Very interesting and helpful article. The severity of dysphoria we feel is so out of the realm of a cis person's experience that it's hard for them to understand it. "Imagine if you woke up one morning with a man's body" (for a woman, obviously) is a hypothetical, but these actual examples of cis dysphoria might be more relatable, and as a result, more effective in conveying to cis people a sense of what we have to deal with. Also, although it may be naive to think this, it seems that recognizing that gender-affirming care is appropriate for cis gender dysphoria might help them see that the same is true for us.
The other big difference is in people’s reactions to dysphoria and how that can compound it.
When a cis woman loses her breasts to cancer and becomes dysphoric, if someone told her “well God made you have breast cancer, so getting a reconstruction would go against His plan for you and you’d deserve to go to hell” we would call that person a heartless monster. But when a trans woman feels dysphoric over the exact same body part and wants the exact same procedure, there are a billion people ready to tell her “well God made you a man, so transitioning would go against His plan for you and you’d deserve to go to hell” and somehow that’s a valid difference of opinion that must be respected on religious grounds. Well gee, I wonder which of those women is going to feel worse about her body.
You're 100% correct. I chose not to go into that in this article, though, because it's less about the dysphoria itself and more about (as you say) the response to dysphoria.
My goal with this article is really just to say "dysphoria is dysphoria, no matter who has it."
I might save the double-standard response for another article, though...
I don't believe for one second that anyone has said any of these things to you. This use of wildly over-exaggerated caricatures of "people who disagree with the ideology we literally invented and continue make up every day" into these crazy fundamentalist religious types is a tactic being used to represent your political opponents in the make extremely and ridiculous way because it's easier to make you look like the good guy. (This is what they mean by a "straw man" by the way-- it's representing your opponent in a really unfair, dishonest, over-exaggerated way because it's easier for you to defeat the "straw man" you built than to wrestle with the nuance of the reality of the issue)
Your opponents, by the way, DO NOT think, believe, feel or are trying or accomplish 90% of the shit I see Leftists online accusing them (us?) of. And there is nothing they saw that led them to feel that way besides seeing other Leftists making wild claims that they repeat, or they simply grossly over-exaggerate, then everyone who reads it repeats it and eventually no one has even spoken of an opponent of gender/trans ideology or heard what they felt about any of the issues but all of you claim to know for sure that they what to "genocide trans people.'
It's all a fucking fiction-- because it is one of the Left's primary weapons-- SELF-victimization, falsehoods/lies, hysterical and often purposeful over-exaggerations, fascist modes of enforcement (cancel culture, doxing, online harassment and bullying, being banned off platforms, etc), and the major weapons? Emotional blackmail and manipulation.
Opponents of these trans-relates policies DON'T EVEN HATE TRANS PEOPLE. We literally just don't want people putting children through gender ideology classes or sex change surgeries and medications, and to not make female athletes compete against trans-identified males and share single-sex spaces with them for those own safety, comfort and privacy-- no one is trying to eliminate trans people-- they literally had all the rights they have no 10+ years ago.
But if the people who do these things haven't been able to develop the honesty, mindfulness, and tolerance to observe their own inner mental and emotional landscape to see these things, or be willing to allow their biases to be challenged and actually sharing a good faith conversation with the people who oppose these policies (they don't oppose trans people-- they oppose CERTAIN policies,and they oppose how people are being treated if they oppose these policies).
So much of this division would die off if this ideology of the one side wasnt being forcefully implemented in every institution and level of government. If the Right was doing something comparable, we would never stop crying about fascism.
That’s nice. Fortunately, facts are true whether you believe them or not. What sort of peer-reviewed research and verified journalistic sources have you used to form your opinions about transgender people? How many children get “sex change surgeries” yearly? What do “gender ideology classes” entail and how do they compare with similar gender- or gender-role-specific lessons at, for example, a Sunday school? Precisely what is the correct amount of rights and protections to grant a marginalized group? How should we view the paragraph on page 5 of Project 2025 that begins “[p]ornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology” and ends “[p]ornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned”, particularly in light of Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) introducing a bill to criminalize pornography yesterday?
By the way — the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, one of the premier international nonprofits studying the process and prevention of genocides worldwide, disagrees with your stance. You’re welcome to go read any of the three Red Flag Alerts they’ve put out on behalf of transgender Americans. They also have an open letter to the American people that you may find edifying.
I'll thank you not to make proclamations about my motives. You don't live inside my head. You don't know what I'm thinking. You can project your own biases onto others all you want, but that doesn't mean your projection has any bearing on how other people actually think, feel, or experience themselves or the world.
I'm disinterested in picking apart the many inaccurate things you're saying here, or in your other reply. I have better things to do with my time, and you have not earned that level of emotional labor from me.
However, this is *my* substack and I get to set the rules for discussion. You are clearly engaged in pot-stirring, and I'm not here for that. I'm not going to remove your comments, but I am going to tell you to knock it off. There are plenty of other places you can go on the internet if you want to pick fights and argue. This is not one of those places.
No, Sonja. Disagreeing with you is not pot stirring. Disagreeing with you is not picking fights. I am not disagreeing with you because I'm a bigot, or a troll, ot a bot, or here to start trouble.
I'm literally just disagreeing with you and the ideas and theories and statements you are making to the world. None of us have the right to never be challenged or disagreed with.
