I see your point that trans people have agency over their own reaction. But, while that’s true, they don’t have any control over the preceding action, namely whether other people treat them differently because of their gender identity. That’s clearly the responsibility of the other person.
And I have to agree with Sequitur that there’s a limit to how much someone can brush these things off with willpower, because the brain is remarkably good at refusing to ignore external inputs. As a personal example, I have a mental health condition where I periodically experience pain despite the lack of a physical cause. There are a lot of things I can do to deal with that, but believing that I’m not in pain isn’t one of them, even if the rational part of my brain can understand that I’m just fine—it’s like holding an ice cube in your hand and trying to convince yourself that it’s not cold. How people treat someone can have the same effect: the person in question may know perfectly well that they’re facing discrimination, or lack of education, or even well-intentioned mistakes, but they’re still being fed signals that they are of lesser worth, and there’s no way for that to have zero effect.
(Incidentally, this is why CBT is six phases, not just the reconceptualization phase that it tends to be thought of as.)
I haven’t seen this term used before. Does it refer to the condition of your perceived gender not aligning with your biological sex in general, or is it specific to male → female and female → male?
Oh brilliant, thanks for that. I’ve played it a while ago, when I saw it posted in Emily Short’s blog, and I didn’t think to save the link, but I certainly tend to remember bits of that often enough. It’s really very good.
Dysphoria is the opposite of euphoria, i.e. a feeling of depression, sadness, or distress. I’ve never seen “dysmorphia” used to refer to gender dysphoria, though it’s a real word, and the confusion seems easy to make. Are you sure it’s not just a contagious mispelling on that forum thread?
Right now, or in two years from now?
It certainly won’t be in ten years from now, because by then it will be called “alternative american person” and anything else will be derogatory.
You can’t even call a midget a midget anymore. Now it’s “little person” or something with an even more “respectfully” convoluted name. You need an actual midget to make it acceptable.
At least, that’s one of the things that identifying as a certain gender might mean. It might presumably also mean that being of a certain gender is important to you in roughly the way that having a certain religion, being from a certain city, or supporting a certain soccer team or belonging to some other group may be “existentially” important to you. I suppose that feeling that you really belong to the gender you don’t apparently belong to, only becomes an issue if you identify with a gender in that “existential” sense.
But whether or not you do identify with a gender in an “existential” sense ,there’s the question of what makes you belong to this or that group, and apparently there are conflicting criteria in society for belonging to the groups of males and females repectively. A pretty minimal one is, as Trumgottist put it, having your genitals on the outside or the inside. But of course there are lot of things beside this that are considered male or masculine and female or feminine respectively. The predominant coneptions of masculinity and feminity ties all this other things to the make up of your genitals (with those body parts playing the decisive role for what other characteristics you “should” exhibit – it’s the external genitals persons that are supposed top behave like guys and the internal genital persons that are supposed to behave like girls). But obviously it happens that people whose bodies display a given kind of genital set-up feel that they belong (or perhaps ought to belong) to the group defined by the possession of the other kind of genital set-up. However, the concepts of masculinity and femininity at work there can’t be those defined by the actual possession of certain genitals, so what does those concepts look like?
I suspect that might be an interesting question even from a philosophical point of view.
I think that dysphoria implies a more holistic sense of non-well-being – which could extend to societal perception in addition to body image – while dysmorphia is a more focused feeling.
I hear dysphoria a lot more often than dysmorphia with regards to gender.
Also, can we get Andreas the hell out of here? His flippant characterization of how people who are regularly beaten or murdered want to be treated is extremely offensive.
