Do any other trans people get dysphoria from anything outside the gender stereotypes?

I know a couple of you have kind of answered a similar question in another thread of mine and thank you for your replies I just needed more input so I thought I would post a new thread with a new title.

What I would like to hear is whether anybody else who identifies as trans get dysphoria from anything that may be remotely associated with your birth gender and that falls outside the stereotypes of normal male/female interests and behavior? Or is it just me?

For example...

I used to enjoy reading novels but since i have realized I'm trans, I can no longer read fiction. It gives me dysphoria even though I am totally aware that reading is a not a gender related activity.

I used to do a lot of cooking for the family, helping out with meals but now I hate it because it makes me feel dysphoric. But men and women can cook, right?

I have great grades from school and college and a degree in design but I can't bear thinking about going into a professional career or any type of work that uses my intellect or design skills because once again it gives me dysphoria. I was looking at entering a profession through administrative work as an admin assistant which is relatively gender ambiguous but now I don't think I can go through with it because it gives me dysphoria. The only way round this seems to be going into stereo-typically male work such as electrical or plumbing maintenance for instance. I can't say this is something I really want to do but I don't feel there to be any dysphoria associated with such jobs and it also seems like this would make me more of a man...

When I am out and about, I see other men dressed how I think I would like to dress but when it comes to, I can't think about style and what type of clothes I would like to wear because it gives me dysphoria. The only way I can see myself overcoming this with regard to clothes is to just have a no-sense-of-style approach where clothes are nothing but functional and do not need to match. I am just realizing as I write this that somehow I perceive this makes someone more of a man because fashion and style are more typically feminine interests...

Does anyone else get this or know why?

 

Re: Do any other trans people get dysphoria from anything outside the gender stereoty

Vaguely, sometimes.

I keep thinking why trans people have to conform strictly to the gender they identify as (e.g. if they identify as male, they must appear more masculine than cis males to be accepted as one). So it's like you mentioned - avoiding doing what may remotely be associated with your birth gender. Maybe it's just an observation that only goes for some trans people, but I don't know why. Pressure to match up perhaps, though that's not exactly a cause of it.

 

Re: Do any other trans people get dysphoria from anything outside the gender stereoty

Not really, to be honest. There's things like wearing make-up or baking that I don't do anymore (latter, I might do if asked). But I find coming out, I'm actually doing more things that I used to avoid like the plague.

Like as a kid, I used to like videogames. But I stopped playing them a few years back. Lo and behold, I picked them up again. Reading? I maybe read one novel every couple months. Now I've always got one I'm working on and I've stopped pretending I liked stupid YA novels.

Seriously. Gender stereotypes are stupid. I know few people who conform to them 100%. I've got a male relative who's a photographer (something, growing up, I'd always thought of as a female thing). There are male bakers. My mom sniff tests her jeans, for pete's sake.

Your transition's your opportunity to do the things that make you feel more authentic. An if that means you're a guy who bakes, then go for it.

 

Re: Do any other trans people get dysphoria from anything outside the gender stereoty

I can't relate to this, but do you think it's because the activities are things you kind of associate with females? Or do you think it might be because you associate it with your old life, before you realised you were trans? If the former, I think it's possible for that to go away, with time, once you become more comfortable with doing things you like and separating them from society's expectations of gender. If the latter, I think that's VERY normal and that a lot of people will feel similar about certain things that tie them to a life that they were unhappy with.

 

Re: Do any other trans people get dysphoria from anything outside the gender stereoty

Physical traits are what do it for me.
Most things I like happen to be pretty masculine anyways.
Being associated with girls is something I'd rather avoid. If I am explicitly called out on "being a girl" then that would give me dysphoria.

 

Re: Do any other trans people get dysphoria from anything outside the gender stereoty

I agree.

