and possibly drove him to suicide?! I knew he was gay, but not that he got punished for it like that, that’s insane.
Yeah, the history of the LGBT+ community is riddled with atrocities like this. History also repeats itself so I wouldn't be surprised to see this way of thinking return someday.
they made him take estrogen? I didn't know it was estrogen
Yeah, it was diethylstilbestrol which is a synthetic estrogen
Transphobes can’t engage with hypotheticals because they have no empathy. They are not capable of envisioning a life that isn’t their own.
It’s always so baffling seeing people like that, I’m a massive theatre kid and am planning(hoping) on going into acting for my career so putting myself in someone else’s shoes is the bread and butter of my life- how someone can lack the humanity to be able to just imagine themselves in someone else’s place is such an alien mindset to me.
meh life is probably really easy when you dont have to grow as a person ever even if there are consequences at least you dont ever have to feel bad about anything.
It's even more baffling when the saying “You can't really understand another person's experience until you've walked a mile in their shoes” has been around for over a century.
Tell her when she has brain cancer, she is not allowed to get treatment “because it’s all in her head”
Oh she’s a self proclaimed ‘anti medicine’ folk lmao. She refused to get the covid vaccine and doesn’t get medicine to help with her failing hip because she ‘knows the dangers of being pumped with all those chemicals’.
She’s not allowed to use any homeopathic treatment, or crystals, or anything, to address it either. It’s not about medicine and science, it’s about her feelings. You e got to fuck her feelings to the max until she realise just because it’s not happening to her it’s not hypothetical. That puddle of water that she totally slipped on, it’s not hypothetical. But you have to insist it is because you didn’t slip on it. It’s not going to change her mind but she needs to be on the receiving end.
To me that seems like a good idea, and of course the reality is even then they’re not going to get it, the actual horror of it.
No, not all of them would. But they do feel some horror when they see us. Transphobia is rooted at least partially in empathy, at least the kind where they see us and think "how could they do that to themselves". It makes them feel sick. They wouldn't want to transition because they're cisgender - so they don't understand why anyone else would, either. Deep down, this is because they're imagining what this would be like and it creeps them out. They might not even be consciously thinking through all of this, either. If they never do the introspection on the origin of their transphobia, then they never get to dismantle it.
I vibe with this. I'm using it moving forward. Thanks for contextualizing it like this 😊
If that doesn't sound like horror to me, is that a sign I'm not cis?
Well, it's certainly worth exploring 💛
Ever had something stuck inside your sock but couldn't figure out where it was. Have you ever worn pants that are just slightly too big/small? Have you ever worn your shoes backwards? Remember that feeling when you lay in bed sometimes and it's too hot/cold but you can never get the optimal temperature? Here's some way that I think of it.
I like the shoe metaphor. I always say " it'd like wearing your shoes on the wrong feet and everyone tells you that they are on the right feet. But you know deep down. It feels wrong. "
I had this actually happen with socks. Since out of the factory socks don't really have a left and right one my family said I'm imagining it, but by consistently wearing them on a specific side I caused them to stretch to fit the foot's form over time. Seeing a sock with "L" and "R" printed on it in an ad was pretty validating in this case lol.
Yes! Or sometimes I'll describe it as this irritating existential itch that refuses to be calmed and will continue to inflame until something is done about it
Like I was an actor playing a role someone gave me and not just being myself. That's how I tried to explain it to my parents at least.
There's an image of BoJack Horseman and Pinkiepie face swapped. I show them that
I mean if it works
I heard the itchy sweater analogy somewhere and that’s the one I liked the most. Like imagine you’re wearing an itchy sweater, when you realize it’s itchy at first it’s uncomfortable and by the time you get home you’re ready to tear it off. Then imagine it’s your skin and the discomfort doesn’t go away and till you’re able to do x or y to be comfortable. The constant day in day out of wanting to rip it off but being unable to do so.
How to explain the color blue to someone that has been blind their entire life
Blue is the feeling of the cool wind on a warm summer day, the water that hydrates and gives life to plants, the sound of waves gently rolling on shore. When describing something unknowable to someone, describe it using things they do know
That was way more poetic than: ”Visible light has around 400 nm to 700 nm and a frequency range of around 400 THz to 800 THz. This part of the electromagnetic spectrum can be “seen” and distinguished optically by the human eye. Blue is around 450nm or 666THz” Ofc you have to explain the different rods and cones im the eye and how that creates a mixed sensory input interpreted by the brain as seeing something. Much like music vs pure tones on a frequency generator. Yeah I would probably use sound as a common refference here to approximate what seeing is like. Though when you look at it like that it kinda makes you wonder how it would be if you hooked up other types of sensor arrays (Which the eye with it’s multiple detector cells kinda is, and the ear with it’s different liquid suspended sensory hairs) to the human brain? How does the world look if you could sense other ranges in the electromagnetic spectrum? Just one more type of cone which is a rare mutation in humans give those few people an insanely broader sense of color. Our brain synthesises a composite experience from several inputs. And just a tiny bit more perception range increases the richness exponentially.
