Transfem

i had a very unspecific depression over years (am in my 30s now). i had took some interrest in genderbending stuff, but never had the thought, positively, that i wanted to be a girl. i liked it that my beard didnt really grow until my late twenties. all that felling of being somewhat comfortable in my body faded, when i started to see more and more manlyness. i had the feeling that noone would ever find me beautiful again. after a few years i realised quite recently, that i'd rather be a girl. only since that moment of clarity i started to get very aware, and 'actively' dysphoric. still i consider this to be better than befor, when i had no sense of self and self worth. now i know. it's not all just repression.

i had some lasersessions already, and when i looked at pictures of me from last summer i got the feeling i just didnt look at my face, esp. my beard. (i shave without a mirror since forever) but now, that i feel myself again, i can start to care. so this awareness that here and there are still hair is stressful, but i feel it to be the right train of thought.

The general feeling of hating everything about myself that was slightly "masculine" when I started having to shave I was sad about it. I hate looking at myself in the mirror and seeing a man looking back at me. I realized that wasn't normal when I was maybe 16(?) I genuinely thought most men if they could would choose to magically wake up as a girl.

After I started puberty, I started to feel very dissociated from my body. I mostly think of myself as a floating set of eyes and hands, kind of like a VR game. Remembering I occupy a body and specially this body is always quite disconcerting. It was only when I read other trans people describe this experience, and point out how it wasn't normal, that I was able to make the connection to dysphoria.

Good question! I'm looking forward to the other replies :)

For me there's a very clear split before / after my egg cracked.

Before, although there's probably a lot more that was dysphoria but I didn't realize, there are two or three main things that stand out. First is the classic "not liking my reflection", although I wouldn't have put it like that. I guess seeing myself just looked... weird? Like when I see other people, they're just people. But for some reason I (mirror or photos) I just didn't look right, although I couldn't have said what was wrong. I guess I didn't really think I was ugly, but certainly I couldn't believe anybody else would find me good-looking or attractive and even after getting married I was convinced it was on personality alone (hah!). I definitely avoided looking at myself wherever possible.

Second was the "meat puppet" phenomenon, which I put down to being a nerdy, intellectual type. Of course I could feel things, and move instinctively etc, but I always had a very clear distinction between "my body" and "me". I was absolutely obsessed by authors such as Greg Egan who wrote about people uploading their consciousness into computers and robots, freeing them of their physical selves. Also, I was slightly the odd one out when it came to super powers: rather than shapeshifting, I wanted to be able to leave my physical form and become a kind of ghost (would you say "discorporating", perhaps?). A facet of this was that I had absolutely no incentive to maintain my physical health, which lead to obesity, alcoholism and a pretty shoddy appearance. As a teenager I was depressed for a long time (pretty obviously trans+ADHD related in hindsight) and didn't even wash for a year or so.

Finally I had a constant feeling that something HUGE was missing from my life. Have you ever seen the Red Dwarf episode "Back to Reality" with the despair squid? It felt like I was playing an RPG but my character was all wrong, and I was missing out on experiences I was supposed to be having. Particularly stories like "Your Name" (and earlier "Ah! My goddess!") where the characters lose their memories of their destinies or important interactions, and are forced to spend their lives searching for something they know is missing but can't remember, were painfully relatable.

Now everything is much simpler! If I see some stubble in the mirror, I think: "god damn, I look like a man". Or my voice sounds like a man, and I hate it. And that can spiral into a kind of "I'm just pretending to be a woman" depression. But those are brain worms, and I can usually calm down by thinking about something else. And there are good days too, where I like how I look and people treat me as a woman.

And that's dysphoria as I experience it.

Profound discomfort and repulsion at my own body, particularly the things testosterone changed about my body. Extreme distress as I went through puberty, especially with the deepening of my voice and the growth of facial hair. Deep envy of bodies that did not go through testosterone exposure like mine did. Frustration at how people perceived me, spoke to me and treated me. Depression about how far away I seemed to be from who I wanted to be. Anxiety about my presentation. A complete lack of being able to see a future for myself. I could never see myself aging as a man.

