It is really, really hard to bridge the inferential distance between gender dysphorics and non-gender-dysphorics.
Of course, all inferential gaps are hard to bridge. But I’ve been able to explain borderline personality disorder, chronic suicidality, autism, and depression fairly well, but gender dysphoria has continually stymied me. And I don’t think I’m alone– anecdotally, I see “what the fuck does gender dysphoria feel like?” a lot more often than I see “what the fuck does autism feel like?”
I think some of it is that gender dysphoria just doesn’t have a lot of analogues in most people’s everyday experience. This is particularly true of social dysphoria. Most people can understand what it means to have a body that feels like it doesn’t belong to you: they can imagine feeling phantom limbs, they can imagine the feeling you get after a really really radical haircut where you can’t recognize yourself in the mirror, except you never get used to it. But social dysphoria? The thing where I recognize that I have a uterus, breasts, a vagina, and as far as I know every other trait that typically leads one to classify others in the category “woman”, but the concept of being classified as a woman makes me want to sob? That’s bizarre. I honestly cannot think of another circumstance in which people have preferences about what categories they’re put in, completely separately from both objective facts and how the members of the categories are treated.
I also think that gender dysphoria itself makes it hard to feel like one is gender dysphoric. The sixth criteria for gender dysphoria is “a strong conviction that one has the typical feelings and reactions of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender).” Notably, this does not require that one actually have the typical feelings or reactions of another gender. Indeed, while my subconscious is firmly convinced that I have the feelings and reactions of a typical nonbinary, my conscious is not entirely sure what that would even mean.
I suspect this criterion leads to typical mind fallacy on steroids. In particular, I suspect that this criterion is what leads to the lack of recognition among trans people that cis people vary in how strongly they care about their genders. We believe we have the typical reactions and feelings of a [gender]; we feel enormously distressed when misgendered; by extension, people who are [gender] must feel enormously distressed when misgendered. This makes it a lot harder to bridge the inferential distance, because in addition to the normal tendency to underestimate how large inferential distances are, we have our gender dysphoria making us think our reactions are more typical than perhaps they actually are.
There’s another factor I think matters: the fact that people tend to rationalize their irrational desires. For instance, I struggle with a strong aversion to going outside. One of the ways this manifests is that my brain will come up with elaborate justifications about why browsing Tumblr is totally more important and urgent than buying food so I don’t starve to death. And the weird thing is that until I explain my logic to someone else– at which point I usually go “wait, this doesn’t make any fucking sense”– it makes as much sense as any other reasoning which I have.
So we gender dysphorics have this irrational desire to be classified in a particular group. Naturally, we wind up rationalizing why we want this. I know a lot of trans lesbians who think “girls are pretty and boys are ugly! Of course I want to be a girl, who is pretty, rather than those awful ugly boys.” I’ve met quite a few ardent trans male feminists who talk about the tiny box that patriarchy puts women into, making them feel trapped in a gender role no one could bear to live within; similarly, a lot of trans women wind up passionate about the soul-destroying ravages of toxic masculinity or, alternately, the many benefits unfairly granted to women because of female privilege.
None of these are, of course, the real explanation for why we’re trans. Cisgender men do not generally want to become women to take advantage of female privilege, free themselves from toxic masculinity, or finally get to be pretty. The real answer for why we’re trans is “I dunno, I guess I just want to?” But that is deeply unsatisfying, so we– often subconsciously– come up with better explanations. Unfortunately, these explanations are not true, and make it significantly harder to explain our experiences.
mdaniels4 said:
I don’t know. Maybe a reason it can’t be described is because there is no description. I really don’t want to be trite not over think things but maybe GD is really just a feeling of being human. More focus on being a human than a gendered human.
