#and think being gnc or queer has to Look or behave a certain way

[nuvomica]

sometimes i look at the whole Thing that western gay culture got goin on and just. man. none of that's for me bro idk

[laundryandtaxes]

It’s so wild to see feminists make the claim that gender dysphoria is a mental illness (and, because they’ve bought the long-discarded idea marketed by the psychiatric industry that all or most mental illness is a prediscusrive category with biological cause) ALONGSIDE the acknowledgement that a childhood of having been forcibly assimilated into female sex roles specifically for the purpose of raising you into a cishet adult woman is likely to leave some reasonable emotional scars, trauma, and issues with the concept of being a woman, including discomfort with secondary sex characteristics because of the social weight they carry, that can be understood in many cases as gender dysphoria. It makes no sense in the first place to understand literally any part of gender as natural and prediscursive if you’re invested in gender abolition or even feminism in any serious sense, especially our personal comfort with being gendered by strangers/people at large. Secondly, almost every butch I know became markedly more dysphoric when we first engaged in self-styled queer scenes that pointed out to us the “conflict” between how we behave, dress, see ourselves, etc, and our bodies- my top dysphoria is less intense than it used to be but I doubt I’ll ever be rid of it without some form of surgery, and when I first started interacting with queer scenes in my city I felt much better about my body and how it reads in a gendered sense. It should be clear that this “conflict” is entirely social, and that its existence is due to social mores around women’s masculinity or being gnc and how our bodies are supposed to do certain things and look certain ways- there’s no conflict naturally between any bodies and any sets of gendered behaviors, there is conflict between what we are and what we are “supposed” to be, and that hegemonic notion of what we ought to be wrt gender is very obviously constructed socially. That isn’t even to say that, minus some social structures, I would not have any measure of dysphoria, or that no trans people would have any way of dysphoria. There’s no way to know that, though my hunch is that I wouldn’t and a lot of other people wouldn’t either. But the -way- I experience dysphoria is obviously very informed by social relations and is therefore a product of them.

Anyway it’s just such a politically weak and often intentionally stigmatizing way of understanding dysphoria imo- how our reactions to a set of social relations (gender) can be understood as an internal impulse entirely that has absolutely not been impacted by the world around us, somehow. Honestly I think for the most part it comes from a weird desire to theorize trans people as sick, broken, to be pitied, etc, because the theorist has already decided trans people can’t just be liked or, god forbid, allowed to do what they please with their own bodies and senses of self, unless their existence is some tragedy which can be accounted for through the totally clear and non-patriarchal lens of psychiatry.