 

Re: Do any other trans people get dysphoria from anything outside the gender stereoty

Not really. A lot of things give me anxiety, but I wouldn't say they up my feelings of dysphoria. I mean the dysphoria, for me, in terms of my gender, comes from feeling wrong - I feel particularly struck with dysphoria when I wear female clothes that emphasize my shape, or when I can see my breasts, or whenever I get called "young lady" or "ma'am" or really anything that alludes to my distinctly female body. For me, feelings of gender dysphoria pretty much all come back to remarks about my body - and even saying something as simple as the word "girl" in reference to me is enough most days because it's a reminder that most people see gender as a black and white thing, and aren't reading me as me, but lumping me in with a group I do not feel a part of because of how they read me physically. It's not about things or activities really, like, for example, yoga is seen as being a feminine activity, at least around here, and I do that and it doesn't give me dysphoria. But if I were to be called "miss/lady/she/girl" etc. while there at the yoga studio, that would trigger the dysphoria.

However, "dysphoria" as defined as "the opposite of euphoria", without gendered connotations, is something that can happen to anyone, particularly people going through depression. In that sense, non gender specific things have set me off in the past as well, and I'm sure many people, cis or trans, could understand that.

This is pretty much what it is for me, yeah.

 

Re: Do any other trans people get dysphoria from anything outside the gender stereoty

I am certified as a journeyman finish carpenter, & apprentice electrician... Now that I am a woman... I can't see myself getting either of those to Master grade. Smoking cigs gave me dysphoria... So I quit... So hard.
Not being tucked also gives me dysphoria, real bad if in public.

 

Re: Do any other trans people get dysphoria from anything outside the gender stereoty

Dysphoria based upon gender roles and stereotypes? Not really, actually. I enjoy learning how to cook, I like partaking in yoga (which is typically seen as a more 'feminine' activity), and I definitely like to read and write. Keep in mind, most popular or well-known fiction is written by men, and enjoying books isn't a gendered activity.

I only get dysphoric in physical terms, i.e. being aware of my body whenever I'm wearing clothing that accentuates features I'd rather not have/would prefer to ignore, having to get dressed, so on. Or if I'm addressed as, or viewed as as girl/female. Partaking in activities such as the aforementioned attract more of a female crowd, but that doesn't make me any less of a guy.

Yes!

 

Re: Do any other trans people get dysphoria from anything outside the gender stereoty

Thanks for your replies.
Seems it's just me then
The only response that comes close to how I feel is Plenilune when she said smoking gave her dysphoria.

The only thing I can possibly think of as an explanation is that I am somehow subconsciously categorizing things into gender roles or anything that reminds me of my past gives me dysphoria which would seem more likely as I'm finding the need to get rid of all of my stuff associated with my childhood, teenage years and early adulthood, before I realized I was trans. It's like I just want to block it all out and get as far away from being that 'girl' as possible.

 

Re: Do any other trans people get dysphoria from anything outside the gender stereoty

This I relate to. Looking at my past does sometimes make me dysphoric, but mostly it's just a lot of anxiety. Either way, I've been working to steadilly distance myself from the old me. Some things, admittedly, I am holding on to, but most things have lost a sense of sentiment.

 

Re: Do any other trans people get dysphoria from anything outside the gender stereoty

Yeah, and I can understand that. When you're coming out, there's definitely pressure to distance yourself as much as possible from the idea of who you used to be.

I'll go back to my baking example. I don't find it enjoyable anymore. And it's something I used to do often, if not daily. But for me, it became this symbol of that person I tried and failed to be. Maybe if my mother wouldn't act like I was some housewife in training, I would've kept on doing it, but it's something that feels odd for me to do if I'm in a position where I've got to bake.

(I was actually baking a cake the day I began to really question my gender. So I was literally standing there, eating frosting by the handful, and panicking as I dotted a damn cake with almonds)

Before I came out, I even considered going to culinary school. Now, I'm shooting for a career in media relations. Which is funny, since the former's actually a male dominated profession, lol.

 

Re: Do any other trans people get dysphoria from anything outside the gender stereoty

So if I'm reading what you're saying correctly your emotional progression seems to be something like this:

Sense of pleasure -> Uneasy and anxious ('dysphoria') -> Depression -> Numbness

I'm basing the above on this thread and also what you have said in other threads. Now so far, you appear to have a pretty firm grasp on those things, but what appears to be missing each time is the part in between.

