Hidden Dysphoria?

[fightlikeoctopus]

Has anyone else had the experience of emergent dysphoria after years of living fairly comfortably with your assigned sex or normative gender roles? I feel as if my mind has, until recently, been masking my discomfort with my body and how I have been presenting since puberty. After coming out as genderqueer I began to do a lot of writing and through that, have discovered these negative thoughts and emotions. I feel a resonance with both the genderqueer and ftm trans communities, but at the same time am scared of moving away from the body and presentation that has defined me for my adult life. Is this sort of reaction familiar to anyone else?

[Contravene]

I can sort of relate to what you're describing.

For as long as I can remember I've been resentful of the fact that I was born female but I never thought I could do anything about it so after a while I just accepted it. I can't say I ever accepted having female gender roles placed upon me but I did kind of just resign myself to having a female body for the rest of my life. I guess I became somewhat comfortable with my female body, I started fussing over my makeup and hair and I even went through a very short lived phase where I tried dressing a little more femininely. When I did feel dysphoria (I didn't know that's what it was at the time) I just put it out of my mind and tried to ignore it, thinking there was nothing I could do to alleviate it, so in a way my mind had been masking my discomfort too.

It wasn't until later that I finally admitted to myself how uncomfortable I really was and all of the discomfort I had tried to push away was still there festering and just getting worse. Eventually the dysphoria was too much to stand, I couldn't push it away anymore, so I went looking for answers and found the trans community. That's also when I learned that it was possible to transition. It felt like a whole new world had been opened up for me because if I transitioned, I wouldn't have to hide and repress myself anymore. Finally I could not only admit to myself that I was a man, I could actually become one too.

When I think about it at length, I am afraid to transition and leave behind the body and everything else I've known for so long but it's even more frightening to realize that I almost lost myself completely by repressing myself and my dysphoria for so long. I don't want to lose myself and have to go through the rest of my life feeling hollow and pretending to be someone I'm not like I used to.

[fightlikeoctopus]

Thank you for your lovely reply, Contravene, and for sharing that part of your story.

I remember when I discovered the ftm youtube community a couple of years ago, I was completely fascinated by peoples' transitions and tried to figure out why I found them so compelling. I narrowed it down to: 1) I was attracted to them, 2) I felt a kinship/resonance with a female-bodied person transitioning.

It's helpful to know that others feel a hesitancy about transitioning. I've never felt particularly happy about having a female body, but I don't at this point feel a huge dissociation from my body (just my chest, really). I guess I'm just struggling to figure out where I fit in the spectrum.

[Nikotinic]

At least in part, I've been feeling the same way. Like you I had never really heard of women deciding to become men so although 'girl' had never really fit me I didn't realise that there was anything I could do about it.

I have never really been that happy with my body, I don't really feel like I have a good relationship with it either though. I've always wanted to get rid of my boobs but other than that, meh.

Recently I decided that I just couldn't put up with being a girl any more and started dressing up in men's clothes. Suddenly I started to feel really ]conscious of my breasts and hips and scrawny girl arms. Not as much because I don't like them in themselves, but that they prevent me from being seen as a guy in public.

[AdamMLP]

I'm about the same as everyone else I suppose.  I was never comfortable with myself, but I never knew that it was any different from the way in which anyone else felt.  It didn't help that most of my time I was in deep depression, so I was numb to pretty much all emotions apart from reckless anger.  I've now realised that I get that way mostly when I'm dysphoric and can't find salvation from the pain of life because the main thing causing it is my own body.

When I discovered that there were people who felt this way, and why, everything seemed to get bigger, because I was aware of what I was feeling and could put a tangible reason and name to it: dysphoria.  Maybe I was partly looking for dysphoria to confirm to myself that I was indeed trans, but as it's still that way I think it's mostly just knowing that it exists, and isn't the norm, which makes me more aware of it.  It's like the thought that happiness can only exist because there's sadness.  If we knew nothing of being sad then we would never realise we were happy because it's normal.  If we don't know that our dysphoria is anything other than right we don't realise it exists.  When we know it exists then we can notice it.