I’m cis male yet also am not overly macho in behaviors. It’s a real mix. I do and like many things that are and are not stereotypical male and while of course that has me puzzled at times, it also does not make me overly concerned because I see many men like that. There is no real 100% this or that so I don’t go out of my way to create problems for myself. I have no idea what it means to think it feel like a man or a woman for that matter. I do know that any expressed behavior is more typically seen by others as more male or female but I’m not living my life according to their standards anyway. So I guess in the end, internally, I’m just feeling myself.
I have no desire to swap gender although that could be fun too for just a different perspective. So cannot fathom feeling like being a male one day and female another. CD must be more definitive though where one always feels specifically the other gender. But since I can only time into to what I want them that specific otherness is foreign to me.
Perhaps the CD person and maybe specifically trans people have this internal desire to be this or that but feel social pressures to not be that wayand therefore are severely distressed. So to combat that they become as acceptable as possible by transitioning. Perhaps if society was just not so rigid there wouldn’t be that distress of not fitting in. So maybe it’s society’s issue rather than the individual’s. But we really do believe in majority rules and if you’re the minority you must be wrong. I don’t tend to believe that anymore as I got older.
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AMM said:
When I try to figure out what you’re getting at, what I get is an elaborate rationalization of “I can’t imagine feeling like that, so it must not exist.”
Gender dysphoria is a feeling that cis people almost by definition do not feel, so there’s no way to logic from cis feelings to an understanding of gender dysphoria. If you actually want to understand, you have to listen to a lot of trans people describe it and accept that you will still be talking about something you don’t really understand.
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mdaniels4 said:
But this whole conversation from maybe some trans folks as well as cos have not been able to describe it either. Perhaps if culture wasn’t so judgmental the feelings of gender not fitting in feelings would be lessened by a lot.
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mdaniels4 said:
And btw, that’s the reason I came up with a scale to describe the person based on realities as well as behaviors. Male in biology, male in presentation, straight. In sexuality and a range of stereotypical behaviors.somewhere between 0 and 100% I am maybe a 65-70. Maybe more or less I don’t know. But I do know I am not madmen 100% so in my scheme I’m a MMS70.
But nobody else seems to resonate with my concept of a description but that doesn’t invalidate that it makes sense to me or that it is totally a wrong way to look at things. Maybe a better way is out there and this is just a start.
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amaia said:
For me, I specifically have a hard time envisioning non-binary dysphoria.
I can comprehend being cis (naturally), and can kiiiiiinnnd of get a sense of being a binary trans-person. Though not fully. If I imagine waking up in a male body, I’d find the idea of having to stay like that and act “like a man” quite distressing, but still not as distressing as the idea of trying to surgically alter my body back (knowing that some traits are not currently possible to change) while dealing with transphobia. I guess people with gender dysphoria who choose to transition obviously feel more distress at the former.
That said, for most of my childhood and teens I explicitly thought that I was a genderless soul/spirit/self that just happened to be attached to a girl-type body, and when I was young, assumed everyone -obviously- felt the same about their gender deep down, and couldn’t comprehend why people made assumptions about my personality and likes based on the body I was piloting (I guess that’s kind of social dysphoria?). If I still felt like that now, I’d probably identify as non-binary. Buuut, I never felt any physical dysphoria or distress at being called “she” or “girl”… I just took that as “the English word that is used as a replacement for the names of humans with body type=female”. IDK.
Anyway, I think in a way that experience actually made it harder for me to gut-level understand the kind of non-binary that comes with the need to surgically transition or use/avoid specific words. I just get stuck because my own sense of genderlessness was totally uncoupled from my physical body, and I took pronouns as referring to my body…
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Drew said:
No idea if this is correct or not, but Ozzy’s previous description of feeling “disphoria at being described as female” made a lot of sense to me.
I can imagine a module in our brain that has a goal like, “find group identifiers”, and another that’s “feel discomfort if identified incorrectly.”
Then, our cis-by-default status could come from a weak output from one of these two modules. Maybe our brains didn’t pick ‘gender’ and an important group. Or maybe our ‘discomfort’ module doesn’t work especially well.