Every time I have put an arrow in the above sequence, we can insert either and action or an idea, essentially the arrow is where we put the 'cause' of the thing that follows.

Let's take, for example, clothing.

Now in your own words, you can look at other men and are able to determine that you would like to dress in a similar style. This, is your sense of pleasure. You have seen something, and without needing to force yourself to think about it, have decided 'I want that'. It may not last a long time, but it remains to be based in personal pleasure.

Now some time after that, you feel uneasy and anxious.

Note:I am using 'uneasy and anxious' in place of the the word 'dysphoria'. There are two reasons for this. The first, is that these are the words that you used to describe your dysphoria in your identity splitting thread. The second I promise I will explain towards the end!

So what happens in between these two feelings? How do you get from that place of pleasure, to feeling 'uneasy and anxious'?

You think about YOU wearing them.

Now there are two things my therapist would say here. First, he would say the words 'unrelenting standards'. Second he would talk about a 'disaster' complex. I will address both based on the things I know about you, and also some semi-educated deductions!

Unrelenting standards is a phrase my therapist uses to describe the way we set targets for ourselves that we can never reach. Nothing is ever good enough. It comes to a point where we are so aware that it isn't good enough, or rather that WE are not good enough, that we decide to stop trying. If I'm never going to reach this goal, why bother. In your case that appears to be "These clothes are never going to look as good on me as they did on that guy". I don't necessarily feel the need to back this up, but just in case you ARE sitting there going 'no, that's not true at all', I refer you to your last paragraph; specifically this phrase: "The only way I can see myself overcoming this with regard to clothes is to just have a no-sense-of-style approach where clothes are nothing but functional and do not need to match." The only way I can see myself getting over this, is if I stop caring.

The disaster complex is linked to the above very closely. I will paraphrase my therapists explanation of the phrase. "Unable to focus outside of what will go wrong, what will cause difficulty, what others will say and do." In this case, if you haven't already got there, I'm thinking about your mum. I will be completely honest, I will be amazed to be point of disbelief if you are able to sit here and tell me that you don't think "Mum is going to take the piss" when you think about wearing clothes you like the look of. Now obviously you have past experience to suggest that your mum will react negatively if you wore what you like, however, it's the focus on the negative that is important here. There are hundreds of millions of people who will never say a word, or will be encouraging, and yet we focus on that one voice that tells us it's wrong.

I think we can all agree that this type of thinking would make us all feel uneasy and anxious!

Note:Before I go on, I need to point out that anything I say here is not a criticism of you and certainly isn't your fault. Most importantly I am DEFINITELY not trying to tell you that the way you are feeling is easy to get over. It isn't! Please don't feel as if I am trying to make you feel bad.

So next on our list is depression. So what sent us from 'uneasy and anxious' to depression and how are those two things different?

I'll start with how they are different. Feeling 'uneasy and anxious' is almost certainly going to be a part of the depressive state, BUT the depressive state is more than that. When you are uneasy and anxious you know vaguely where it came from. In your case, you seem to become panicked when this happens. The depressive state is different. If you compare the tone of your original post in this thread to you second, you will see the difference I mean. In the original post, there is some panic. I KNOW you've already answered some of this, but I needed a new thread to deal with it because it's messing with my head. There is a pleading behind the words for someone to be able to relate. Now look at your second post. "Seems it's just me then". That's not panic any more, that's the point where you've sat there and felt helpless. So there is the difference, 'uneasy and anxious' leaves you asking for help, depression makes you feel you'll never find any.

So what takes us from one to the other? We try and fix the problem, and we inevitably fail. I'll give you an example from my life. Every day I get out of the shower and catch site of my back in one of 3 mirrors some bastard decided to put in our bathroom. My back is pretty hairy. The second I see it I feel the same as you, 'uneasy and anxious'. My thoughts immediately fly to how un-ladylike it is and how repulsive it would be if I was lucky enough to have a boyfriend and he saw it. I think about how I COULD go an get it waxed but I'm scared of what the people there will say, whoever saw such a hairy girl before! So I panic, grab the razor and randomly scrape it across my back hoping to get some of it off. It never ever works. Then I get depressed. I tried to fix the problem, but MY method didn't work, and I'm scared of the alternative. I'm scared of going ahead and doing the thing I KNOW will fix it, because to do so is going to make me feel really, REALLY bad while it happens. So instead of doing anything I just sit there feeling sad about it until I think of something else, then it happens again the next day.

