Doubts About Being Trans vs Dysphoria
It’s really difficult to figure out if you’re trans or not, and honestly, a lot of it is experimentation. Playing around with things and seeing what you like best, or what you’re most comfortable with.
But there are differences between doubting that you’re actually trans, compared to dysphoria making you doubt yourself.
What even is dysphoria?
Well, it’s the negative feelings that you get when your body doesn’t match your internal sense of self – your gender. Which is, like a lot of places like to say, ‘between your ears,’ compared to sex assigned at birth, which is ‘between your legs.’
Brain vs Genitals
Someone assigned female at birth might get dysphoria about their chest being too big – because it’s a feminine trait almost always given to women, and when you identify as male, the fact that you have female traits might give you dysphoria.
Doubt can come in many forms, from several sources. You might think things like ‘what if I’m just a tomboy?’ ‘what if I’m just a feminine man?’
Being a masculine woman or feminine man are different from identifying as male or female. You can even be a trans man who likes to wear nail polish, because gender roles can be whatever you want them to be.
The differences between doubting being trans and actually having dysphoria are understandably muddy because of things like gender roles and conformity via societal expectations.
How to (try) to tell the difference: (It can all be quite subjective sometimes)
First of all – doubt is normal. Many trans people feel doubt about being trans at some point.
This could be because you’re having a day where your dysphoria is lower than normal, and you’re feeling euphoria instead.
Transitioning can allow you to finally feel more comfortable within yourself, which might mistakenly lead you to thinking you might not be trans at all.
If you think you might be trans in the first place, then there’s probably some part of gender non-conformity that you might fit into anyway.
If you’re into your medical transition, you could try comparing how you felt when you started vs how you feel about where you are now. How much discomfort were you in at the start? How do you feel about your body now?
Dysphoria is not always constant. For many people, it comes in waves. When you’re doing things like using your new name and pronouns, dysphoria will often be replaced with euphoria.
Doubt can be healthy, as long as you take a step back and try to really think about where that doubt is coming from. Is it because you actually made a mistake? Or is it because of societal pressures telling you that you need to be a certain way? Cis people don’t often question their gender, and they don’t often have this nagging feeling in the pit of their stomach that there’s something off about them that they just can’t quite figure out. Dysphoria is a very specific feeling for a reason.
Exploration – Sometimes you just need to try things, like I mentioned at the start of the post.
Talk to other trans people – Use places like r/ask_transgender to see what other people are feeling. Their explanations might help clear some things up for you.
There’s a lot of ways to figure out if you’re feeling doubt or dysphoria, but the best thing to do is to not rush it.
Take your time, maybe even think about who you are and what your ideal self would look like if you were removed from all the pressures of the world and existed only for yourself.
This isn’t something that has to be figured out quickly. It’s better that you know yourself after years of thinking about it, than to rush into it and regret what you do afterwards.
