I’m marking this as NSFW because I’m not super sure if this counts as discussing dysphoria. I don’t exactly know a lot about this if I’m being entirely honest. Feel free to tell me if this would have been fine or not :)
I’ve always considered myself a cis dude. I feel relatively comfortable as a dude I think. But there’s a lot of stuff that has me wondering things. For example, like a year ago I told one of my friends “Being a man is cool and all, but if I was given the reins at character creation, I would have chosen to be a woman.” That friend told me that was not very cis of me to say, and I kinda just wrote it off, but I still hold to that take as the way I feel. When I am falling asleep and I’m sort of day dreaming, I choose to daydream about the adventures of a female character I’ve invented. When I play video games, I almost always choose the female option if it’s given, because I found it’s easier for me to get into the story that way.
However, I feel totally fine being a guy. So like I don’t know if I’m gaslighting myself here, one way or the other. It’s kinda a thing where there’s a possibility I might be trans, but if I were to actually do it, I can’t tell if my life would get better or worse. I don’t think I would feel safe being trans in my area of the world, for example. So it’s like sure I might have chosen the female build in the game of life, but that’s not what RNG gave me, and maybe I’m okay with that?
This feels more like a discussion of not having dysphoria. Being trans does not require dysphoria.
There’s some common misconceptions. I’d say the “always knew” narrative is also really pushed, but the reality is many of us don’t realize until adulthood. Some don’t know until after they’re past middle-aged.
Used to have hangups over quibbling about what exactly “dysphoria” meant in “you don’t have to have dysphoria to be trans if you’d be happier transitioning” where I was like, “well, if they’d be happier transitioning, isn’t that dysphoria?” but language and gender are both social constructs and it’s whatever to me now. Ultimately nobody gets to define your gender but you. You don’t have to medically transition or change your presentation to have a different gender identity or change names or pronouns if you don’t want to, and you can pick and choose what changes you would like to make.
That’s also good to know. Because I definitely haven’t “always known.” Not even in the slightest. So it’s confusing when I try to look up info and every blog post written by a trans person has a story where they always kinda knew.