Now look at our clothes example. Part of you knows what you want, and knows that you would really love to wear these things. But standing squarely in your way are all the things that are going to make you feel genuinely dysphoric. What will other people say? Will I look good in them? I'm just going to look like a girl in mens clothes? What if I don't pass? You see all those things, just like I do, and all of a sudden it doesn't matter what we did to try and fix the problem, because suddenly we feel helpless.

Last, we have numbness. What is numbness? Numbness is that point you are at right now. It's where you are prepared to say that you would rather have NO input in terms of style in exchange for being free from feeling 'uneasy and anxious'. In my case, I sit here thinking that I'll just never go swimming again because that way nobody will see my hairy shoulders and the parts of my legs I just can't get right!

Now we discussed before about the type of person you want to be, and the type of person you think you will HAVE to be. The person you have to be to avoid the dysphoria. The person that will wind up being the person you hate, whose only redeeming feature is that nobody can say he isn't masculine.

But think about that person you WANT to be. We spend a lot of time on this forum telling people not to do things in transition they aren't comfortable with, don't we? Perhaps we should rethink this strategy because it occurs to me now, that it is potentially damaging.

In your case, when you have a choice between 'clothes you like' and 'clothes that are functional ONLY', you are finding that 'clothes you like' is making you really uncomfortable. But we can both see that it is the better choice! When you are considering work and you have 'careers you enjoy' and 'careers that are masculine', careers you enjoy and uncomfortable for you. The masculine ones feel comfortable because they don't come with dysphoria (from the outside). They are comfortable, but they almost certainly won't make you happy.

So I think, in this case, and perhaps all cases, are focus should not be on the things that you are comfortable with, but instead on the things that you WANT. Those things that give you that moment of pleasure before you think too hard.



I promised I would explain the second reason I was using 'uneasy and anxious' in place of 'dysphoria' and I will do so now. I have done it because I wonder at what point we draw the line between 'uneasy and anxious' and dysphoria.

What I mean by that is that I when I feel dysphoric, I feel fake and I feel scared, among other things. Now it occurred to me while I was at work, that I do know exactly how you feel. There are things I do that have NOTHING to do with gender on the surface that make me feel fake and scared. I wouldn't go to the job centre appointment I had for it. I'm putting off going to martial arts classes again. I'm put off doing historical re-enactment. I can feel that way about reading and music too.

Then I realised a couple of things. The first thing was that some of these things DO have a hidden gendered part that I wasn't considering at the time. Let's take music as an example. I've played bass guitar for many years now and I love it to bits. But I have not been able to play it since I accepted who I am. I have picked it up, played half a song and then felt weird. The last time I did so, I realised why. I tried my hardest to forget about it and managed to play a few songs, then it got dark and I saw my reflection in the window. I saw a guy standing there instead. It's something I've associated heavily with being 'me', except until recently 'me' was a miserable, pathetic excuse for a man. Even listening to music has changed. I used to listen to a lot of metal, because it was powerful and helped me channel anger. I have barely done so since. I've gradually moved over to other thing, like bluegrass. Playing the mandolin is a lot 'prettier' and feels more girly than playing bass, even though I know neither of those things are true. I think it's one of those things that will change over time. I loved these things in the past, and I might never do them the same way but I will still try, bit by bit, to do them now and if I need to, to change the WAY I do it. As I said, listening to music, I now listen to a lot of bluegrass, country and the alike. Very rarely any metal. Reading...well I just stopped for a long, long while and now I read loads. Sometimes these things feel strange and I think 'this is what I did BEFORE'. But before wasn't a lie! I didn't like those things BECAUSE I was a guy, I just liked those things. I think it's just letting the personal association die down and it might take a while.