There's so many other things. But those are the major points. Nearly all of those feelings I am recollecting. I am very happy with my body and my presentation and how others see me now. My voice remains a source of dysphoria for me but not enough to outweigh the euphoria I feel being me.

When I was still a kid, I experience my dysphoria in a couple of ways Physically, my body was always wrong, and I wished it were different. I'd dream it was different, I'd pray that it would change, and as puberty kicked in, my detachment from my body increased. Socially, I resented being grouped with boys and missing out on things that girls could do.

This was in the 80s and 90s, so I didn't have the words to understand what was happening, and I didn't even know trans people were a thing. I didn't have a feeling of "I am a woman/girl", rather, I experience it as "I should have been" or "I wish I was".

And ultimately, it mostly didn't change from that for many decades. The language I used changed, and my awareness of trans folk increased, but I still didn't see myself as being trans or being anything other than a guy who should have been a girl.

I used to dream about it in the way I'd sometimes fantasise about winning the lottery. I'd imagine how my life would be different, and how life altering it would be if this wish came true. But the key difference between thinking about the lottery and thinking about my gender, is that I never stopped thinking about my gender. It was always there.

It wasn't until a couple of folk in my life came out as trans about a decade ago and I had a chance to talk to them that I realised I was the same as them, and that I'm trans. It was the first time in my life I was able to talk about my experiences to someone and have them understand what I was saying, without having to fumble around trying to explain myself.

And for a little while, that changed my dysphoria. Instead of a vague feeling of discomfort with being gendered as a guy and a wish for a body that I didn't have, the shedding of my denial crystalised my dysphoria and sharpened it. In some ways it felt worse, but in some ways it felt better, because now I understood it, and knew what I could do with it.

And I spent the next few years after that chasing social and medical transition, and these days, I don't really experience dysphoria in any meaningful way. I still have moments, even when it does pop up now, it's background noise rather than a debilitating and painful awareness that dominates everything.

Dysphoria before I knew it was dysphoria:

• 4 years old, I won a girl's doll at a fair, the attendant wouldn't let me have it, and they gave it to one of my sisters - I was devastated and felt it was unfair to deny me the doll because I was a boy - I wanted to play with the doll.
• 5 years old being told my family expected me to be born a girl and they were surprised when I was a boy, I thought it was a genuine mistake I had been born a boy, that I was somehow secretly meant to be a girl instead - that the universe made a mistake (and that maybe someday it would be corrected or work itself out).
• 5 - 10 years old, I was jealous of my sisters and felt excluded, I wanted to be included as a peer. Didn't think about the gender relevance of this, just didn't like the way being a boy alienated me.
• 10 - 15 years old, I was absolutely miserable having male friends, I felt huge relief when my family moved and I lost my friends, and made mostly female friends from then on, though that was frustrating, I didn't want to be a "male friend", I wished I could just be accepted as one of the girls
• 15 years old, dark hairs growing on my legs, despite feeling insecure about not being masculine enough (and desiring "normal" male development) and feeling unsafe being targeted for being too feminine, I secretly shaved my legs with a razor nobody knew I had access to
• 16 - 17 years old, I kept trying to find a way to take a selfie of me that felt OK, nothing worked. The things I tried to make it better were adding a cute leaf to my hair, using hair pins, etc. - feminizing intuitively seemed to be what helped, but it wasn't enough. I hated pictures of me as long as I could remember, no photo of me ever looked right. I didn't know why, I didn't have the thought that it was related to gender.
• 19 years old, tried makeup but hated the way it felt like a contrast between a feminine expression on a male body, it made me feel so much worse every time I would see myself in the mirror after trying something feminine. Nonetheless, I was wearing skirts and women's clothing, and going to stores to buy them. No idea how to explain it, I didn't know what to think - I just thought skirts felt more comfortable and right. I even wore women's jeans and pants, etc. They just fit better, I liked them and they were more comfortable.
• 20 - 30 years old, once or twice I tried makeup again. Makeup always made me feel worse, as my body finally masculinized in ways it hadn't before (my puberty was slow to kick in and weak, I never developed body hair on a lot of my body and I couldn't grow a beard until my 20s). The makeup clashed more and more with my increasingly male body. My shoulders became broad from manual labor jobs. My hands became calloused mitts. My voice masculinized more, I started growing a beard. I felt afraid and insecure in my masculinity, and in my 20s I started to really "pass" more as a genuine man, I learned how to dress and act more like a man. I hated it, but I always felt disconnected from my body and it was safer than being targeted as a feminine man, perceived of as gay. I liked that my beard hid my face. I wore dresses and skirts secretly at home, the only clothes that felt "right", they just were comfortable. Didn't make anything of it.

