Lower dysphoria

[kaiju]

I don't really know if I can expect anyone else to relate or give advice, I just kind of wanted to vent my spleen.

I have a couple trans guy friends with differing levels of dysphoria about their bodies, and I really can't relate to them at all. I've tried to talk to them about this sort of thing, but they tell me to get over it and that it's not so bad. Both are in happy sexual relationships and have little to no discomfort with how their bodies are below the belt, and I guess I envy that about them sometimes. Ever since I was a little kid, I hated my body with a burning passion and could not understand why. Being taught about how things work down there crushed my hope that I could be fixed, because nothing sounded right. Even using the bathroom made me panic and withdraw from others.

I developed some coping skills as I got older and could barely manage, but it never really got rid of the sense that I was missing something important. I really tried hard to make myself love my body for what it was, and it only made things worse. Before top surgery and HRT, my dysphoria was just kind of...all over the place, really. I guess you could say that everything was wrong and I felt like I was being forced to put on a puppet show using only my eyelids or something equally ridiculous. I didn't know where to start, so I bound, packed, and did all I could to make things better, even just a little. Getting on T was a difficult, frustrating process. I was in a relationship I didn't want to be in to begin with, and my partner at the time was highly resistant to any sort of physical change. The binding was okay, but packing was out of the question because they hated it. Due to my poor mental state, I let them walk all over me and do things to me that were a violation of every boundary I had set up. The clinic I went to treated me like an idiot and tried to tell me that if my partner wasn't on board, then I was obviously not a good candidate for any form of medical intervention. It was a nightmare, and I still have trouble trusting doctors because of it.

I got out of the relationship, got a job, and managed to get a prescription for T in addition to scheduling top surgery. Things weren't bad at all. I had my surgery, started being treated more like a man by people around me, and it seemed like things were falling into place. But I still have this awful dysphoria surrounding my lower regions. I have to pack nearly all the time, it keeps the empty feeling away.

And even though it's not all the time, sometimes I'm just...bothered by the fact that I have to go through with all of this to feel better. I know that bottom surgery won't fix everything. I'll never be a cis male. I've (begrudgingly) come to accept that. But I have dysphoria about the fact that I'm trans and that bottom surgery is going to be a few years away. I like the available procedures, but I can't decide which one is for me yet. And there's all this stuff about growing full organs in labs, the future of surgery...I'm excited and scared, I guess. What if I make a decision now and then something better comes along? I don't want to have to pack forever. I want something there that isn't just a phantom limb. I want to be able to have a sexual relationship(say all you want about being able to have a healthy sexual relationship without bottom surgery, that's you, not me) and I just want this to be over. I want this to be done. I want to be able to go to a doctor and not have weird questions about my genitals if it's not related to the problem I'm presenting.

I just want to live my life and have this be over and done with. As liberating as transition has been, it's also a cage to me.

I've tried support groups and talking to my trans dude friends, but everyone else seems to think I'm crazy, I guess. Or that I'm being overly dramatic over this. Maybe I am, I dunno. I try not to talk about it to people now.

I would just like to have a dick that isn't a prosthetic, is that too much to ask for?

I guess this is just weird.

EDIT: This was all kind of brought on because I've been having trouble getting a surgeon whose willing to perform a full hysterectomy on me. I think the struggle is just bringing a lot of my frustrations to the surface, so I'm sorry if none of this makes sense.

[Nero]

I have a couple trans guy friends with differing levels of dysphoria about their bodies, and I really can't relate to them at all. I've tried to talk to them about this sort of thing, but they tell me to get over it and that it's not so bad. Both are in happy sexual relationships and have little to no discomfort with how their bodies are below the belt, and I guess I envy that about them sometimes.

I'm one of those with very little bottom dysphoria. But I try to understand what others are going through. You feel what you feel. Have your friends had top surgery? Taken T? Could they have 'just gotten over it' without those things?

And there's all this stuff about growing full organs in labs, the future of surgery...I'm excited and scared, I guess. What if I make a decision now and then something better comes along?

This is a tough one. A lot of factors here. Like how long can you wait? Age may also play a factor: will lab grown organs be available for trans men in your lifetime or while you're still young enough to benefit or even have the transplant? No real answers, but if you're pretty young may be worth waiting around. Then again, how long can you wait? 10 years? 20 years?

Anyway, it sounds like you've been through a lot and come a long way. You're about to have a hysto? You're getting things done. You'll get where you need to go bottom wise as well.

[kaiju]

It's a tough one with my friends. One is pre everything, and I get the feeling that he's trying to make the best of it until he is in a safer place to transition, the other has gone through top surgery and is on T. The latter friend tends to view T and surgery as purely cosmetic things, and I guess that's where he and I don't see eye to eye. I view them as necessary for my well being, he says he would be happy with or without them and just seems to go with whatever when it comes to his transition. I guess you could also say he's extremely laid back?

