Transgender Body Parts: How Many of Our Bits Need Retooling?
A personal perspective
If you are transgender and actively transitioning, you may feel that many parts of your body need to be adjusted so that your body can be aligned with your gender as much as possible. Re-tooling what you may see as your physical birth defects takes a lot of commitment, time, pain, and, sadly, money.
If you throw on the added emotional and social pain transgender individuals experience then, if you are cisgender, you begin to have a sense of how powerful the drive is to make all of those changes is for a transgender person to just be themselves.
Gender dysphoria is that drive.
Clinically, gender dysphoria is the feeling of discomfort or distress that might occur in people whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth or sex-related physical characteristics.
What does gender dysphoria feel like?
Gender dysphoria can feel different for everyone. It can manifest as distress, depression, anxiety, restlessness, or unhappiness. It might feel like anger or sadness, or feeling slighted or negative about your body, or like there are parts of you missing.