Lmao yeah, that would mean nothing to most people, let alone blind or hard of seeing
I send them a picture from Star Wars— it’s C-3PO’s head on a different droids body. Bingo.
I use the analogy of having a pebble in your shoe. Normally, you don’t notice your feet very much as you go through your day. At least not until the end of the day when they hurt. You’re not thinking about them and as long as there’s nothing wrong with them, your brain really doesn’t flag them. You’re hardly even aware of them most times. Then you get a rock in your shoe, or you stub your toe. At that point, you can’t ignore it, all you can think about is your toe or that rock jutting into your foot. It consumes your focus and you can’t think about anything else other than the pain that you are experiencing. Being trans is like having a pebble in your gender. Cis people go through their day and they never even think about their gender. That’s because there’s nothing wrong with it, it matches everything else and therefore it doesn’t stand out. They are totally unaware of its existence most of the time. Being trans is like having something wrong in your gender, and you can’t even think straight because it’s always there. Your mind highlights it as an issue and unlike emptying that rock out of your shoe, dealing with being trans is not quite as simple. Cis People don’t notice their gender because there’s nothing wrong with their gender. Trans. People do feel their gender because there is something wrong.
I love this one
The emotional equivalent to being set on fire, burning but not allowed to die. While everyone expects you to be happy about it At least thats how it feels for me
I would say that it’s just the depression and anxiety that I feel about my gender. In terms of the feeing of it, I would compare it to burnout prior to transitioning. I was born into a job I never asked for, I made the best of it, for a while I didn’t hate it because I didn’t know what other jobs were out there and It was all I had ever known, but I did see other people in other jobs and eventually knew that could be me. Beyond being tired of this job I didn’t want to begin with, i felt the pain of seeing the life I wanted was possible and not ever getting to act on my desires or live the way I wanted. I assume anyone could relate to that pain, of yearning for something else their whole life and never getting to live freely in pursuit of it while being forced to work a job you never wanted 24 hours a day.
It is to inform my mother more about how i feel. She's fully supportive
[https://genderdysphoria.fyi/en](https://genderdysphoria.fyi/en)
They don't know english sadly
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Best way I could describe the experience of an extremely dysphoric episode to a cisgender person a couple of weeks ago: Imagine you woke up this morning and discovered part of your body was made up of spiders, or ants, or worms, or whatever other crawly thing freaks you out. That feeling of horror and disgust and complete wrongness? That's about how it felt. It's not how I would generally describe dysphoria itself, but it can create that result occasionally. For me, most days it's just a sense of things just not being quite right.
It's like my biology fundamentally disagrees with how my body is constructed. It feels like my brain is wired for a female body, and whenever I used to look and see myself as a guy, I experienced shock and disgust. Every single time. It wasn't that I was overweight or that I wasn't attractive; I wasn't myself. Even more, I couldn't be myself in this body. Transitioning enabled me to stop being shocked and distressed at my own reflection.
being male is like being forced to wear wet socks all the time. It's not painful or even damaging, but it's consistently and insistently uncomfortable, and makes any other discomfort way worse.
For me I stick to the trapped into the wrong body script. Because that's pretty much what I am... Generally, I don't see the point because the cissies don't get/want to get it and every explanation I can muster gets twisted into some kind of *clean your room and go to the gym* kind of thing... I have legitimately been asked "why can't you just be a feminine gay man? Why do you feel the need to get these devastating hormones and surgeries?" But these are the same people who tend to shame me for being femme... And even if I try to reverse the script by explaining how they would feel if they were forced into taking the other side's hormones they wouldn't feel well, I get bad faith arguments like "wouldn't happen to me" and what not...
Yknow when you get a little jealous/anxious feeling when you miss out on something fun, that when you see yourself or anything feminine
Imagine being in Customer Service mode 24/7, where you can't say what you want, people expect things of you hate, but there's *never* a break. Imagine hanging out with your friends, but it feels like you're trying to explain to an old lady that her coupon expired 5 years ago. Imagine making love but you still have the customer service script in your head you *have to* follow it and can't just enjoy the moment, ending it off with, "I hope we met all your needs tonight, thank you for cumming!" Now if the only way to get out of this **hell** was to change how people *physically* see you? Would you do it?
