Gender dysphoria
May. 13th, 2016 08:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcGender dysphoria is in the news again: Britain's NHS is, quite reasonably I think, giving some teenagers hormones to delay puberty developing them in ways that feel very wrong to them.
With a wide range of people I think that I can partially see their point of view: I may come nowhere near to agreeing but I can imagine why they might think as they do. However, my gender really isn't an important part of my identity. I like being male, but more for practical reasons: I like being stronger and being paid more, and not having to put up with practical inconveniences like breasts and menstruation. But, while people might believe me to be sorely mistaken in this, I really don't think that in a woman's body I'd be so unhappy as to require treatment. I would like to think that modern society is quite flexible in what is expected; after all, I've worked with confident female software developers, etc., so I suspect the condition's about more than just how people are regarded or treated. In the respect of my difficulty imagining myself in that place, gender dysphoria is thus a condition that's fairly unusual for me.
In short, while I have to accept that people come in different flavors and that gender identity really is fundamental for many, enough to deeply affect their happiness, it's something that for me is quite an abstract thought: something I can try to bear in mind intellectually so as to be compassionate about it but not something with which I can at all come close to identifying. Perhaps I am wrong to imagine that I don't greatly care about my own gender or, I think more probably, some people are more deeply different from me than I can even glimpse, and gender dysphoria is a way in which that difference is revealed.
With a wide range of people I think that I can partially see their point of view: I may come nowhere near to agreeing but I can imagine why they might think as they do. However, my gender really isn't an important part of my identity. I like being male, but more for practical reasons: I like being stronger and being paid more, and not having to put up with practical inconveniences like breasts and menstruation. But, while people might believe me to be sorely mistaken in this, I really don't think that in a woman's body I'd be so unhappy as to require treatment. I would like to think that modern society is quite flexible in what is expected; after all, I've worked with confident female software developers, etc., so I suspect the condition's about more than just how people are regarded or treated. In the respect of my difficulty imagining myself in that place, gender dysphoria is thus a condition that's fairly unusual for me.
In short, while I have to accept that people come in different flavors and that gender identity really is fundamental for many, enough to deeply affect their happiness, it's something that for me is quite an abstract thought: something I can try to bear in mind intellectually so as to be compassionate about it but not something with which I can at all come close to identifying. Perhaps I am wrong to imagine that I don't greatly care about my own gender or, I think more probably, some people are more deeply different from me than I can even glimpse, and gender dysphoria is a way in which that difference is revealed.
