pustluk:

we’ve gone pretty far off the rails with the Dysphoria Question, mostly because we’ve lost track of what gender dysphoria is.

gender dysphoria is not another name for ‘the state of being transgender’. it is not a concept transgender people have developed to describe themselves, their subjective experiences, or their day to day lives.

gender dysphoria is, specifically, a psychiatric diagnosis—a recent one. it has existed only since the DSM-5 was issued in 2013 as a reclassification of its predecessor, gender identity disorder, which itself first appeared in 1980 with the DSM-III. being a psychiatric diagnosis, gender dysphoria definitionally frames transness as some kind of pathology.

this should be easy to intuit and reject, and the only reason we haven’t is because we’re still preoccupied with the idea that trans is something you simply are rather than something you do. our transness takes shape and acquires consequence in relation to the world; it is a certain set of behaviors and relationships to our selves, our bodies, and others that place us in opposition to gender as a social system, in relatively consistent ways. that’s all.

we continue to fixate on the idea of an essential transness because it gives us comfort, as well as the easiest answers. it is easiest—when we’re confronted with the hardest parts of being transgender and find ourselves asking why we put ourselves through this—to say that we simply have to, full stop, rather than implicate the organizational principles of the world around us and our own orientation with respect to them. all of us are looking for consistency in our personal narratives, for a reason we are they way we are, and for a means of justifying our transness to ourselves and those around us.

to that effect, controversy among trans people over the question, “do you need gender dysphoria to be trans” is an internalization and continuance of the older, more explicitly pathologizing taxonomies of transess through which we’ve had to navigate the healthcare system—the other big place we’ve had to justify ourselves. are we crossdressers or transsexuals? are we true transsexuals or autogynephiles? are we gender-conforming or gender-nonconforming? will we have gay or straight relationships? do we meet the criteria for a gender identity disorder diagnosis—and, accordingly, have access to healthcare—or not?

none of those questions have ever been centered around trans people. they are questions asked by a cissexist society to itself as it resists processing trans people, who are themselves too disenfranchised to do anything about it.

this is why so many of our answers to the Dysphoria Question are so unsatisfying. it can’t be solved by expanding the scope of gender dysphoria, by creating a feel-good parallelism of ‘gender euphoria’, or by a simple ‘no’. the whole question, and the history in which it’s grounded, has to be rejected out of hand. the answer to the question, “do you need gender dysphoria to be trans” is not, “no, because transness can mean anything”. the answer is no—because transness is a way of living, in relation to yourself and the world, and no one needs a psychiatric diagnosis to live a trans life.