A non-binary dysphoria could be the result of a well-functioning ‘discomfort’ module, combined with a “group identifier” module that spit out “Not Male!” and “Not Female!”.
Alternately, the “Group Identifier” module could work too well, and come up with definitions of “Male” / “Female” that included so many traits that the person didn’t feel like either term was a good fit for themselves.
If that happened you’d get a group of people who’d feel strong discomfort whenever they were described using terms from either gender.
Those people might want the whole pronoun business to just go away. And the “Non-Binary” description might be the least-uncomfortable self description that’s available.
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loonybrain said:
Enh, the thing was, I get transphobia whether I surgically transition or not. I was getting rape threats for being trans before I even got my first binder, haha! So if I’m going to be treated like shit anyway, I might as well do it in a body that’s comfortable for me.
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Kacey Now said:
Part of the problem here is I guess people mean different things by gender dysphoria. I experience physical gender dysphoria (what Julia Serano calls “subconscious sex”) and don’t identify with your experience of it as a social phenomenon. For me it was, as a child, expecting to grow into a woman by some miracle or otherwise, then concocting conspiracy theories of the sort that I actually was a girl but doctors or my parents decided to make a gender experiment out of me. Either way I *knew* on a subconscious level that I was or was supposed to be a woman, and activities like crossdressing etc I eventually realized were more of a way of masking my body appearance from myself than of expressing social gender. A real option I’ve considered now that I’m on hormones is to just remain socially male because that might be easier and a lot of my physical dysphoria is alleviated by hormone effects. As long as I can look sufficiently female to myself, and remain employed, it makes less difference to me how others gender me.
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loonybrain said:
Yes, that’s what I’m like! For many reasons, I can’t “pass.” I have never been able to pass for very long as my gender, and I figure I never will. I can’t even legally change my name or gender marker, due to bureaucratic horror beyond describing at this time.
And the thing is, THAT’S OKAY. Though I fuddled around for a while, I figured out that’s not really what I wanted.
What I really wanted was just a vessel I could live with without wanting to claw my face off. And I have that. My body isn’t a “male” body, in most people’s eyes, but that’s fine. I’m male, the body fits me, I’m not in pain anymore (and I don’t mean that metaphorically, fibroid cysts are HELL) and when I look in the mirror, I can say, “You’re a good body, and I’m glad to reside in you. Good job, body.”
It’s not social to me at all. I wasn’t trying to make my body male. I was trying to make it COMFORTABLE. Totally different things. I’m not even sure that my gender identity has much to do it with it; my breasts were just really, really awful to live with and needed to go.
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DES3264 said:
In reply to “I honestly cannot think of another circumstance in which people have preferences about what categories they’re put in, completely separately from both objective facts and how the members of the categories are treated.”
I’m a liberal Jew and I really like that more observant Jews will agree that I am a Jew, even though they will say that I am doing Judaism very wrong. I know children of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother who are very upset that they will not recieve the same recognition, even though they have no interest in engaging in any Jewish activity with the sort of people who won’t recognize their Judaism.
Does this work at all as an analogy? Do Mormons or Catholics, for example, have strong feelings about whether Protestants think they are non-Christians or “Christians doing Christianity wrong”?
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Ghatanathoah said:
I remember reading an anecdote somewhere (maybe Bryan Caplan’s blog?) where a Catholic person was talking about all the things they disagreed with the Church about and they were asked why, if they disagreed with so much of Catholicism, why they did not convert to a Protestant denomination that shared more of their views. They protested that being Catholic was part of who they were.
I also recall going to a debate where a fundamentalist claimed that anyone who was not a biblical literalist wasn’t a real Christian. A lot of the Christians I knew were really upset by him.
