pradlee: Re: The Difference Between Dysphoria...

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Re: The Difference Between Dysphoria and Negative Body Image

start-wandows-ngrmadly:

amydentata:

[TW: Cissexism]

pradlee:

If all a person had to do was to announce hirself as a certain gender to be read and treated as that gender, then there would be almost no drive to change hir body.

Wrong. Dysphoria persists even in the absence of social pressure. RTFA.

…

You can’t cite that article as “in the absence of social pressure”;

I’m not citing anything. I’m linking back to my original post.

no one is without social pressure, no matter what time or place hir’s in.

Dysphoria exists in many trans children before they are old enough to learn socialized gender. That is my own personal experience as well as that of many others.

Presence of social pressure does not mean that a trait exists because of social pressure. Social pressure neither made me dyslexic nor cured me of it. Sometimes social pressure is irrelevant, even though it is present.

I was wrong to be so extreme and exacting in my response, though I still believe that societal influence, even and especially if it’s subconscious, plays a large part in dysphoria, along with genetic/mental influences.

I know what the author of that article

The author of the article is me. I was wrong to be so extreme and exacting in my response as well. What I should have said was, for some people dysphoria persists even in the absence of social pressure.

means that some things are just wrong/don’t belong, but a significant part of that for me is because people will think I’m a certain gender when I’m not,

That is true for you, but not necessarily for everyone else. One of the most common fallacies within the trans community is to project personal experience onto the community as a whole. Or to project the collective experience of a smaller group of trans people onto the entire community. It’s something I fall prey to myself as well. It’s pretty understandable: since our identities are constantly under attack, we rush to defend ourselves harshly out of self-preservation. But projecting like that doesn’t work, no matter who is doing it.

Many trans people experience an innate, hard-coded “glitch” that needs to be physically corrected. Others experience an aspect of social pressure. Neither type of dysphoria is wrong, except when projected onto the other. There is more than one kind of dysphoria, and they are not experienced by all.

We each experience our own flavor of transness that doesn’t necessarily speak to some universal truth about transness itself. There are smaller subdivisions within the trans community that share certain aspects of experience (for example, the group who has innate dysphoria, and the group that doesn’t). The community is a complicated Venn diagram of all these tiny pieces of transness. That’s why we don’t have a single unifying narrative; the trans umbrella consists of micro-communities within micro-communities within micro-communities. It’s important to recognize the places where we overlap while at the same time recognizing our differences.