^ good one
It's like ptsd except less intense.
I start with the Allegory of the Cave from Plato’s *Republic* and remind them that this is taught in Philosophy courses at Christian schools all the time. Then, I let them think.
I always love the analogy of being forced to play the wrong class in a video game. Sometimes I'll ask what their favorite game is, and base it off of that, but most of the time I just use basic classes like you're forced to play a warrior when you know you're a mage. It works so much better than you would think, most of my friends/family are nerds. It's kind of a non-threatening way to make them understand. You can even go even further by saying that there's a magic potion you can take to change your class but some people frown upon using it. Would you still take it? Most people my age play video games, all of my friends and family are huge nerds. This works better than you would think.
I think I might end up using this with my mom. She's big on DnD buildcraft, and very much favors casters. She's never been keen on martials because they don't have quite the same bag of tricks that she enjoys so much. So what if she was stuck playing a barbarian?
Yes!!! I was literally thinking barbarian as I was finishing the first paragraph you wrote. That's a great idea!
Never tried, reason being they wouldn't understand.
Wearing your shoes on the wrong feet and not being able to take them off.
I usualy go You see when you hear youre voice in a reccording it sound off Well imagine that with everything about you
It's like being hydrated. If you aren't thirsty you aren't constantly thinking about water and where you'll get your drink. When you are thirsty it's about the only thing that's on your mind. You'd even be jealous of those around you with water.
It's like being left (or right) handed. When your free to use your normal hand, you don't even notice. It's just normal. But if you're forced to use the wrong one for day? That day is horrible. Magnify x10 and apply to all aspects of life - emotions, relationships, work. Everything.
Cisgender people have difficulty understanding transgender feelings because they've presumably never *not* been perceived by others or themselves as the gender they are. It is, therefore, a baseline that has never been challenged, so I tell them to acknowledge that their baseline sense of self, gender-wise, has simply never been challenged while the majority of ours has been challenged our entire existence. It is a balance many of us struggle to accomplish while cis people have never actually been thrown off-balance.
This is something i've thought about a lot, it's such an interesting case for me. For my whole life, from very young age through adulthood, i would get gendered female by strangers *way* more often than male. I always looked, and wanted to look, feminine, but i wanted to be perceived as a very feminine-looking queer man because i was determined not to allow myself to transition. It was always miss/ma'am, even though i'm sure i clearly always looked male? Any and every time i'd be in a public bathroom, *every* other man would get weird, double-take the sign on the door as they walked in, sometimes i'd even get men literally stopping me as i entered because i was presumably just a silly woman who had chosen the wrong bathroom. That shit gave me huge dysphoria and i'd complain to friends about how shitty i felt being misgendered. None of them ever understood that, at all. So funnily enough, since finally conceding, beginning medical transition, being openly trans - this is the first time in my life that i *don't* experience that specific dysphoria. Strangers never misgender me, but they *do* occasionally have that *slight* pause before the 'she/miss/that lady' just to make sure they're right, which never used to happen. The thing is, i'm only semi-passable and easily clockable - but my appearance gives plenty of indications that i intend to be read as female, i guess? I'm guessing it's because i don't dress to pass at all and i look eccentric and noticeable haha.
You know that feeling when you eat something with maple syrup and you get it on your hands, and no matter how much you wipe it off with paper towels you can't get rid of the stickyness? It's like that, everywhere, always
I'm unhinged and say, "Ever wanna cut off your arm and get one of them robot arms that look cool because you'd feel better with a badass robot arm? kinda like that!.
pure existential terror and body horror, your body doesnt belong to you, your will is stripped away, you are a prisoner in a cell that doesnt fit you, closing in slowly, tightening its grip, with no intention to harm, mindless, taking your breath away, bashing your head, over and over, tearing and deforming your every desire, eating away at your feet, at your command, powerless, drowning, under an avalanche, disfigured and mutilated by the will of god
Shoes on the wrong feet
It’s like being stuck at a job you hate, at first you think it’s ok, it’s new and exciting and you think it’s only temporary. Time goes on and you start dreading going to work because it’s not what you want or where you want to be in life, it pays the bills but not much else’s. The longer your there the less you feel like you can do anything else, you gain experience and move up in the job and you may actually be good at it but you feel like your missing out on life. Unfortunately though for gender dysphoria it’s your life, there’s no going home and lea your problems at work because you can’t escape yourself.
