fierceawakening:

earlgraytay:

girl-unashamed:

earlgraytay:

weird unendorsed Late Night Disk Horse Insight: 

seems like trans men are often more dualistic about their body vs. self than trans women are.

 trans men (even ones who are not self-identified truscum) tend to look at being trans as a medical condition more often than trans women do? and  in my experience trans men are more likely to say things like ‘i’m a man but i have a woman’s body’ or ‘yeah my ovaries were a birth defect’ and meanwhile trans women are more likely to say things like ‘i’m a woman, this is my body, so it’s a woman’s body even if i don’t do anything to it’ .

 my guess is that it is a Thing, but it’s a Thing because being AFAB is Hell in a number of very !!FUN!! ways that being AMAB is not, and if you’re dealing with that kind of shit AND gender dysphoria at the same time? you’re gonna dissociate yourself from your Flesh Mecha a little more than if your body has always just been Your Body. 

it’d be interesting to see if this is actually A Thing, if trans men and trans women really do tend to see their bodies-wrt-gender differently, and if it is A Thing how it maps onto how cis people see things. double interesting to see if/how it maps onto people who are dealing with chronic illness or other debilitating conditions. 

(obligatory disclaimer, this is not a one-to-one statement, i have heard trans people of all genders say things on all ends of this spectrum and if your experience doesn’t map onto this that doesn’t mean you’re Not Really Trans)

Wouldn’t this theory predict that there would be more self-identified trans men than trans women, because having a Hell Body would make you more likely to notice dysphoria / body dysmorphia and actively want to do something about it?

Hey, I did say ‘unendorsed’. :p More seriously, I do think that there are at least as many AFAB people with dysphoria than AMAB people with dysphoria, and there are probably many more AFAB people who have dysphoria than you’d think. It’s just that dysphoria != identifying as transgender. 

Dysphoria can mean ‘becoming a trans person’, obviously. But just as often, ‘having dysphoria’ means ‘living in extreme discomfort with one’s body, but not having any outlet to handle that discomfort’.

Sometimes dysphoria means ‘having extreme discomfort with one’s body, but not knowing that there’s something one could do to fix it’. Or ‘having extreme discomfort with one’s body, but not wanting to give up ‘being [female | male]’ as a part of one’s identity’. Or ‘having extreme discomfort with one’s body, but not wanting to suffer the kind of shit trans people go through on a daily basis’. 

Or ‘having extreme discomfort with one’s body, but suspecting a full Gender-To-Other-Gender physical transition would give one the same discomfort for other reasons.’

Or ‘having extreme discomfort with one’s body, but knowing you can’t actually have the body you want with current medical technology and/or no one will give you the body you want, so grinning and bearing it with what you’ve got’.

Like… outside of Queer Spaces ™ ®, most people don’t even know trans men exist. Both cis allies and anti-trans folks tend to think of trans people as “binary femme trans women”; their immediate mental model is Caitlyn Jenner or Laverne Cox.  Hell, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve said “I’m trans” to someone and had them immediately think, "oh, you’re a trans woman, right?”. Even though at this point I do not look female, like, at all. Even if they’re a nurse seeing me before I talk to a doctor about my hysterectomy. You have to actively remind most cis people that AFAB trans people exist, or they will completely forget.

So there are probably a lot of AFAB people out there who don’t know that you can, for example, get an FTM sex change*. Or that you can choose to say that you’re something different than a woman and people will treat you with respect. Or that you can choose to identify as something other than a man or woman. And some of these people would be very, very happy to transition in one way or another! But they can’t.

Other AFAB people would like to physically transition in a way that’s similar to FTM transition… buuuut they identify as ‘butch’ or ‘dyke’ or ‘he/him lesbian’; being a woman is an important part of their identity, and they can’t give it up. A lot of the time they make you live as Your Chosen Gender for a year or two before you can even talk about having surgery; living as a man for a year while still being a woman is not, I imagine, a pleasant experience. And there are not very many doctors who will help someone who isn’t “officially” transgender transition. Hell, there are plenty of nonbinary people who still have problems with doctors refusing to help them, because they’re not a binary trans person.  

Similarly, there are a lot of AFAB people- regardless of their identity- who have dysphoria with some aspects of their bodies, but believe that the kind of physical transition they’d have to undergo to fix these problems would just give them more problems. For example: an AFAB person who just thinks of their gender as “LOUD SHRUGGING NOISE” might want to have a more muscular body, broad shoulders, and no breasts, but might also feel like having a deep voice, body hair, and a penis would give them dysphoria in the other direction.

“Having dysphoria” and “being transgender” are about as synonymous as “being attracted to women” and “being an out, proud lesbian”. A lot of dysphoric people are trans, but not all dysphoric people are; sometimes they’re ‘just’ something similar, and sometimes, for whatever reason, they can’t come out. 

*apologies for the outdated language, but ‘gender confirmation surgery’ just sounds awkward in this context. y’know? 

thank you thank you thank you thankyouthanmkgftbbrb