What does dysphoria feel like to you?

For social dysphoria: being called "she" feels like I'm being insulted, but worse. It reminds me of my face, and makes me feel like I'll never be a real guy.

Secondary sex characteristics: my face shape makes me self conscious in the same way someone might be self conscious about being fat, or having big ears, or something like that. My chest/hips are a lot worse. They feel like I'm always carrying heavy weights, and I'm always hyperaware of them--sometimes it actually physically hurts because it feels so wrong. Sometimes I'll also panic because it feels like I'm in the wrong body so much, I just can't understand why how I think my body's supposed to be isn't the way it is.

Bottom dysphoria: I often have a very vivid phantom limb-type sensation, and when I remember that I don't have it, it's very distressing. I either feel anxious ("trapped in the wrong body" is a commonly used phrase I can really identify with) or depressed, because I feel like something is missing from me. The latter is also caused by things like not being able to use urinals.

 

I just sometimes feel dissociation having to do with mainly my chest. Sometimes my long hair, which culture makes me believe is inherently feminine. I also feel very shitty when wearing dresses on a more masculine day.

 

I'm normally pretty good, but wearing things that draw attention to the fact that I'm afab, especially my chest, are hella triggering. It's the worst with dresses; I look in the mirror and it's like a really poor photoshop; that's my face, but that body is very wrong and it needs to go.

 

My dysphoria is most commonly triggered by others; it's not their fault, but when I compare myself to them or I get misgendered it makes me feel bad.

It feels like my regular anxiety, which is why I have found it so difficult to distinguish in the past. It feels like I've forgotten something- it's the exact same feeling I get, physically, when I forget something or I'm running late. It's essentially a panic attack. It's really just the mental side that's different.I know there's nothing I can do, but I know it wouldn't be like this if I'd been born a natal male. That's what really distinguishes it from a regular panic attack for me; that and the fact it lasts for much longer.

The way I get over it is more or less the same as with regular anxiety. I make myself feel fresh. I scream, I run, and then I take a really hot shower. It may seem counteractive considering, but it works. Then I usually clean my teeth and mouthwash about a billion times and take a nap. It doesn't work in the same way as it does when I panic, but it certainly helps.

 

My dysphoria's gotten less intense because transitioning socially has meant that there are fewer reasons for me to have to think about the parts of my body that make me uncomfortable. My dysphoria is worst when I am misgendered because it reminds me that other people still think I look like a girl, that my voice is too high, etc. Most of my dysphoria at this point isn't discomfort as much as disidentification. My brain thinks my body is male, and it does a pretty good job of ignoring the parts it doesn't expect to see. I see my face and general body shape as more masculine than they actually are; the discomfort arises around the parts that are too obviously female so my brain can't skip over them (e.g. my chest and hips) and they just don't feel like they actually belong to me.

 

My dysphoria's a little funky because even though I'm completely trans, I'll go from dressing super masculine, and wanting to make my chest disappear; to dressing more androgynous and wanting to show off my feminine figure more.
When I'm passing though, my dysphoria just feels embarrassing because I don't have access to a binder. I also have a higher voice, so when I talk to people, I have to talk really deep, and it feels just uncomfortable for everyone. I'm still in school, and since I haven't really actually come out to my parents, I can't change my name as a nickname (there's a policy for trans students that lets your name change when people call attendance), and so I've had some experiences where new teachers don't believe that I'm the person with a female name, so it just makes me feel bad for accidentally causing a scene and like nobody's going to believe that I'm a guy.

 

I feel like it all the time. My feminine side has taken over. I plan to lose weight and fit into a dress. It can be pretty aggressive

 

Sorry to block up the thread but this is pretty much what mine seems to feel like too, so thanks

 

Hm, that's an interesting thing to point out, Alder, that it demonstrates through action and I never thought about it like that, but I should have, because I'm more prone to act on what I feel than to think about it or know what it is exactly. I sometimes also get this feeling that boobs are annoying to the max and want to bind them down with literally anything, because wtf. It irritates me especially when they move. I'm not especially conscious on their point or ashamed of them. But I guess that if I felt a connection with them, I would have no brutal thoughts about them whatsoever.

I don't really get dysphoria per se, I don't feel distressed about it all, I perceive my body more like a guy, it's the right body, because it is a guy's body. But some things feel foreign and very, very wierd. They don't make sense in my mind.

