So imagine this.

You are male. This is a fact you have never questioned. It is a fact you take for granted. Sure sometimes you’ve thought wouldn’t it be great to be a woman cause you might have been able to flirt your way out of that parking ticket you got last week. But you wouldn’t really want the monthly periods, cramps and associated mood swings.

Now imagine, you wake up one morning to discover your penis has shrunk, and your chest feels… a little tender. Your nipples are itchy. You google your symptoms. You learn that you have a condition called Gendermorphia. You will slowly, but surely turn into a woman. There is nothing you can do about this. Nothing you can do to stop it.

How does this make you feel…?

Distressed? Why? You’re not sick. You still have a healthy body. It’s not like you just got diagnosed with cancer. You’re not dying.  Just get over it. There’s nothing wrong with you. Just suck it up and get on with things.

Or alternatively, imagine this.

You are female. This is a fact you have never questioned. It is a fact you take for granted. Sure sometimes you’ve thought wouldn’t it be great to be a man, cause it would have made it so much easier to move that sofa last week. But you wouldn’t really want the dangly, messy looking appendage between your legs, that’s constantly in the way and suddenly develops a mind of it’s own at the most inconvenient of times.

Now imagine, you wake up one morning to discover your clitoris has enlarged, and your voice seems to have suddenly gotten deeper overnight. My gosh, no amount of tweezering is going to get rid of that shadow that seems to have sprung up on your upper lip. You google your symptoms. You learn that you have a condition called Gendermorphia. You will slowly, but surely turn into a man. There is nothing you can do about this. Nothing you can do to stop it.

How does this make you feel…?

Distressed? Why? You’re not sick. You still have a healthy body. It’s not like you just got diagnosed with cancer. You’re not dying. Just get over it. There’s nothing wrong with you. Just suck it up and get on with things.

What I’ve just described was pretty much my reality, except I didn’t develop Gendermorphia. My symptoms didn’t suddenly spring up overnight. I was born feeling like I was a boy, yet my body disagreed. I felt betrayed by my body. Puberty was a huge struggle. Yet I kept telling myself to be grateful. I had a healthy body, I wasn’t sick, why couldn’t I just stop focusing on what I didn’t have and focus on what I did have. I beat myself up over my unhappiness.

And what would seem like a hugely distressing reality to most cis gendered people, ie being diagnosed with Gendermorphia, was all I could (and still do) wish for, that one day, something would magically happen that would allow me to become just a regular, ordinary, unremarkable male.

I think for anyone who has not experienced gender dysphoria, it’s a really difficult thing to understand. How all consuming it can be, because it’s not just a big nose, or an overbite or any number of physical traits we wish we could change about ourselves. It’s our core identity.

However, I can also imagine that for a lot of people reading this, they could honestly say they wouldn’t find the scenario of Gendermorphia particularly distressing at all, and I would believe them, because gender identity is not binary. Some people would be able to happily inhabit either a male or female body or something in between, without feeling any distress. Gender identity is after all a spectrum, but for those of us unfortunate enough to have experienced a polarisation of physical and mental gender, it (at least for me) was a pretty shitty position to be in. Transitioning was by no means a straight forward “yay! now everything is fixed” scenario either. Biologically, it is simply not possible for me to become the anatomical male my brain tells me I am. This makes sex and relationships quite complicated and difficult. I also can’t erase an entire history of being socialised as female, but what I can say, is that this life is by far preferable to living the lie I was living, because ultimately that is what ate me up the most.

And many might say I’m a hypocrite because I choose to live mostly stealth (a term I have some issues with, but will save that for another post), and isn’t that inherently a lie? Yes, I guess in some ways it is, but it is 1000 times closer to the truth than the lie I was living before. My internal gender identity has always been unquestioningly male. Society now perceives me as unquestioningly male, though my chromosomes and genitals still beg to differ.

But I digress. I guess really my point is this. If you’ve struggled with being able to relate to or understand gender dysphoria, I hope the above hypothetical, has been able to give you even just a tiny little glimpse.