Gender dysphoria isn’t just for transgender people
A surprising number of cis people experience something similar
A lot of people have made the point that transgender people don’t exist. Oh, those kinds of people may accept that there are people who pretend to be the opposite sex, and will take hormones and other actions to do make the pretending more real. But they don’t accept that transgender people do these things because they are that sex, at least in their brains, which drives the need to make those changes, and by extension results in a discomfort called gender dysphoria when making those changes is impossible.
Such opponents of the “sex in the brain” theory will tell you that sex is due to biology, that having a uterus and growing up with one is the be all and end all of womanhood, with those who loose their uterus in older age having an honourable part of the grouping. We’ll refer to that viewpoint as “sex as biology”.
The debate on this has been covered in much depth in many places on both sides, at least over transgender people that I’m not going to cover it here. Sometimes intersex people are mentioned so they can be safely ignored. What all of those debates miss, however, is that transgender people aren’t the only ones suffering from dysphoria. A lot of cis (i.e. not trans) people suffer from gender dysphoria too. The effects are real, and they make themselves felt. However, we never call these effects gender dysphoria, which creates this idea that only transgender people experience this one thing (and by extension have made it up). This disconnect is, to put it bluntly, a bit weird when you think about it.
So where are these places where you start to see gender dysphoria creep in to everyday life? Well, mostly you see that in places where people may lose some of the things we commonly think of as being core to male and female. For men, this tends to be hormone blockers (the same kind they give to transgender people) for prostate cancers, and for women, it tends to be when wombs are removed for medical reasons preventing pregnancy, and having children.
Prostate Cancer
One of the most fascinating peeks into the world of gender dysphoria in cis people I’ve encountered comes from the world of prostate cancer treatment. One of the main forms of treatment is to use the same kind of hormone blocking drugs that transgender women use to stop male hormones, called gonadotrophin releasing hormone analogues.
One of the very surprising things with this treatment regimen is that men refuse to frequently stay on it and fundamentally men hate the side effects, which is the loss of what testosterone they have. This often leads to men choosing to come off the treatment and die rather than stay on it.
Why men would prefer to die isn’t something that’s easily explainable by the “sex as biology” model, because you should be able to adapt to the hormonal changes just fine, and since you grew up with those hormonal changes, you’re still an honorary member of the male club, congrats!
However, the negative response to having hormones stopped and the misery it causes is something that many transgender people would understand, having experience of just that, just the opposite way.
And none of this remotely ties in with just how terrified men are of injuries to their “family jewels” or how we, in normal life, utterly understand, sympathise with and utterly try to prevent accidental castration, whether its necessary for medical grounds or not.
Childlessness
Childlessness is another good example, but for women this time. If the “sex as biology” theory is correct, then medically removing a woman’s uterus would not fundamentally change that person. They would have had the experience of growing up with it and its removal would mark the change from one life circumstance to another. it would, in short, be more of a neutral act.
That isn’t how the medical profession sees it, however. Medical professionals will fight to save the fertility of a woman to a certain point and will utterly dissuade any women from having hysterectomies if there is the slightest change of success in saving the womb, even if it would be better for the women for this to happen, and a frequent narrative I’ve heard is that, even if a person would not mind a hysterectomy now, then in the future they might seriously regret it.
I know lots of Childless By Choice women (CBC) who have struggled to get hysterectomies when necessary precisely because they feel losing their fertility is a neutral act, but society does not. I also know many women who are Childless Not by Choice (CNC), who express massive amounts of loss, grief and devastation at the loss of their ability to have children. A common narrative is that such women feel a loss of their femaleness and a death of part of themselves that they can never get back, and feel less than other people.
The existence of CBC women points to the “sex as biology” model having some validity, while the CNC narrative echoes many of the feelings transwomen face and it’s something I can certainly empathise with myself. However, what’s very much overlooked is that the CBC people I know correlate heavily with queer identities and often will correlate heavily with non-binary identities. The correlation is so staggering and such a good predictor, I actually just assume they’re the same thing now, and it certainly helps to explain why the CBC population of women tends to stay stable over time — if they’re being driven by internal brain processes, then cultural fads of the kind that conservatives worry about just won’t affect them.
Disability
If that’s not enough, physically disabled people also provide a window into gender dysphoria. Disabled people I know tell of their frustration of the obvious assumption that, should a person be physically disabled enough that having offspring makes no sense, then their existence as a sexual being simply turns off. This is an assertion that could be reasonable under the “sex as biology” theory and it seems to be the default position we, as a society, have about disabled people.
The fact that physically disabled people not only do still experience sexual desire, even when it makes not sense for them to do so, but will also do so frequently against society’s expectations, is absolutely explained by the “sex in the brain” theory, however. As is their frustration with able-bodied people and their default assumption that sexual attraction switches off once it’s no longer needed.
If that’s not enough to convince you, then one last thing to ponder, why do elderly people have sex? In many ways, as people get elderly and infirm, they will start to come under the disabled umbrella I’ve written about above. Obviously, under the “sex as biology” theory, they also shouldn’t want to have sex anymore. Their hormones and body parts are working less and so that part of themselves should switch off. But, allow me to ask you, has anyone told the elderly people that? Instead, we’re all usually heartened by an elderly romance, even if it makes no sense for us to feel so.
Conclusion
Childless not by choice women, men with advanced prostate cancer, the physically disabled and the elderly all share a common trait. That trait is that they are all examples of common gender dysphoria that we encounter in our day to day lives. They are all people we unconsciously and deliberately assign gender dysphoria to and we don’t even notice we do it. We then look at transgender people and say “that’s not real” and expect the world to carry on working somehow, like it all makes sense.
Intellectually, something has to give here. We can’t keep applying gender dysphoria to cis people and then ignoring it for trans people when it suits us. There has to be some coherence to the whole thing, and some acknowledgement that erasing transgender people means erasing an entire class of cis people and their experiences as well.
It also means some groups of people, be they trans or cis, are more linked by common bonds than we think, and that we share some of the same struggles. If you are struggling through life, feeling emasculated or rendered barren by circumstances outside of your control, then trans people get that, and you’re not alone in that.