 

When I look in the mirror or at a picture of myself I'm usually a little shocked, it takes time for my brain to acknowledge that it's me. It can also happen just looking down at my body. That leads to a kind of depression, mostly focused at the things I dislike about my body and life, the realistic things I'm hoping to get from hrt and the miracle i secretly pray it will work. the things I want to change. Some things you just can't change, and for some of us it's less painful to hold back on social transition for the foreseeable future than to forge ahead with a transition you can't afford to do right. So you're left trying to tell people what they need to hear to understand what they are seeing instead of how you really feel. That brings on another type of dysphoria, knowing that asking people to use your preferred pronoun is unfair to them because you almost exclusively present as your birth sex/androgynous because ffs is expensive and so is child support

 

Dysphoria for me has always been the weird lack of ownership I feel towards my body. It doesn't feel like mine. I may be living in this body, but in so many ways it doesn't feel like mine. As with most trans people, my dysphoria is extremely fluid. Some days it's crippling, other days it just an annoyance. I do have far more social dysphoria compared to body dysphoria. Being called by male pronouns or my birth name is far more painful than looking at my body, which still sucks. I often describe my dysphoria as the weird sense of detachment. Dysphoria for me is going to bathroom and looking down and going "Oh shit, that's a penis. Huh." I don't view me as having a penis, because I don't want one! It's weird. On the body side, I also hate any bodily hair that I have and my Adam's apple. It's just weird, I don't like it.

All in all, my definition of dysphoria is the awkward, painful, and frustrating feelings relating the the detachment between my mental and emotional being and my physical body.

 

I feel the the same way! And the tips for how you try to get over it is what I do too, it does help.

Going along side that, I don't have any dysphoria fully on my own. If I lived by myself and never saw people then I wouldn't ever be dysphoric. But when I go outside and people misgender me it literally feels like being punched, and even more than that it's odd to realize that the way I see myself is not the way that anyone else sees me.

I often describe it feeling like I'm carrying around a pane of one-way glass. It's like I can see everything around me, but when people look at me they just see their own reflections on my pane of glass. It's not me, standing behind the glass, that they see.

 

A lot of my dysphoria is like a feeling of anxiety. Like if I wear anything that isn't very neutral I feel like something's very wrong. I get social dysphoria too if someone calls me "girl", "woman", "young lady", etc. or interacts with me like that. I get a lot of top dysphoria. I'm okay with it, I guess... I think it's hard to say which is worse, the social or physical aspect... It probably just depends. At the worst, it feels like when I look in the mirror I'm not even looking at myself. At the best, it's sort of okay/indifferent. I'm happier now that I know where a lot of my anxiety has come from and I feel like I'm able to at least have some sort of control over it now. Before it was pretty horrible, I just felt bad in general a lot of the time and I didn't really know why. Now my sense of self is a fair bit healthier.

 

Hmm..

Well, I do think I experience dysphoria, both bodily and genderly. I've discovered the term only recently, but I continue feeling it more and more.

To me, it's something that I simply "accept" (yet not at the same time).

When I see my body it just feels odd. Strange. Wrong. Like I shouldn't have those parts. I don't /want/ those parts. It just doesn't feel like me. I often avoid thinking about those parts of my body, rather ignoring them and pretending/wishing they weren't there, though of course that annoyed and upset feeling that they really /are/ there is always present. It's a bit funny, because I remember already when I was little and when puberty and stuff happened that I wasn't comfortable with those upper parts that I had been 'blessed with' and wanted to hide those parts. I don't think I've thought much of it then or when I grew up, but lately I've realized that it could've been a form of dysphoria.

I also often find myself wishing that I had the body of the opposit sex. It feels like I would "belong" there a lot more, or at least I wouldn't mind it that much. Having that body, I think, would feel a lot more natural. This one I have now does not feel right at all. I just want to avoid it. This is not a body that I am comfortable with, at all, to say so.

When it comes to the gender it also feels pretty wrong. I've always 'questioned' my gender. But I never knew about the wide spectra of genders until recently. To me, there only was male and female. I wasn't aware of all the gender possibilities, and so I was always questioning.

The gender that I had been assigned with didn't feel right, it felt slightly unnatural, or like I had a hard time "connecting" with it, "relating" to it. And so I considered the other gender, and that one I did feel more a "connection" to. It felt like it would've felt natural, had I been assigned that one instead. But I wasn't. And so I was stuck between wondering, "am I this or am I that?". But in the end, I couldn't really choose. None of them felt right. I often found myself ending up thinking "I just want to be me" when thinking about my gender. And then, one amazing wonderful day, I discovered it. The possibilities. It didn't have to stand between being cisgender or being transgender.

But the discovery wasn't all joy and rainbows. It made me discover that I didn't identify as the gender that I had been assigned with (obviously). It made me grow appalled by my assigned gender. Each time someone refers to me according to my assigned gender, I can't help but feeling a bit bitter. Like I want to tell that person "No, you've got it wrong, I am not that". And whenever I accidentally refer to myself according to my assigned gender, I get real disappointed in myself and, well, bitter. I'm fine with whatever pronounce, but I think that I simply don't want to be "recognized" as my assigned gender.

I'm not sure what to say. I'm a bitter person I guess? Ahah.

I wrote way too much and probably didn't answer the question right. I haven't written about this before so the words just went out.