I’m a 17 year old Demiboy/libramasc/bigender transmasc. I used to think I’m a trans person without dysphoria but as I grew up I feel I am not my gender assigned at birth more and more. I hate whatever estrogen is doing to my body, yet there’s no way for me to reverse its effects. I barely take a photo of myself unless I am forced to, and seeing myself in the mirror makes me uncomfortable as I want a masculine appearance so badly since I look too feminine. My voice is sort of androgynous, but it’s still not masculine enough, which I do not like. I have mild chest dysphoria, however, that focuses more on how society genders my breasts rather than a biological gut feeling(like, when you see a person with breasts, you will automatically assume they’re a female, etc etc) I get so envious of cis boys at my school. They use he/him pronouns. I will never have broad shoulders, or be as athletic or tall as them. I have three dudes whom I often chat with, but they never view me as ‘one of them/those guys’. Currently, I am out to 3 teachers at school. Nevertheless, they did not take my words seriously, because they do not think I am truly transgender. Life is so unfair. Nobody at my school seems to be worried about their gender identity. They don’t have to face the discrimination against transgender people. My classmates/schoolmates, especially the most popular boys, love making fun of gay & transgender (especially mtf) people in public. What’s more, that little male person in my closet, he’s there in the dark, he lives in my heart, and, he never went away. Nonetheless, I can’t let him out. I don’t want more dysphoria, however, neither do I know how serious it takes for gender dysphoria to be diagnosed. What if I’m not trans enough. Then (perhaps) I cannot get T, so it’s a paradoxical situation. I do not think I can actually socially transition successfully without testosterone in the future, since for most people, I am just a shy, quiet little girl. If I ever came out(for now), I would be teased to death. Every time I imagine I had male body parts, on testosterone, or my breasts gone, it made me so happy. Whenever I picture my future self as a man, this gave me so much euphoria, like I’ve never felt before. Why would I have these eerie desires. Why can’t I be a cis-het, be a lovely wife/girlfriend/mom/etc. But I just can’t imagine living my entire life as a woman, and even if I could, it sucks(no offense to the ladies here). I’m afraid I will never, ever become a man. Everyone at my school keeps on misgendering me. I’ve got no idea why the hell am I posting this but I want to complain so much
I'm so sorry you're going through a rough time in your life right now. I'm no expert in trans issues but I know if you want others to accept you, you have to accept yourself first. The more confidence and effort you put into your goals the more it will start to show. If you believe in your own confidence other people will believe and recognize the fruits of your labor too. Some may not like it but they will respect you. Also It's more important for you to accept yourself rather than others accept you. I'm almost 30 and a lot of people I have met have come and went throughout my life. 95% of them don't care about me or stopped caring about me. So in the grand scheme of things, what they think about me doesn't even matter. Don't let people dictate who you are, when it's not even their place and they won't even stick around to support you. The one person you''ll be stuck with the rest of your life is you and I promise life will become better when you don't fight with yourself. As you know, life is unfair and schools are kinda a social dumpster-fire. It's hard to accept but it's true. However school is a small artificial isolated bubble. There is a whole other separate world out there. At your age I treated school like a crappy job and did what I had to do to get through the day. Afterwards I went wherever I could to experience life and do what I wanted. It was rough and I made a lot of mistakes but it was on my own terms. So school isn't forever and it's a cage that you're not bound to. Just try to survive and get through the school day , So you can discover and accept yourself well outside the cage afterwards. Build the life you want and have fun doing it.
I was the other way around (mtf) but puberty also hit me like a sack of bricks, I will say it's better for you to address how you're feeling now than pushing these emotions down inside. Being repressed is pretty psychologically damaging speaking from personal experience. Also you don't have to be performatively masculine to be a boy you can just be you. Maybe there's some traits you'll adopt because you feel comfortable with them but ultimately you shouldn't have to be perform being trans to be believed. It sucks that a lot of kids at your school are being vile but fortunately they don't have a say in your gender identity and chances are you'll make a better man than any of those boys.