And I can personally attest that writing that last sentence was mildly painful, because it involved me directly referencing the fact that I am not a Christian. Even though I believe firmly that Jesus was not divine. Somehow drawing attention to the fact that I personally don’t fit into the “Christian” category is painful to me, even though I could go on rants about how there’s no God all day, as long as the rants were abstract and never referenced me personally.
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jenavira said:
I concur on religion being a source of social dysphoria. I’m a deeply religious pagan, living in an area and with a career where that fact becoming well known could potentially cause problems, so I don’t advertise it – but I know that people assume I’m Christian, and that bothers me a lot.
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blacktrance said:
Is social dysphoria similar to the feeling that I (a cis-by-default man) get when people talk about the (stereo)typical experience of being a guy? (Being strongly driven to seek sex, lack of interest in emotional intimacy a strong desire to be the breadwinner, a tendency towards non-defensive violence in certain situations, etc.) I feel like men are an outgroup, for a value of “men” used both by some feminists and conservatives who talk about “the decline of men”. When people get really into talking about men in that sense, I get a strong feeling of “I’m not a man, I just happen to have male physical traits”.
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mdaniels4 said:
That’s exactly what I was trying to get across in my first comments. When I hear this back slapping knucle dragging competitiveness I wonder who are these people. If they are truly “men” then it’s obvious I’m not a man and if not then I am a woman? Of course not but you get the drift.
I think there is a stereotype that somehow everyone believes is the norm but in fact you must take a huge section of population to establish a norm and that clearly hasn’t happened by stereotyping what the norm is here. Good point blacktrance.
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AMM said:
I don’t know either. Most of these definitions feel so slippery and hard to relate to my experience. It’s like trying to read Judith Butler.
Right now, all I can say for sure is that I am heartily sick of having to pass as a man. (When I was young, I got an enormous amount of crap for failing to be what I was supposed to be, and a large part of that was my inability to be what a male child was supposed to be. That may have prejudiced me.) I can’t say I identify as a woman (I’m not sure what “identify as” means), though I do know I’ve always identified with women.
I’ve always felt like I was a different species from just about all the men I’ve been among, even the nice ones. I can’t wrap my head around how men think, whereas I don’t have much trouble with women. Women just make sense to me.
I’m in the process of transitioning now. I don’t know that I’ll be so much happier living as a woman, though the idea is very appealing. I don’t know if I’ll even be accepted as a woman, but being some sort of neither-one-nor-the other wouldn’t be so bad, either, as long as I’m not expected to be a guy (and I don’t get harrassed too much for it.)
No idea where this fits into Ozzy’s schema.
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sniffnoy said:
Thought: People capable/incapable of experiencing gender dysphoria might be a more natural distinction than cis/trans. (Not in terms of social effects obviously, but…)
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Drew said:
This is the part that I can’t seem to wrap my head around.
To unpack it, the claim seems to require: (1) there are separate male and female experiences, (2) this binary comes from something other than socialization (3) the binary is so intrinsic to our biology that a male mind can figure out that it’s been put into the wrong cluster, even at a young age.
The idea of ‘intrinsic male’ experience gets even harder for me, since I’m cis-by-default. So, the claim comes off as, “My experience is just like yours except that it’s different.”
And, to make it more confusing, the people advocating this view seem to strongly overlap with the people who say that there is no such thing as a real gender binary. It’s all socialization. And anyone who claimed that there were ‘identifiably male’ minds is being sexist.
I’m not sure how to square these things.
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AMM said:
A lot of us trans people have a hard time wrapping our heads around this stuff, too. It doesn’t have to make “logical” sense, since it’s an experience. Imagine trying to explain the color purple to a population of people blind since birth. It’s an experience which our native language(s) has no way of describing. We make stuff up, we use analogies, but I’m not sure anyone who hasn’t experienced it can understand it from a description.
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Drew said:
It seems like the pro-trans is that differences clearly exist, and are innate enough that a child can pick out the non-cultural parts well enough to orient themselves.
