Having read a multitude of body dysphoria stories it seems apparent to me that the body dysphoria experienced by androgynes, transsexuals, neutois, cross dressers and other is much the same - though it varies in intensity of feeling and specifics of the focus of that feeling both within and between groups. I believe that there is an aspect to gender dysphoria that is purely physical, that we have patterns or the bones of wiring in our brain for a certain kind of body and when they don't match we feel dysphoric. I think there is the possibility of people having more than one set of patterns and some people having holes in their body patterns. I think it can also be influenced by our perception.
There are a number of common elements in many of these body dysphoria stories:
Feeling of wrongness about their body or aspects of their body that goes beyond what you can see and touch, feelings of phantom body shape or 'bits' e.g. the phantom penis in many FtM, persistent thoughts around the wrongness of their bodies and ways of rectifying the situation. To a greater or lesser extent it seems that external efforts to dress oneself more in-line with your internal identity can offer some relief from these feelings - I see this strongly parallels phantom limb sufferers who, through the use of mirrors, can 'see' their severed hand and unclench it and remove the feelings of pain as their phantom nails dig into their palms. If we see that we look more like our internal identify says we should look like we end up feeling better. Perhaps it is even related to the way people feel good when they put on their nicest clothes to go out. I have not mentioned the social aspect of gender presentation as I think this is a separate, though related thing, which can lead one to feel dysphoric. For example, I've meet transgendered people that say they are not unhappy with their body but feel keenly that their social gender does not match their internal identity.
If we look at ourselves honestly we can see that transsexuals don't all experience the same body dysphoria in that it varies both by intensity and focus. It can be seen that there is a range of intensity of feeling from a MtF who attempts to sever their own penis compared with a MtF who does not feel the need to do this, just as I sometimes feel like I could just spend the day vomiting in a dark room due to my lack of feminine shape to other androgynes who feel a bit 'niggly'. A MtF's body dysphoria has a much different focus than that a FtM's yet the resultant feelings are very similar. It would not be too much of a stretch to see that other transgendered individuals experience a variation of this too, just with a different focus or intensity. Perhaps it is related to what a woman feels who thinks her behind is too big, or the guy that feels too short, or the man with gynomastasia or a woman who wants breast implants. It all seems to do with meeting an internal body image - some of it could be hard wired, some of it might be distorted by perception.