The second thing was that some of the time, I realise that actually, I'm not feeling dysphoric, I'm just feeling things that I now associate with dysphoria. Going to the job centre scares me, and I am scared because of my gender. It FEELS the same, but I'm not left thinking 'job centre isn't for girls'. There are certain things I just naturally associate with dysphoria now, and I realise that is a really dumb thing to do. It's not good me getting scared and deciding in my head without thinking that I must also be freaking out about my gender too!

Anyway I hope SOME of that helps, or at least sheds an outside light on things!

 

Re: Do any other trans people get dysphoria from anything outside the gender stereoty

@Ellia: You're really insightful and eloquent! I think there's a lot of value in what you wrote here.

 

Re: Do any other trans people get dysphoria from anything outside the gender stereoty

Not trans here, but I always found it unfair how it seems like gender stereotypes take up our society....or how trans people are judged more harshly when it comes to stereotypes.

For example, my uncle is a straight cis male who loves flowers, gardening, and cooking/baking. Almost no one teases him or mocks him for being less of a man for these interests. But I noticed if a FtM guy did the same thing, people mock him for being less of a man and that he has to prove his masculinity more than a cis man has to.

Maybe this is why some trans people feel dysphoria when it comes to gender stereotypes. Unfortunately a lot of ignorant people will link those activities to your biological sex to "prove you wrong". So trans people have to work even harder to fit gender stereotypes.

It's definitely dumb for sure. My dad and uncle are great cooks, and my dad loves novels and even certain drama flicks. But they're still very masculine real men. Trans*men shouldn't be seen as any different.

I'm so sorry its causing you trouble though....

 

Re: Do any other trans people get dysphoria from anything outside the gender stereoty

I loved to cook as a guy, but I love it even more now as a woman. Infact every cooking trick and recipe I know I learned from my father, who in turned learned it from his... Men did a lot of cooking in my family lol
Video games is another story... I played every free minute I had... now I rarely play them... but I am ok with that.

 

Re: Do any other trans people get dysphoria from anything outside the gender stereoty

Thank you Holly. That has given me a lot to consider. I've only just read your reply and I'm still thinking it over but what seems to stand out to me is association and avoidance.

For quite some time now I have cared very little about my appearance and the way I dress because of depression and because of real body dysphoria. The last time I cared about my appearance was when I used to present feminine female. I used to enjoy shopping for clothes and choosing outfits so I am wondering from what you have said whether I get anxiety which feels specifically about my gender (that's why I group it with dysphoria) when I once again think about taking more interest in my appearance and how I would like to dress because I associate it with the old me.

I could say the same about trying to decorate my room. I haven't cared about it for some time now, again because of depression, dysphoria (my bedroom decor was very girly) and grief (I was sad about saying goodbye to the old me). I used to enjoy decorating and choosing new colours etc. So again I am wondering if I associate this with the old me which makes me anxious and uncomfortable about my gender.

Both of the above also link with my interest and education in art and design which was also something I used to enjoy but now gives me dysphoria, again because it is associated with the old me and perhaps because I also subconsciously think of it as a stereo-typically a female interest. There were very few boys in art classes at college and university.

I can think of plenty more things that have these kinds of connections which give me dysphoria. It seems to make sense that I want to avoid all of the things I used to do or which I associate with being female and deal with this by avoidance and not caring.

Yes I am also worried about what people will think of me dressing differently. I can guarantee my mum is bound to say I look ridiculous. Even I think I will look ridiculous and will never be happy with my appearance as male because I have all the wrong features. I am going to be a very strange looking man so how do I deal with this? By thinking the way to deal with it is not to care which somehow ends up with me feeling emotionless and numb.

Thanks Holly. I have a lot to think about!

 

Re: Do any other trans people get dysphoria from anything outside the gender stereoty

I'm glad it's been useful! Take your time to think it through

 

Re: Do any other trans people get dysphoria from anything outside the gender stereoty

Is it that you think video games aren't a girl thing? Or is it that you were using video games to distract you from your dysphoria?

 

Re: Do any other trans people get dysphoria from anything outside the gender stereoty

I still play, just no where nears as much as when I was a guy, but... yea seemed like a distraction