The differences are hard to describe. But it’s the same difficulty we’d have if we wanted to talk about the (obviously real) differences between American and Japanese culture.
Just like gender, you’d have groups defined by a cluster of fairly strong trends.
The hard part of the discussion is (1) English is bad at talking about both trends and natural categories and (2) developing this language would have political problems because it would make it easier to generalize about groups.
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Totient said:
> they can imagine feeling phantom limbs
I thought I could imagine that accurately, then one day I woke up having somehow slept on my right arm in a way to leave the entire arm dead. Literally no sensation. I saw my arm slide off the bed, but part of my brain was absolutely convinced that my arm was still on the bed. That was intensely uncomfortable in a way that I don’t think I could ever explain to my past self.
So, at the object level, I don’t understand what gender dysphoria feels like. But at the meta level, I feel like I absolutely understand what you mean by “It is really, really hard to bridge the inferential distance between gender dysphorics and non-gender-dysphorics.”
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tailcalled said:
Which of the following feelings are most like social dysphoria? (if you ignore the intensity of the feeling and only focus on the rest)
Physical pain? Awkwardness? Being assigned low status? Numbness? Anxiety? Is there some other feeling that is closer?
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not the name I usually post under said:
I’m not sure I’m the right person to answer this question since I don’t experience social or body dysphoria very consistently or often and I consider myself cis (by default). So take this with a large salt crystal.
Out of my experiences, two were a lot like social dysphoria: being bullied, and being the victim of physical violence. Humiliation, shame, self hatred, an uncomfortable sense of loss of control over one’s own circumstances and body, and a strange kind of passivity or shutting down are common to all. Numbness and low status/ostracism match somewhat.
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tailcalled said:
Also, it’s not obvious that you should take supposed cis-by-default people on their word, see e. g. this: https://www.reddit.com/r/SampleSize/comments/3yksuh/casual_genderbending_all_welcome/cyelfro
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Nick said:
I was talking to a nonbinary friend about this recently, and they described dysphoria as being a little bit similar to the feeling of discomfort from being under-dressed for a situation. They went on to explain that it was more complicated than that – a feeling of not looking right, but not in a way that anyone else was aware of; feeling “like a clown” or not like themself; mostly-but-not-entirely based on their awareness of their appearance; mostly-but-not exclusively occuring around other people, and often dependent on how those people treated them. [They’ve read over and ok-ed this description before I posted it.]
The clothing metaphor was the first description I’d heard that really clicked, and the rest of their explanation made sense after that starting point. Is this description of dysphoria similar to anyone else’s experience?
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mdaniels4 said:
I don’t know what a non binary friend is. I am non binary and am straight and male and present as a male. You could say a gender fluid friend or gender expansive or even a gender but non binary is an conceptual understanding of the breadth of human sexuality not a state of being.
But yes. I can imagine the dysphoric state as being just out of sync. But subtly and more or less depending on overall acceptance. It’s the same feeling I get when in a group of hyperposturing males all trying to be stereotypical.
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Alec said:
I’m the nonbinary friend Nick mentioned. When I describe myself as nonbinary, I mean that I don’t see myself as exclusively in the category of either a ‘man’ or a ‘woman.’ Non-stereotypical interpretations of any definite gender category still do not include me. And it can stand alone as the name for my identity, even when I’m not using a more specific term for my gender.
It sounds like what you’re trying to say is that you don’t see humanity as existing in a set binary of genders, which I agree with.
With how you described imagining the feeling of gender dysphoria – yes, sometimes social dysphoria is kind of like that. It can also be a different (and sometimes more intensely uncomfortable) experience. It varies depending on context for me, and it can be different for every person.
So I don’t know how helpful it is to try and find a universal experience of gender dysphoria. I would say that who someone feels they are is the most important thing. How uncomfortable they are being seen as someone/something else does not decide it; they decide.
