Okay, so I have SAD (seasonal affective disorder) and often my "male" feelings get more intense when it's cloudy or raining outside. I seem to long more for a male body. Does anyone else have similar experiences?
-Merrick
I haven't personally, but if you look it up on the Internet there seem to be a lot of instances of health care places with SAD and TG help forums listed...Could just be that both can lead to depression/anxiety, and so tend to appear fairly close together...
I don't know, maybe because you have SAD and so feel down in winter, it makes you more aware of the fact that you want to be male and aren't...I know that when you feel depressed you tend to think more negatively, and so if these 'wanting to be male' thoughts are negtive, and your SAD makes you negative, the two, while not really *causing* each other, will nevertheless feed off each other.
Sorry, probably not very helpful. :-\
Lutin
Now that I think about it, I do feel the GID more strongly during the worst parts of SAD. It was almost unbearable back in March.
This is something that sort of happens to me, and I really don't get it.
Yes, I almost certainly experience SAD, generally from about late September through early January, the worst being October and November. (It improves once it starts snowing and I can go skiing.) My GID also tends to peak in the fall and winter. The weird thing is that at a finer scale day (say, one day to a week), they seem to be exactly anticorrelated: days when I'm really upbeat, the GID is more intense; when I'm really down, I just don't care about much at all, including gender.
I think it may be just a cultural effect; that depression and GID are anticorrelated for me in general, but that because of this culture and how I view it, I perceive societal restrictions around gender more intensely in the fall and winter, and less in the spring and summer. But I'm far from convinced of this explanation; when i think about it, I can't think of any reason I would see things that way. Perhaps, apart from depression, there's just something more introspective about fall and winter. Or, in your case, rainy days.
~Alyssa
SADS has always made my problems worse.
Hmmm, I hadn't noticed if my SAD coincides with bouts of gender dysphoria. Guess I'm too busy shoveling snow then... :P I sure live in a good place for having SAD though.
Z