How will the left ever recover?
https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1535733409083011073
A transmasc person experiencing dysphoria from hair loss is a different thing from a cis person experiencing distress from hair loss. It has to do with the wider context of what that hair loss represents
I can’t really speak for trans mascs as I’m not one. for trans femmes, it’s a scalding iron, joining with societal voices to reinforce in our own heads that we are in fact men. that belief, that we are actually men, is the root of dysphoria. it means something obviously true about the world - that I am a woman - is false and the cognitive dissonance is existentially painful. it’s difficult to articulate what this pain is like because there’s no real comparison with the things you might experience day to day. dysphoria precedes thought and emotion - it warps my perception of the world and my responses to it before I’m even aware that I’ve even perceived something. that is, every single other person in the world can look at me and see a woman and I’ll still look in the mirror and see a man - literally hallucinate things into existence or out of it - just because I’ve allowed my dysphoria to grow out of control. I have to remind myself every time I look in the mirror that I can’t trust what I see, good or bad, because my senses will straight up lie to me depending on factors entirely out of my hands. have I gotten misgendered or deadnamed recently? 0% chance I see anything but a disgusting wretch of a man. I have a single point of control - to remove all the factors my dysphoria might anchor on from my body and my life well before I look in the mirror. and to fail too often means returning to the zombie-like existence I eked out prior to transition - something I cannot tolerate.
Part of what youre describing sure sounds passingly similar to the experiences of cis people seeking out surgery. Or HRT.
Don’t get me wrong, trans experiences of dsyphoria are different than cis ones, especially because of the intensified scrutiny society places on us.
But,
I think it is a mistake to conceptualize gender dsyphoria as a unique experience of trans people because
a) IME it is not, I’ve had cis people describe similar feelings and experiences
b) on a larger level, it others trans people. Dont get me wrong. There are many ways that our lives are different than the lives of cis people. But when it comes to dysphoria like you’re describing, the variation is on how and to what degree we experience it, not that we experience it.
And when it comes to the Musk thing
c) rhetoric against cis cosmetic surgery is inevitably turned against us
A cis person who is distressed over experiencing hair loss doesn’t take that hair loss to mean that they’ll never be/be seen as a “real” member of their gender
That isn’t true. Women’s hair has been culturally tied to their femininity for so long that women would no longer think they would be treated as real women if they started to bald, which did sometimes happen. This has changed somewhat in modern times, but for much of history it was the case. I can’t compare it to gender disphoria as experienced by trans people because I’ve never been a balding woman or trans. But those are both experiences stemming from a similar root cause, balding as a sign of non-femininity.
So I guess my confusion lies in that my friend is a man and doesn’t worry about being perceived as not a man based on balding, but still experiences gender dysphoria about it?