For me, it’s sometimes difficult to separate the feeling of gender dysphoria from the more general feeling of not being respected by people. The knowledge that someone does not respect me enough to respect who I know myself to be, or the fear that they won’t once they know, can be just as bad as the actual dysphoria for me.
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mdaniels4 said:
Nick. I understand a bit better now what you mean. Sometimes I think this idea of dyspepsia would go away if culture just merely accepted everyone how they are and stopped trying to stuff them into their own expectations of how they’re supposed to be. I think true trans people would still fill out but that is a much different idea than a general feeling of not fitting in.
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loonybrain said:
I’ve never had any trouble communicating my own experience with dysphoria. (I honestly prefer the term ‘dissonance’ since I feel it more accurately reflects the feeling for me.)
When I am born, I am given a suit. Everyone thinks this suit is fucking awesome. It looks great! I look amazing in it! It’s made of awesome material, flatters me in every way possible, what’s not to like?
There’s only one problem. This fabulous suit DOES NOT FIT ME AT ALL. It is deeply uncomfortable to wear. It rides up my ass. It pinches. It’s too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, I can’t layer it with anything, it gives me a rash, it’s absolute MISERY to wear. And I CAN’T TAKE IT OFF.
I want to tailor the suit to fit me. But all anyone will say is, “Why do you hate the suit so much? It looks great, it works great, why do you hate it?”
And I’m like, “No, no, you don’t understand, I don’t hate the suit. It is indeed a fabulous suit. This suit would be amazing for someone who isn’t me, but it is on me, and it just doesn’t fit. I’m not morally judging my suit, I just want it to be comfortable.”
And people just can’t fathom that. I don’t know if it’s that their suit fits so well, they can’t IMAGINE it being uncomfortable or what, but they keep coming up with these alternative motives I must have for wanting to tailor my suit. Sometimes they get very elaborate (“you only want to change your suit to look like people in power, and if this oppression didn’t exist, you wouldn’t want your suit to look more like theirs!”) and sometimes they’re just strange (“you just hate your suit so much you want to kill it.”) They ask me to carefully analyze all my reasons to tailor my suit (“you just got raped in that suit so you hate it; heal the rape, and you won’t feel this craving to mutilate your suit anymore.”) They make me pay exorbitant amounts of money, go to a shrink, and practice for a year as though I were wearing my new suit already, to persuade them I’ve earned it. (Even though my health insurance won’t cover it.)
Finally, I get my suit altered. AHHHHHHH. It fits! It fits! Oh thank merciful heavens! I don’t even care that people still treat me pretty much the same, because it’s not about them. All I care about is that my suit fits.
(As you might get, my dysphoria is pretty much entirely physical. Social stuff is it’s own thing, but way more manageable.)
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rash92 said:
“Cisgender men do not generally want to become women to take advantage of female privilege, free themselves from toxic masculinity, or finally get to be pretty.”
See, this is what keeps making me tjink I might be trans. I kind of do all of these. I’m less severe about it now, bjt I certainly felt very very strongly about the first and third at one point, and the second these days im more ‘ill just he a less masculine cis man and not care wyat people think’.
I dont want to cut of my penis or like my man boobs/ want them to become proper boobs particularly. I dont feel horrible when people call me male or by male pronouns. So I dont have body or social dysphoria, but then you go and post stuff like this that just confuses me more u.u
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Pidge said:
I am non-binary and I feel mostly social dysphoria and less physical. Recently, I have begun to relate my dysphoria to “chafing.” Every time that I am called a girl or she/her, it’s like a sharp object lightly brushes my heart. At first, it just feels a bit uncomfortable but I can deal for the most part. As the day/week progresses, however, the light brushing chafes against my heart and feels less of an uncomfortable nuisance and more like an intentional clawing. I can only take so much before the chafing/clawing becomes so bad that I do my best to completely avoid social activities all together. I don’t know if this explanation resonates with anyone else (or even makes sense) but that is how I try to conceptualize and hone my dysphoria.
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