Once I realized I am probably trans (at which point I thought I had no dysphoria), the realization suddenly melted a lot of my coping mechanisms like extreme dissociation and just ignoring everything as much as possible.

I went to Sephora and took a private class in how to apply makeup (expensive, but was so helpful for me), having the right products and knowing how to apply makeup to feminize my face made it helpful for the first time.

I started to get laser hair removal, and afterwards my face would be so puffy and raw in a beard pattern, I would feel acutely suicidal from it. Makeup actually helped me regain some semblance of my face and reduced dysphoria somewhat.

Dysphoria is still hard for me to identify, esp. when it initiates with dissociation. During sex this is often the case, I didn't realize I had bottom dysphoria until I realized I always dissociated during sex. Sometimes bottom dysphoria just feels like being really embarrassed about my genitals. Sometimes it means leaving my body and having a hard time being present. Sometimes it means suddenly feeling bad and breaking down crying.

My testes and scrotum have always felt more overtly dysphoric - like revolting alien appendages on my body. Orchi helped a lot, esp. when walking or wearing clothes, but the presence of a scrotum still makes me quite dysphoric.

I personally think one reason the dysphoria kicked in so hard after transitioning is that I went from feeling like society expected me to having these genitals to starting to feel like these were the "wrong" genitals, that I should have different genitals. So there are many sources and pressures that impact the severity and nature of the dysphoria. It's complicated and hard for me to really understand.

I typically get laser on my face once every 5 weeks, and two weeks after an appointment the hair starts to fall out. I have a week or two where I feel much better, and then as the beard shadow comes back I increasingly feel worse about myself. That was a surprising aspect of dysphoria - even a subtle or small beard shadow has a lot of power over my mood and self-perception, and in ways I didn't directly link except that it became a recurring pattern that was noticed.

For me it was just a general feeling of "wrongness" mostly. Like cramming yourself into shoes that are just a little too small. You're acutely aware that it's uncomfortable and that it doesn't feel right, but it's your whole body.

In my case I think those feelings were aggravated by my ADHD. There's this sense called proprioception that is knowing where your body is and how it's moving without looking that many people with ADHD or autism often struggle with. It's one of the things that contributes to that stereotype of the "ADHD Walk" where we're constantly running into, getting caught on, or tripping over things more typical people seem top just instinctively avoid.

So not only did just the state of being a boy feel wrong, and I hated the things that came with this box everyone had put me in. But my whole body felt clumsy and like it was a few inches too big in every dimension. Which only reinforced that this person I saw in the mirror every day just wasn't Me.

I had a double whammy of "phantom pain" and it's opposite of somehow also having parts that shouldn't be there. It feels like the vagina that I should have been born with is aching to just be there and that the parts I do have are always just somehow in the way. They feel foreign, like a transplant that's being rejected. The awful part is that the latter started when I was a very young child. I kept trying to "move it out of the way" and was always getting yelled at.

It took almost 30 years for me to fully grasp why these feelings were happening, and then I spent the next 10+ in an internal battle over whether to just give up on life or to keep going to keep my spouse happy. This essentially manifested as a kind of depression where I was withdrawn from everything that was happening around me. I just went through the daily motions with occasional small glimmers of the outside world, usually when something really good happened with my spouse around.

After starting GAHT, they straight up said to me "I'm glad to have you back! You're actually here with me now". Sometimes it's almost a physical pain, and sometimes it's a mental disconnect, and sometimes it would qualify as clinical depression. However, like everything else in this journey, we all go through the process differently. Your mileage may vary in transition, but it also likely varies on the way to starting, too.