I'm a bit young(19), but I also don't believe I could wait ten or twenty years for the next and best thing. It's like my mental health sort of rides and just getting it done and if it's not perfect, oh well. Bodies aren't meant to be perfect, right? In spite of my fear of making a decision before something improved comes along, I also know that I would rather have done something than nothing at all. I've got my fingers crossed on the hysto working out, really. One step, no matter how small(for me personally) is a step, and it means I'm going somewhere instead of sitting around doing nothing.

Maybe it's just my age and I'll take it back when I'm older, but everything goes by too slowly, it seems. Sometimes I wish I could just skip through all the blood, sweat, and tears to get where I want to be and let it be that way. If that makes sense?

[Mr.X]

I am someone with bottom dysphoria. It may not be as bad as yours (I can still go to the toilet without being constantly reminded its wrong down there), but it is bad enough. I just can not have sex with this equipment because it grosses me out to the max, and feels just plain wrong.

My bottom part is the reason I discovered I was trans, in a way. A friend and I were getting really close. Relationship close. But the mere thought of having sex with that guy as a girl was unbearable. This did make me think, and thus the trans journey began.

So you are definitely not alone in this. Regarding the surgeries, I would not keep my hopes up if I were you. It is still a long way off. They managed to attach a penis to a man who had lost his, but that only succeeded once, only to fail when they man could not cope with it mentally. Seeing that this surgery was performed on a cis man, who had the right nerves and set up, it is still a long way off for men who were born with female equipment. And who says the current surgeries would ruin your chances to get transplantation surgery in the future? Or perhaps you won't even want it then because you are perfectly happy with the wee-wee you got from present surgery.

[D0LL]

My trans friend and her fellow trans friends all seem to be how you describe your friends: they don't think it's that bad, and they enjoy the transition (of course, they get all the good stuff during a transition, boobs and a penis). They have normal sexual relationships and don't seem to have any problems with using their "wrong equipment".

But I've always been like how you describe yourself. I've always hated what I was stuck with, and envied cis guys for being born with the right parts. I used to pee standing up pretty frequently when I was a child, and always hated looking down and seeing nothing there. My dysphoria was always pretty bad, and even though I've had relationships that were seemingly "sexually healthy", in all reality, I was either drinking a lot during those relationships, or we weren't having sex because it was too painful for me (even my body rejects its own female aspects). After trying to feminize as a way to distract myself from the harsh truth that I'll never have a born male body, my dysphoria became so much worse, to the point where I wouldn't even touch myself down there.

And I look at these other people and wonder why they're so ok with their bodies, even though they obviously dislike them enough to want to transition. Is my dysphoria made worse because I also suffer from BDD? Why don't they feel this kind of hatred and self-loathing when they see their bodies every day?

My MTF friend actually started some bull with me because I can't take compliments. When someone compliments me, I don't know what to do, and either say "Thanks?" to be polite or just tell them they're crazy. Because for me (because of EXTREME borderline personality disorder ontop of dysphoria), my mind literally refuses to believe that anyone would truthfully compliment me. My mind thinks that if someone's complimenting me, they're lying. And I don't know how to accept their lies, and end up reacting very awkwardly. She tells me I need to just learn how to take a compliment. Like after 22 years of people harassing me I can just "stop it" and learn how to deal. So, someone who suffers from gender-associated dysphoria can still look at me and tell me to basically "get over" my dysphoria problems? Obviously her problems must not be too severe at all if she can't even comprehend where I'm coming from when I explain to her why I just can't do it, and that these reactions I have to compliments are the result of years of practicing taking compliments. And I just don't understand how two people can both suffer from this awful body image known as dysphoria while being on two completely different pages when it comes to severity of the symptoms.

For what it's worth, the only thing that makes the waiting for bottom surgery bearable is knowing that science and surgeries do advance fairly quickly, and it's likely that by the time I can even think of having it done, there will be new options out there (there are already a lot of advances since I looked into it in high school). So even though I won't ever size up to a cis male, I still know I'll be getting better results than if I were able to just afford it right away. If someone told me right now that they would give me free bottom surgery tomorrow, would I take it? Hell yeah I would! But since that obviously isn't going to happen, I've gotta do what I can to try to fool myself that it's ok to have to wait so long.

[wolfduality]

This might come as a surprise, but although I've had a child, I have a lot of bottom dysphoria. I have little to no top dysphoria. I remember angering my mom by my repeated attempts to pee standing up and leaving messes everywhere. There are even times when sleeping with my MTF wife that I feel guilt for not being able to give/receive pleasure how I feel I should. Finally obtaining a "proper" packer helped alleviate some of the dysphoria but, in some ways, it sparked a different kind of dysphoria. The simple fact it's still a fake penis and I will never look like most cis guys. In a kinda of "funny" bit, I already feel like I'm comparing "my penis" to other guys.

I don't blame you a bit. A part of me worries that something better will come along for FTM trans people that will improve bottom surgery in ways that I can only dream of. I'm already decided on which surgery I'm going to get but it's so much money even though it's not as invasive as phalloplasty. It's just like running in place at this point.