On Gender Dissonance

A year ago, I received a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. I went to a therapist for help with my depression, which I suspected might have a basis in gender issues, and she confirmed that the depression was likely due, at least in part, to my gender identity not matching the sex I was assigned at birth. I’m still not convinced it’s true. Some of those words don’t even make sense to me.

Since my teenage years, more than two decades ago, I’ve struggled with fantasies of turning into a woman. That’s how I’ve always thought of them, as fantasies, no different than fantasies about having superpowers or being an elf. Any sort of transformation would fascinate me, but especially men turning into women. I never told anyone about these fantasies or my behaviors in acting them out. I knew how shameful they were, and I hid them. There were some close calls while I was cross-dressed, but I was never outed. I wanted so very much to be normal, and that desire was stronger than whatever this feeling was that compelled me to pretend I was female. I buried it. I am a rational person, and these thoughts are irrational.

I would not call these feelings gender dysphoria. That would imply distress or discomfort. I’m not distressed about my gender, at least not consciously. I don’t feel like a woman, whatever that means. There is no alter ego yearning to escape, nor do I have any strong desire to be seen and treated as a woman by the people in my life. If these feelings have caused any disruption in my life, it’s either indirect (depression) or it comes from having to keep secrets from my family and friends.

The transgender experiences that I’ve read about and heard from others seem to revolve around the concept of an individual’s gender identity, and I don’t have one of those. I don’t even know what it means. What is an identity? I have many attributes that I could list for you, and one of them would be the fact that I am biologically male. I have many beliefs, personality traits, emotions, and relationships, none of which have anything to do with being female. Those things aren’t even inherently masculine of feminine. So do all these attributes combine to make up my identity? I’m told it’s more than that, that there’s some internal sense of self, of knowing. A soul, maybe. I can’t get to that place, wherever that unidentified thing may be.

Could this be gender euphoria? That term is often used in trans circles to describe people like me who don’t dislike their current sex but nonetheless would change it if they could. It’s an appealing notion. The thought of being a woman is exciting, and cross-dressing gives me a thrill, or at least it used to before hormone therapy tanked my testosterone levels. Gender euphoria seems like nothing more than stating that I have a desire to be female. It’s true, I do. I also have many other desires besides that, some of which are as impossible to achieve as changing sex. What makes this one special?

In Julia Serano’s book, Whipping Girl, she uses a term that I had not encountered before: gender dissonance. I liked the term, thinking it might be a more moderate way of describing the transgender experience without using the extremes of dysphoria and euphoria. I filed it away, but it kept resurfacing, demanding to be examined.

Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort experienced when a person holds contradictory beliefs or acts in contradiction with their beliefs. I’ve always associated it with hypocrites, people who refuse to change their minds when presented with new information, people who are definitely not me. I base my beliefs on evidence. But in the context of gender, this is exactly what I experience. I have conflicting thoughts and feelings and behaviors related to my gender. I’m holding simultaneous contradictory thoughts in my mind, and my behaviors are at odds with my beliefs. I am thinking rationally but feel compelled to act irrationally. This is gender dissonance, and it is the real source of my distress.

I used to call this feeling shame. Sitting in a hotel room wearing tights and heels I bought that day and would throw away before leaving for my return flight home, I felt ashamed. Looking enviously at a female coworker and realizing I could recognize most of the outfits in her wardrobe, I felt like a creep. I hated myself every time I masturbated to transformation stories and wouldn’t even look at the screen after orgasm. That emotion certainly felt like shame, but it wasn’t. It was frustration. Normal, rational people don’t do those things, and I am a normal, rational person. Trying to reconcile those two facts was unbearable.

The normal methods of coping with cognitive dissonance are listed in the psychological literature, and I could check off every one:

• Change the behavior — “Stop dressing up. Focus on your career. Be a man.”
• Justify the behavior by changing the cognition — “I have a transformation fetish. It’s just a sex thing. It’s compartmentalized.”
• Add new cognitions — “I have Asperger’s. That’s why I feel so different from everybody else.”
• Ignore conflicting information — “What I’m feeling is not gender dysphoria.”

The fact that I am dissonant even within this very article is not lost on me.

Unfailingly, it’s the feminine side of every conflict which gets marginalized. In my mind, this is as it should be. I am not female, so naturally anything contradicting that fact must be wrong. To believe otherwise would be a delusion, a denial of reality. That way lies madness. Then I see so many stories of transgender people who gave in to these so-called delusions and are happier for it, and the dissonance starts up all over again.

My coping mechanisms are failing. It’s getting harder to ignore the dissonance, especially now that I can recognize it for what it is. The problem is what to do about it. The only way to resolve cognitive dissonance is to somehow bring my thoughts and behaviors into alignment. I just don’t know how.

What I do know is that everything I read, every story I hear, every bit of research I can find reinforces one basic truth: it doesn’t get better. These feelings will not go away. I need to deal with them.