I'm not victimizing you. I'm not abusing you. I'm just disagreeing with your ideas. 🤷♂️
Very interesting and helpful article. The severity of dysphoria we feel is so out of the realm of a cis person's experience that it's hard for them to understand it. "Imagine if you woke up one morning with a man's body" (for a woman, obviously) is a hypothetical, but these actual examples of cis dysphoria might be more relatable, and as a result, more effective in conveying to cis people a sense of what we have to deal with. Also, although it may be naive to think this, it seems that recognizing that gender-affirming care is appropriate for cis gender dysphoria might help them see that the same is true for us.
That's my hope!
The other big difference is in people’s reactions to dysphoria and how that can compound it.
When a cis woman loses her breasts to cancer and becomes dysphoric, if someone told her “well God made you have breast cancer, so getting a reconstruction would go against His plan for you and you’d deserve to go to hell” we would call that person a heartless monster. But when a trans woman feels dysphoric over the exact same body part and wants the exact same procedure, there are a billion people ready to tell her “well God made you a man, so transitioning would go against His plan for you and you’d deserve to go to hell” and somehow that’s a valid difference of opinion that must be respected on religious grounds. Well gee, I wonder which of those women is going to feel worse about her body.
You're 100% correct. I chose not to go into that in this article, though, because it's less about the dysphoria itself and more about (as you say) the response to dysphoria.
My goal with this article is really just to say "dysphoria is dysphoria, no matter who has it."
I might save the double-standard response for another article, though...
I don't believe for one second that anyone has said any of these things to you. This use of wildly over-exaggerated caricatures of "people who disagree with the ideology we literally invented and continue make up every day" into these crazy fundamentalist religious types is a tactic being used to represent your political opponents in the make extremely and ridiculous way because it's easier to make you look like the good guy. (This is what they mean by a "straw man" by the way-- it's representing your opponent in a really unfair, dishonest, over-exaggerated way because it's easier for you to defeat the "straw man" you built than to wrestle with the nuance of the reality of the issue)
Your opponents, by the way, DO NOT think, believe, feel or are trying or accomplish 90% of the shit I see Leftists online accusing them (us?) of. And there is nothing they saw that led them to feel that way besides seeing other Leftists making wild claims that they repeat, or they simply grossly over-exaggerate, then everyone who reads it repeats it and eventually no one has even spoken of an opponent of gender/trans ideology or heard what they felt about any of the issues but all of you claim to know for sure that they what to "genocide trans people.'
It's all a fucking fiction-- because it is one of the Left's primary weapons-- SELF-victimization, falsehoods/lies, hysterical and often purposeful over-exaggerations, fascist modes of enforcement (cancel culture, doxing, online harassment and bullying, being banned off platforms, etc), and the major weapons? Emotional blackmail and manipulation.
Opponents of these trans-relates policies DON'T EVEN HATE TRANS PEOPLE. We literally just don't want people putting children through gender ideology classes or sex change surgeries and medications, and to not make female athletes compete against trans-identified males and share single-sex spaces with them for those own safety, comfort and privacy-- no one is trying to eliminate trans people-- they literally had all the rights they have no 10+ years ago.
But if the people who do these things haven't been able to develop the honesty, mindfulness, and tolerance to observe their own inner mental and emotional landscape to see these things, or be willing to allow their biases to be challenged and actually sharing a good faith conversation with the people who oppose these policies (they don't oppose trans people-- they oppose CERTAIN policies,and they oppose how people are being treated if they oppose these policies).
So much of this division would die off if this ideology of the one side wasnt being forcefully implemented in every institution and level of government. If the Right was doing something comparable, we would never stop crying about fascism.
That’s nice. Fortunately, facts are true whether you believe them or not. What sort of peer-reviewed research and verified journalistic sources have you used to form your opinions about transgender people? How many children get “sex change surgeries” yearly? What do “gender ideology classes” entail and how do they compare with similar gender- or gender-role-specific lessons at, for example, a Sunday school? Precisely what is the correct amount of rights and protections to grant a marginalized group? How should we view the paragraph on page 5 of Project 2025 that begins “[p]ornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology” and ends “[p]ornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned”, particularly in light of Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) introducing a bill to criminalize pornography yesterday?
By the way — the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, one of the premier international nonprofits studying the process and prevention of genocides worldwide, disagrees with your stance. You’re welcome to go read any of the three Red Flag Alerts they’ve put out on behalf of transgender Americans. They also have an open letter to the American people that you may find edifying.
I'll thank you not to make proclamations about my motives. You don't live inside my head. You don't know what I'm thinking. You can project your own biases onto others all you want, but that doesn't mean your projection has any bearing on how other people actually think, feel, or experience themselves or the world.
I'm disinterested in picking apart the many inaccurate things you're saying here, or in your other reply. I have better things to do with my time, and you have not earned that level of emotional labor from me.
However, this is *my* substack and I get to set the rules for discussion. You are clearly engaged in pot-stirring, and I'm not here for that. I'm not going to remove your comments, but I am going to tell you to knock it off. There are plenty of other places you can go on the internet if you want to pick fights and argue. This is not one of those places.
No, Sonja. Disagreeing with you is not pot stirring. Disagreeing with you is not picking fights. I am not disagreeing with you because I'm a bigot, or a troll, ot a bot, or here to start trouble.
I'm literally just disagreeing with you and the ideas and theories and statements you are making to the world. None of us have the right to never be challenged or disagreed with.
I'm not victimizing you. I'm not abusing you. I'm just disagreeing with your ideas. 🤷♂️
Tone matters. Your tone is pot-stirring. We're not idiots. Go find another playground.