If you haven't read it yet, I strongly recommend reading The Gender Dysphoria Bible

for me I couldn't even recognize my face. I hated the shaving so much -both the touching my face and the feeling of stubble on my skin as it grew back I just opted to just let it all grow for years before realizing how much I just wanted it gone. Some portion of that was personal neglect, also just being busy working for years and burying my disphoria under that and supporting my partner. I told myself it wasn't a good time for it and waited way longer than I should have but at least I didn't have to get sectioned.

I tested first by shaving for the first time in years and looking at my face not covered in hair made me start crying from joy right then and there. So I went and spent many, many hours getting electrolysis done because the pain from that is pretty much insignificant compared to how waking up to hairs growing out of my face made me feel.

CW: ED, drug use, sex, and suicidal ideation

I transitioned when I was a teenager, over a decade ago, and I ultimately don't remember how bad it used to feel for me, although I do remember the impact it had on my day to day life. I guess that is a little bit of a strange thing to say considering that I have significant trauma from it. I guess the dysphoria was always there for me since I often wished that I would be reincarnated as a woman. This hope and idea frequently made me feel suicidal at around 13/14, although I never made any serious attempts.

I realized that transitioning was an option when I was 16. I saw a Reddit post that helped me to acknowledge that HRT would actually have mental changes as well as the physical ones which made me reassess if I wanted the physical ones (I did). I ended up awake all night having a sober ego death. I found some pretty shitty posts online that made me worry that it was too late for me to transition and that if I didn't manage to transition by 25 that it would be too late for me. Throughout this dysphoria episode, I somehow managed to avoid finding the word "dysphoria" or making the link that it meant I was trans. I was still in a bad state the next day and my mum picked up on it so she asked if I wanted to go to a nearby cafe for a chat. I said that I wanted to start hormones in the car on the way there. She still denies that it is the case but my mother's reaction was absolutely awful. She outed me to my grandparents, her friends, and my child psychologist, and said the classic line, "Are you sure you don't just want to be gay?"

The psychologist told me that this was dysphoria and then he asked if I had a name picked out; I didn't really but I said one of the names I had considered and it stuck. Thankfully, as services go, this psychologist was one of my best experiences in trying to access trans healthcare. He referred me to the children's Gender Identity Development Service right after that appointment.

Over the course of the following year, my mental health suffered. I developed really bad problems with executive dysfunction because, at the time, I really struggled with the idea of making a body that I didn't like perform actions. It took me years to realize the link but even now that I am (mostly) comfortable with my body, that executive dysfunction remains a major issue for me, due to it becoming a force of habit. My college work suffered as a result, and to be brutally honest I should not have been there while I was that unwell.

For 8 months, I delayed making any steps towards transitioning with the expectation that GIDS would help me in a similar way to the psychologist who referred me there did. I realized how wrong I was in that assumption by the time that they saw me. The first thing that they asked me what being a woman meant to me and I didn't really have a clue how to answer it. They then went on to ask me about my masturbation habits and if I had tried wearing "women's clothes" (I had not). I concluded that GIDS was unlikely to actually offer me anything so I began taking things into my own hands, with some help from Reddit lurking, which was when I began to experience gender euphoria for the first time. I borrowed an old dress and bra from my mum without asking, which I know is shitty, but considering her attitude towards my early transition it was probably the right call, since I didn't have access to money either. It didn't take much but I saw potential "girl" in my features that day. I also gained the ability to realize that people might eventually see me as sexually attractive, which admittedly turned me on. I later realized that this refusal to consider how others could ever see me as sexually attractive was also dysphoria. That said, being more familiar with GIDS and the GICs now, they probably wouldn't have had the insight to make the connection.

The steps that I took to begin transitioning myself encouraged me to seek further outside help. I was the first person that I knew well to transition so the person that I spoke to ended up being the councellor at my college. She wasn't great at helping but she affirmed the changes that I wanted and called me by my name, which was enough for me at the time. I went to my college LGBT group but I was the only out trans girl so it didn't really help as much as I would have liked. For the next 4 months, my dysphoria was pretty bad but the steps that I was taking to transition were useful in softening the blow a lot more than the 8 months prior.

