I do not understand Gender Dysphoria.

No, really, how does it work?

Gender dysphoria is, for a significant part of us, an intrinsic part of the transgender experience. It’s this inexplicable feeling of sadness, discomfort, and general “wrongness” that surrounds you, fluctuating at times, sometimes being unbearable, sometimes being unnoticeable.

But, like, I can’t possibly be the only one that just does not get it, right? There seem to be so many different causes of dysphoria, so many different ways of experiencing dysphoria. There is also gender euphoria which is the polar opposite of dysphoria — a feeling of comfort, happiness, of being content in your state of being. And the more I think about them, the less, I feel, I understand them.

It feels like “gender dysphoria” is actually several different phenomena, which feed into one another. I want to briefly explore them — and how they relate to one another. Also, all of this is stuff I’ve just made up, there’s no official precedent to any of this, it’s just a framework for me, and other trans people, to better understand ourselves.

The State of Dysphoria

The general state of dysphoria is what probably most people have in mind when they say “Gender Dysphoria”. It’s not a feeling, it’s more of a “state of being”, similar to “having depression” (rather than “being depressed”).

Its main characteristic seems to be, in general, the perpetual feeling of your existence being wrong. Your body is wrong, your social role is wrong, and all of the other gendered stuff in your life is wrong. It can exist unacknowledged for years and it slowly eats away at your soul, can create depression, anxiety or symptoms of depersonalization and derealization, and a whole bunch of other negative mental health effects.

It’s this sort of negative background radiation in the life of a transgender person. As long as their experienced and desired gender are different, the dysphoria eats away at their happiness.

The Feeling of Gender Dysphoria

Does anything make you feel dysphoric? I, for one, have mostly moved past the above description of dysphoria as an emotional tumor, it lies dormant and doesn’t really occupy my mind, or sap my emotions as it had at the beginning of my transition. However, that can easily be changed — dysphoria can easily be called to crawl out of its hole with a single slip of the tongue, a single selfie taken at a bad angle, a single unflattering look in the mirror, or a single derailed conversation.

And then it hits you. It’s not just a “feeling of discomfort”. It’s impossible to describe, really — it feels as if someone’s nails were grinding on a chalkboard inside of your entire body, all at once. It’s this feeling of shock that first makes you want to claw your eyes out, that then either returns you to the state of dysphoria that you felt you escaped from or makes the existing one even worse. It could last an hour, it could last a month, who knows.

And life is a minefield of such triggers.

Gender Euphoria

Gender euphoria seems to be a bit different. There doesn't seem to be some kind of a “hypomanic” state that transition induces — there doesn’t seem to be (or at least I’ve never heard about anyone that experienced) a “state of euphoria” that was long-lasting/permanent.

The feeling of euphoria, though, is very much something else — I honestly sometimes feel bad that cisgender people won’t really ever get to experience it (as easily). It’s the exact opposite of the feeling of dysphoria — it feels as if you entered a warm room after spending hours in the cold, whilst simultaneously drinking water after being thirsty for hours and like you have just been informed that you managed to achieve a goal you had been working toward for years.

And it is triggered in the exact opposite way from dysphoria — by doing something affirming, usually for one of the first times. By seeing your body finally develop the way you want it thanks to hormones or surgeries. By being gendered correctly by your friends and family or — better yet, strangers. Every single milestone in transitioning seems to be rewarded with gender euphoria.

The Relationship Between Euphoria And Dysphoria

This is the thing that puzzles me the most. I’m going to be speaking purely from my own experience here, but I think at least some other trans peeps will be able to relate to this:

Euphoria and dysphoria aren’t independent of one another.

After, say, I had spent Christmas with family I had not come out to, I almost broke down from happiness when I talked to a friend who… simply gendered me correctly. This, of course, doesn’t really happen otherwise, when people gender me correctly I usually do not respond with any emotion.

Another example: When I shaved my legs for the first time in my entire life, I cried from joy for several minutes. This… is not a normal reaction to shaving — and I haven’t had it since.

What these two experiences have in common is that they came after long periods of dysphoria. They were relief. Gender euphoria came as an absence of dysphoria.

But I don’t feel like this gives the feeling of euphoria justice. While yes, it seems to sometimes be derived from just… the overall state of dysphoria, which wasn’t really noticeable, lessening, it can also be triggered by temporary things, or by the transition simply moving forward. Recently, I felt euphoric because my body was changing… but I was not particularly dysphoric about it before. Insecure, maybe, but not dysphoric. And yet it manifested itself all the same. So it can’t just be fully dependent on dysphoria — especially since there are people who experience either to various degrees. Some people don’t even experience dysphoria at all and, vice versa, others never really feel euphoria.

Overall, that’s why I say that I don’t understand dysphoria. While on the surface its causes and effects seem to be clear-cut, a bit deeper down lies a ton of other overlapping factors and combinations that seem to shape it. I haven’t really touched upon other things here — such as the relation between dysphoria and body dysmorphia, which seems to plague a ton of trans people as well, or how dysphoria can be really weird at times and caused by odd stereotypes we hold true. But I’ll talk about both of these things at a later date.