Can you explain for the rest of us who have never personally dealt with these issues what your experience of "debilitating body dysphoria" was like? Serious question, I have asked other troons and never gotten a good answer.
Sure thing.
Imagine you're a young person on the Internet. (Not uncommon these days.) For whatever reason, you feel insecure - maybe there's a lot of changes going on in your life, maybe you lack a sense of community, whatever it is.
Somehow, you encounter an online community for transgender people. Perhaps someone sent you a weird link after you made some offhand comment about "what if I was [opposite gender]?" This is how it begins. Even if the thought of being a troon never occurred to you, online trans spaces use truly insidious messaging to get inside your head. Check out these relatable memes! Do you [insert symptom of social anxiety]? You might be like us! If this statement makes you question yourself even for a second, you MUST be trans. Look at all these testimonies from happy transgender people! The
real issue with you is that your gender is wrong, and you can finally live an authentic life as your true self if you just take these pills, change your name, have this surgery...
You might ignore it at first, but these things plant seeds in your mind. One day, looking in the mirror, you think to yourself
"What if I had facial hair?" or
"What if I had breasts?" . You go back to the trans spaces, and they tell you yes. Yes you are one of us. You are one of us and you need to transition NOW because your body is literally destroying itself the longer you wait and you will live to regret it otherwise. Let the cycle repeat itself a few times and it eventually begins to perpetuate itself as you learn to redefine certain quirks of your personality, or innocuous occurrences from your childhood, as surefire signs that you should have been born the opposite sex. It reaches a point where you can't bear to look at yourself in the mirror or be touched in certain places because the thoughts consume your entire being, and THIS is what I meant when I mentioned body dysphoria.
So you bite the bullet and troon out. The difficult thing is, no matter how deep you get into transition that feeling
never goes away - its focus only shifts to a different body part, or a different element of your presentation, or your voice, or your personality, or your interests, or the guy across the street who looked at you funny, and for as long as you keep indulging the delusion it follows you everywhere. This is because gender dysphoria comes not from one's biology, nor from oppressive societal norms; rather, it's a physical manifestation of your deep-seated insecurities, which are projected onto your own body because you're taught to believe that transition will fix EVERYTHING.
Some people follow the road of transition until they reach a dead end. A body pumped full of cross-sex hormones, a resculpted face, genitals mangled into a poor imitation of nature's craftsmanship, and for what? People come up with all sorts of ways to cope after reaching that final point - isn't this the life they wanted? And yet, after following every step exactly as they were told, the dreaded feeling remains, and you can tell that at some level they understand the hell they've entered themselves into. These are the people I pity the most, even though they did it to themselves in a sense. I was lucky enough to step off the path before wrecking myself in any truly irreversible ways.
Apologies for the essay but hopefully it answered your question.
.