Thank you. I often get dysphoria from my hobbies because they are not very stereotypically masculine. I don’t like physical contact like rubbing shoulders and I suck at sports, so it took me a long time to accept I may be transgender. My dysphoria is mostly what a trans man would feel although I am bigender(agender and male), I don’t often get agender dysphoria. After a year and a half I will be going to an university…A more accepting place, probably. And I will get a super short hair-cut, wear boys’ clothes and no one, not even my parents, can stop me from doing that.
Omnis, from everything you have written, like... And... And... I would say you're a 100% slam dunk ain't-no-doubt-it trans man. The question is: what are you going to do about it? Actually, what can you do about it as a 17 year old trans guy in Shanghai? I don't have any knowledge about the Chinese health system. One thing you'll have to do whatever is wait. Wherever you are in the world, one thing you get used to as a trans person is waiting! Are you able to access moments of gender euphoria at the moment - either through gender presentation or friends accepting you as a guy? Good luck though, Omnis. It won't be long til you're able to go to university and be yourself - that's something to look forward to! Beth x
I basically have to live with this female body for now, I’m afraid. They’re not so many gender clinics here. Online platforms like EC is all I have. Most parents only realize their child has a gender identity crisis until their child starts to commit suicide, self-harm and so on. And doctors only prescribe hormones unless one’s gender dysphoria is extremely severe, so yeah, you’ll have to prove you are ‘trans enough’ to get testosterone. It’s a lot easier to obtain estrogen here, although it’s not easy overall for trans people to get access to gender affirming healthcare(and I suppose it’s also true for developed countries like Canada or the US) In addition, I tried to come out to my mom once. Even though she said she did not care, I could tell that she’s transphobic. I will not be staying in China after I graduate from high school. I will probably move to Canada or Britain. I don’t know how’s the gender clinic like in those two countries. I’m thinking about getting in a PhD in either physics or chemistry, but this means I perhaps will not be financially independent for a long time(possibly), so if my parents find out if I am on testosterone, they’ll probably threaten me by refusing to my tuition fees and etc. I just think the sooner I start taking hormones, the better. My hair is short——despite not being short enough for a guy, it’s pretty short for a girl, so a few times people can’t really tell my gender. For example, one day when I was in a loo a lady walked in and she was like’Oops, wrong bathroom’ because she thought I was a boy. Although at last she realized she was in the right loo, I was really happy. At my school there is a gender-sexuality alliance, consisted of mostly AFAB gay & bisexual people. Only the leader of the group knows I am a trans man. A lot of the members don’t understand trans people, however. They do seem to focus more nevertheless on trans women since they are kind of misandrist…? Yes, the leader of my school’s GSA do use my he/they pronouns, but I know they think that ‘yep…you want to be man as there is so many male privileges in society…’ A year ago, when I was eating with a bunch of the club members, one non-binary person openly claimed that they hated men, despite knowing that my gender is more masculine. And I was like,’Oh?Okay.’ I mean, I am a man, however I don’t hate ladies, nonetheless I see where they were coming from. I do have some male friends, yet they don’t understand trans people, nor are they not going to accept me as a one of them anyway. I plan to come out to them after we graduate from high school one and a half years later.
I'm English and I wouldn't recommend the UK, at least at the moment. A lot of barriers in place unless you go private and we've been condemned as one of the more transphobic countries in Europe both official political parties are anti trans and waiting times if you wanted free healthcare are ridiculous, America is similarly going to be expensive because they don't have public healthcare. I've heard Thailand are the best but if you're looking for a western country Scandinavia is pretty good (Denmark Norway Sweden) also I hear that Canada are a lot better than the US, a lot of people emigrate from the US just for their healthcare. Argentina is apparently also really good with regards to treating us like human beings. I think it's definitely worth sitting down and looking at the pros and cons when you do move. I'm sorry you've had bad experiences with misandry though, I think a lot of people face oppression from guys as a group and then extrapolate that indignance to all men which is pretty counterproductive. You can't help what you are, I can understand why that would be painful to be denigrated for something you have no control over.
Thank Thank you. Good to know. I would say I have a 90% chance that I would go to Canada but I’m still not completely sure.