A lot happened while I was still at college for the next three or so months but my relationship to my dysphoria remained pretty consistent so I won't go into to much detail. I did get harassment from strangers and I lost a few friends but that didn't really come into the dysphoria side of things, and was more of an issue with loneliness. My main source of it was still that I didn't really have anyone to tell me what steps I could take to make myself feel better, but also feel more normal. I did start DIYing HRT around then and developed cup-filling A cup breasts within less than two months. I was very happy with them but strangely enough, this also gave me further dysphoria because everything I read online told me that my rate of development wasn't possible - it was, but likely because I am, what I later found out to be, MAIS/PAIS (intersex). Anyway, I really managed to make things feel better for me by embracing the idea of "fake it till you make it".

I had, and still have, a thick head of hair but it wasn't very long, so for the first 6 months of my transition, I would wear a wig to alleviate that aspect of my dysphoria. I eventually stopped wearing it because, by then, it hindered me more than it helped me. My mum had pushed me into a shitty fast food job after I left college, even if I wasn't well enough to be there. I made new friends there who never knew me as anyone else and that really helped, though none of them were trans. I do still wish that I had asked the one who had hair extensions for advice, because that would have probably helped me to reduce my dysphoria a lot. I barely got any facial hair but I got some so I tried using Veet on my face which gave me a rash and made it look like I had more facial hair than I did. I remember getting a pretty nasty dysphoria episode over that.

For the next 3-4 years, things progressed slowly but surely. I did, sadly, lose a lot of the shape around my boobs because I developed quite a nasty eating disorder, mostly over my shoulders seeming too big. Everything but my skeleton shrinking made the same issues worse. I also suspect being underdosed on my HRT contributed a lot. My sense of style slowly improved over time, and despite my ED making my body develop in a way that made me more dysphoric, people who later became my close friends started to assume that I was a cisgender woman. I would still find my mind drifting over if I actually fit in while I walked down the street, but because I spent all my time in a much more LGBT friendly city, I learned to put it to the back of my mind because strangers did tend to refer to me as a woman and it was probably just an effect of the trauma of my early transition more than dysphoria itself.

I had pretty nasty genital dysphoria, which I also learned to ignore until I found out that I had actually managed to get a surgery date. In the first couple of years of my transition, I always said that I would avoid sex because of the dysphoria. That didn't end up lasting for various MDMA related reasons. When I would smoke weed, it would give me extra sensation in the tip of my dick, which would always make me really dysphoric though. Strangely enough, I used to imagine getting eaten out when I would receive oral sex, which meant it wasn't too bad for me. It felt very similar but getting eaten out just keeps going for as long as it is stimulated. I have never been a fan of anal because it would always make me really aware of the fact that I didn't have a vagina, and these days it just isn't worth the bother.

After I learned to manage my ED (and switched to injectable E), I started getting shape back in a way that is actually really feminine. I'm pretty sure my hips have realigned since surgery too. I don't have any body or social dysphoria at all anymore. I still have some facial dysphoria, but mostly over my nose, which most other women in my family have anyway. I'd still access FFS in a heartbeat if I had access, even if I am in a position where I have managed to successfully infiltrate GC and neo-Nazi groups in person.

If you want some further reading on it, I would recommend Gender Euphoria by Laura Kate Dale. If fiction is more your thing, To Own The Libs by Zoe Storm is probably the best example that I have ever come across over how people tie themselves in knots to justify treating what is obviously dysphoria to themselves.

I reacted to what I now recognize as dysphoria with avoidance for most of my life. A lot of others have recounted similar symptoms - disliking the way I look in pictures, hating shaving, and generalized depression that I unconsciously avoided addressing. I was never invested in conventionally masculine interests as a child. I got way into video games, which I now recognize gave me a way to roleplay female identities through feminine avatars without directly addressing the source of my discomfort in meat space. Unfortunately, my body trended masculine as I aged - thick beard, taller than average, prominent facial features, etc.