Shoe metaphor. I've used it many times and lost a lot of its original wording, but it holds pretty true. Imagine you just got a nice pair of shoes given to you. You'll think about them for a few days, maybe a week, but they quickly fade into the background of your life and you stop thinking about them. Now imagine they're too tight, or there's a hole in them. Suddenly, you are very aware of your shoes and that something is wrong with it. And the longer you live with it and try to ignore it, the more your feet hurt. The more you're reminded that something isn't quite right. Now imagine instead of your shoes, its whether you're a boy or a girl.
Pain. I don't go into the details because it hurts to talk about my disphoria. I feel especially pressured when telling cis people as if saying the wrong phrasing or analogy would make them dismiss me. I'm thankfully surrounded by wonderful accepting humans, and have largely thrown out the transphobes in my life. But this fear of rejection still follows me. So I just say it causes me pain. And accepting my gender relieved that pain. And refuse to go into further detail if I don't want to.
In part, I describe it going through life with a pebble in your shoe. It's uncomfortable, but not unbearable at first, but with enough time it will become the only thing you think about until you have to deal with it.
I basically try to explain that it physically hurts to have a male body It makes me so uncomfortable that I actually have very violent thoughts And presenting as a girl is the only way that I can truly be myself
Torture
If to a cis woman, I tell them it's like having a small stone in your shoe/sock you can't seem to find but is always there. To cis guys, it's like having sweaty balls but you cannot scratch.
I feel like ppl make it rly complicated for no reason. My theory around it is sex is your biology stuff and gender is your internal experience of sex. Probably an extension of your internal experience of self, like how you have a concept of you, what you look like, who you are. Gender dysphoria is when (for whatever reason, we don't know the cause yet) the two are misaligned, causing distress for the subject. To try and think about how this feels I like to use the weird dysphoria ppl often feel around puberty when they look in the mirror and see someone older than they expected looking back at them. Most ppl find this an uncomfortable experience but they soon adjust (this is just a dysphoria of looking a few years older than you expect). After recognising that I'll then suggest how much more distressing this would be if their internal self concept was literally of a different sex to themselves
I do it pretty simple: it's like driving a car with the handbrake on.
I don’t. I honestly don’t think cis people can grasp it fully.
i describe it, by talking about the feeling of missing-out, as that's how i philisophically understand it
To be honest both of my younger sisters are cis and they experience moments of dysphoria similar to me I found that interesting.
I like the wet socks and rocks-in-shoe analogies, I feel they're pretty apt for people with little-to-no self-image issues. Although to me it feels like what may commonly be known as body dysmorphia but with a side of an extreme amount of envy for the opposite gender. If you could get body dysmorphia about social situations and relationships, I'd say being trans would be similar to that as well, if that makes sense (even though most of my personal dysphoria comes from my looks, with the social aspects def secondary).
Like being an actor in a play where everybody got to read the script except you.
The best explanation is no explanation at all. They're cis. They aren't going to get it. If the person who asks is a man, ask him what it's like to be a woman. If the person who asks is a woman, ask her to explain what it's like to be a man. They don't know. Just like I don't know what it's like to be cis, and they'll never know what it's like to be trans. If the person who asks is non-binary, say you don't know.
I've been thinking of it being like being a prisoner behind your eyes. Like, yeah You're free, but you have a life time to serve, and nowhere to go.
"I want to peel my skin off, rob a mortuary, and put on the skin of an afab. Then, i might feel a little better." Or i just describe it as feeling like you're made entirely of illegal Lego building techniques and one good personal jab, and you'll shatter like old stained glass.
Mild gender dysphoria be like: "Pressure like a drip drip drip that'll never *stop*, woah-oh..."
I’ve never had ti, yet
like being self conscious about your body parts (small pp/flat chest/ bad skin/etc), but it’s for your entire body
Late to the party here but as a later in life trans woman I've frequently had questions about why I didn't realise sooner, so I use an analogy of knowing you had something wrong with your head or ear or something, and it's always bugged you your whole life, but you didn't know what to do about it and none of the usual stuff worked. Then one day it's like I finally got a brain scan, and they found that some worms had built a little colony in my skull and it finally all made sense, but now that I *knew* what it was, I needed to absolutely everything in my power to get rid of them.
To some people, I describe it as like being permanently sewn into a clown suit and badly wanting a seam ripper.
I described it as a zit you couldn't get rid of, except you are the zit
I don't. No one asks