Depends what country you're comparing it with! Though we moan about the trans healthcare system in the UK, it's a darn sight better than Eastern Europe, large parts of Asia, large parts of the US, Africa etc etc. One is far more bigoted than the other. And don't forget the Lib Dems and Greens, who are v tolerant. We are sadly saddled with an out and out transphobe as Prime Minister at the time of writing, though hopefully not for much longer... Beth x
I'm a Green voter but sadly there isn't really any chance of them ever getting into power in our FPTP system. I know personally 5 years was too long to wait to be diagnosed through an NHS gender clinic, although the alternative has left me broke and Gender GP are the least expensive. I know it's better than a lot of countries but still feels like a kick in the gut after the euphoria of coming out of the closet. I think Canada is probably a safer bet considering nhs waiting times are only getting longer and longer thanks to the Tories.
I don’t know if I am trans enough to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria, as I have said. The problem is that if you are not dysphoric, then you cannot medically transition. I personally don’t want more dysphoria, but I really want to look, and sound like a man, at least in the future, although I know hrt is not everything. Otherwise I will be stuck in this female body forever, so that’s why I am little bit worried. It’s a complicated.
There is no such thing as being trans enough. And having dysphoria isn't an requirement to being trans. The only thing that matters is that you feel that something does not match up. Where is this stated? It's just wrong in my opinion. People need to get educated about it. We have committee you have to go to, that don't accept nonbinary identities for example and many here do lie about their feelings. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but sometimes the system is made so riddiculous that lying is the best option to get, where you need to get, since lives depend on it. We even have example questions and answers on our lgbt+ center webpage on how to answer committee questions.
Alright, then maybe it’s the situation in my country, where you can’t get testosterone without a prescription. Obviously some transmasc without dysphoria still medically transitioned, but it’s illegal and could be dangerous.
You do need to get prescription here, but you don't need gender dysphoria diagnosis. You do need to get a transsexualism diagnosis what I have thanks to my psychiatrist and the committee gives their own diagnosis and the permission to start hormones. At least this is how it's in my country.
They really need to update the terms of it all. It can get really confusing and this is what I fight against. You do not need to have euphoria or dysphoria to be transgender. It's important that you feel the mismatch between your birth sex and your actual sex and that alone should be enough to get the diagnosis. Of course it's important to also have an psychiatric evaluation and therapy for support, but according to World Healt Organizations it's not a mental health disorder anymore. It's who you truly are. You don't need to seek medical transitioning either, it's enough if you transition socially. All that matters is that you feel okay in your body at the end and you are happy.
Though I do realize it is requirement in some countries what truly sucks and it shouldn't be like this.
In my country dysphoria is a not requirement for being trans but for hrt and srs It’s sort of gatekeeping and a lot of trans people here call non-dysphoric trans people transtrenders and so on But for me I think many so-called non-dsyphoric trans people actually experience dysphoria, even if it’s very mild, because everyone experiences dysphoria differently, some feel strong discomfort(which is a typical form of dysphoria) while others may feel disconnected from their AGAB. Dysphoria and euphoria can also focus on weird things such as eyebrows or hands dysphoria, etc etc. Perhaps they just don’t call it ‘dysphoria’ or without realizing that they have it.
Yeah I know. My dysphoria for example can get really bad and I feel it all physically and things like my voice and the feeling of my skin can trigger it. It's the gatekeeping part that I dislike, because it feels transphobic towards transgender people.
Hey, what you just listed here is dysphoria. You don't like the way you sound or your body because it makes people think you're feminine/a girl from what I'm hearing there- that qualifies as dysphoria. I thought I didn't have dysphoria at first either, but what you said is close to what I thought. Turns out I was repressing my dysphoria for a lot of my life, and had to teach myself what it is. I'm not here to push you in a direction either way, I just wanted to point that out.
Thanks guys. I did not mean to say anything discouraging. I just sometimes feel bad about myself since none of my peers seem to experience the same struggle I am going through right now, not even some queer ppl I know. It's frustating when others don't understamd you.
