Anonymous asked: Hi, hope I'm not bothering you! I have a question about body dysphoria. I try hard in everyday life to "de-gender" stuff to better deal with my dysphoria. And therein lies my question. If we didn't gender everything, do you think dysphoria would still be a thing? I hope you don't mind me asking.
I think that’s a very interesting and difficult question to answer. Speaking personally, dysphoria is a mix of both the cultural and the bodily: meaning, I’m aware that certain things are perceived as either masculine or feminine - and have been raised to share that perception myself, at least residually - and so this can impact how I feel. There are days when putting on a dress feels violently wrong, and where I only feel comfortably if I’m wearing more “masculine” clothing. But at the same time, there’s a bodily element to it that goes beyond cultural gendering. Even knowing that my body is mine, and therefore, in that sense, “correct” for what I feel myself to be, that doesn’t strip me of the urge to alter it, or the retroactive desire for it to always have been something else.
Historically, the big problem with the “born in the wrong body” narrative for trans people wasn’t that no trans person ever felt that way; it’s that it was taken as the only acceptable narrative by cis practitioners who wanted to squeeze everything into a binary and who thus used it to delegitimise any experience that fell outside a very rigid policing of its parameters. Some people feel, absolutely and indelibly, from a very young age, that the body they were born with should be different. A great many others do not. There’s no single cause or expression of dysphoria, but even though gender is ultimately a human construction, one with many expressions more permeable than rigid, removing gender altogether wouldn’t solve the problem.
Gender is a finite lens which humans use, in our fumbling way, to view a thing with infinite permutations - the thing being our humanity. Removing gender won’t help those who identify strongly with a particular gender, whether cis or trans: it’s gender essentialism, not gender itself, that’s the problem.
Hope that makes sense, and thanks for asking!
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