First a couple definitions' to help those new to the subject:
Gender dysphoria is a feeling of distress that can happen when a person's gender identity differs from the sex assigned at birth.Gender identity is having the internal sense of being male or female or being somewhere along the gender spectrum, or having an internal sense of gender that is beyond male and female. People who have gender dysphoria feel a big difference between their gender identity and their sex assigned at birth. Gender dysphoria is different from simply not following stereotypical gender behaviors. It involves feelings of distress due to a strong, lasting desire to be another gender. (mayoclinic.org)
non-binary: denoting, having, or relating to a gender identity that does not conform to traditional binary beliefs about gender, which indicate that all individuals are exclusively either male or female.
I am non-binary. I don't fit neatly into a box on either side of the spectrum. Please note that not all non-binary folks experience gender dysphoria, and some are quite content with their body, and their NB identity is related to gender roles. For me being non-binary is about both gender roles, and my body. As I mentioned in my last post, I don't necessarily want to be a man, but having a more masculine body feels more "at home" to me. And just a reminder that gender roles are made-up social constructs and vary from culture to culture.
My last post included the line, "Welcome to shit soup."
That wound up in there because when I first started writing I jotted some lines about trauma, and body dysmorphia, and although a separate issues from gender dysphoria (GD), they do affect one another. How I see myself has been tainted by my early experience of being fat shamed, and trauma has exacerbated my distress of having a female body.
Firstly, the joy of being fat shamed. This memory was such an impactful moment that I remember it like it was last week. I was 7 or 8 and I was leaning against the stove, my mom was sitting on her stool in the kitchen having a cigarette and my sister was standing beside her. My sister looked at me and said to my mom, "Look at how fat (Grace) is getting. She's going to have a pot belly just like her dad." Spoiler alert: I was not in fact fat, but it took me decades to be able to look at photos of myself and really SEE the size I was. Long story short, from that moment on I learned to see the flaws with my body, particularly how I was always too big. That was the day my sister also helpfully informed me that I needed to skip meals, and started me on my disordered eating journey.
Since we're on the subject of my mother and my sister...unfortunately my observation of these two women had an impact on how I felt about what it meant to be a woman, and how I had no desire to follow in their footsteps. My mother, if you haven't read my previous posts struggled with her mental health. There would be days of being bed-ridden because of her "nerves", the trip to the mental hospital, handfuls of pills, and the meltdowns (I struggled to come up with a different word, but truly, I saw her psyche "melt" during these episodes). Then there was my sister with her own mental health issues with in contrast to my mother were quite volatile, violent, and scary AF. In addition my sister started her drug abuse with the 70's diet pills (speed), which only made her behavior more erratic and terrifying. Keeping in mind that I grew up on ranch in a very isolated area, and had very limited contact with the outside world when i was young, so these were my examples of what it meant to be a woman in my life early on. Unfortunately I believed that they were weak, and that they were weak because they were women, and I sure AF didn't want to be like them. I had to do a lot of unpacking to understand these people as products of their time and their own trauma.
I shan't go into details, but as alluded to in my last post, for about 25 years of my therapy journey, when I spoke of hating my body it always got tucked into the category of "you hate your body because of your trauma, and we just need to resolve your trauma and then you'll be ok with your body." I wish somewhere along the way that one of my many therapists would have taken a step back and thought, "Huh, my other SA trauma survivors don't want to cut their breasts off, maybe this hate of Grace's female body isn't just about sexual trauma?"
Am I saying that the unrelenting sexual abuse/assaults I experienced as a young person didn't effect my relationship to my body? Of course not. Absolutely they poured kerosene on my already severe gender dysphoria, but those experiences weren't the cause of my dysphoria. And yes, absolutely; addressing my trauma was necessary, but not necessarily in the context of "fixing" my gender dysphoria.
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I didn't want to be a girl, and I most certainly didn't want to be a woman. I was fortunate to have grown up on a ranch where I got to do "boy" things like fix fence, round up cattle, feed the livestock...and part of that work was dressing like a boy. I also had a dad who had wanted a boy so I didn't get treated like a little princess, and in fact I wanted to be dad's "little boy" and because we were ranchers none of my gender-role non-conformity was pathologized.
My gender dysphoria didn't hit until I approached puberty (see my previous post), and it never got better with "resolving trauma", and in fact I think it got worse because I had more attention for that particular distress, plus I couldn't blame the trauma on my dysphoria anymore. And when I think back to when I was a young child, I wasn't putting on my mom's dresses or eye shadow, I was putting on dad's cowboy hat. I was "shaving" with his straight razor (minus the blade). The signs were there, I was just a few decades to early in our understanding of gender dysphoria.
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