I leaned in during my twenties and got into strength sports as a defense mechanism, because I was afraid of being seen as a target to cis men. This actually helped, as I became friends with several very strong cis women who helped me to decouple “physical prowess = masculine, frailty = feminine” in my mind. I recognize now that I had several misogynistic ideas imprinted from my childhood that I had to unlearn.

As a result of all this, I am now visually very masculine presenting. I am tall, have a large beard, and am visibly muscular. I sometimes view my body as something other than myself, like a trusted bodyguard rather than my own form. This is probably not healthy, but it is better than my earlier state of generalized nonspecific depression.

I’ve been making an effort to be visibly queer at work in attempt to make something positive of what I’ve done with my body. I wear skirts and dresses, use they/them pronouns, and introduce myself as nonbinary. My goal is to “tank” negative attention away from other GNC folks and normalize free expression in the workplace, which I am primed to do both as someone who has accumulated some prestige and power and as someone whose physicality tends to illicit deference in others. Paradoxically, I feel that presenting as a “muscular dude in a dress” is received more positively than if I were to attempt to pass as a cis woman, although that is speculation on my part.

I dunno how sustainable this posture is, as I often find myself envious of trans women who are brave enough to abandon masculinity all together. However, I am still afraid of losing the protection and privilege that comes from walking around in a physically intimidating body.

My experience with dysphoria has always been subtle and unspecific. It took a very long time for me to recognize it.

In adulthood, it was little more than a slight inclination towards depression. Whenever I would notice it, it was far easier to attribute it to immediate circumstances.

When I felt it in winter, surely its just seasonal depression. When I felt it in summer, its just because I hate summer. During covid I was miserable because I couldn't go anywhere, then afterwards I was miserable because I had to go places. This was all dysphoria, but nothing about it gave any indication it was about gender.

Also I had the emotional range of a thimble. (what is this metaphor?) I could feel empty, or angry, and little else.

I never liked how I looked in pictures avoided taking them, or appearing in them when possible. I guess I'm just ugly, that's the most reasonable explanation.

It took me a very long time to realize I was trans, and even longer to be ready to accept it. It wasn't until I started HRT and most of what I have described went away that I realized it was dysphoria.

I dislike the word dysphoria, because its such a strong word. For a long time I thought that my subtle and nonspecific feelings couldn't possibly be enough to be dysphoria.

To anyone out there reading this because you're uncertain if you're feeling dysphoria: When a disorder is named after its symptoms it's usually named at a very early stage of research, when researchers are only able to find the most obvious examples. This is why so many disorders have incredibly scary sounding names. Dysphoria can be that bad for some, but it can also be so subtle you don't even realize you're suffering.

I just want to say thank you for making this post. It felt pretty good to get my own feelings out in the open and validated by someone. Although painful, it's also good to hear from others with similar experiences. None of us has to deal with this alone!

I could write a lot about this but I'm going to keep it on the short side.

When my dysphoria was at the worst every day felt more and more hopeless. I woke up wishing I could go back to sleep which was the only time I had some happiness. Living felt like trudging through thick disgusting sludge and as time went on the sludge got thicker. I think I would have succumbed to it if I didn't get HRT when I did.

I also sometimes also have this vision where my deadname has wings and a horde of them is swarming me like ravenous monstrous bats while I'm standing there trying to shield myself and swat them away. Often times when I think of dysphoria, that and the sludge is what comes to mind.

If someone misgenders me I feel like I'm being bullied. But if I look at myself in the mirror and I don't like what I see, it's more comparable to sexual orientation where I don't like looking at masculine features and my femsexual+autosexual sex drive thinks disgusting, very comparable to an unsolicited 🍆-pic.

Being a healthy weight, even underweight at times, and still hating my body fat because my body isn't the right shape. Dealt with that for a long time without realizing it for what it was, just thinking I was fat. Not feeling comfortable being a boyfriend. Being attracted to men and being fine with it but also feeling off, like I was attracted to men but wasn't gay. Wishing I was a lesbian. Being really jealous when a transfem friend of mine changed her voice. Being uncomfortable having people interact with my dick, and discovering bottoming and having that feel like who I was supposed to be.

eh depends it can feel subtle like I'm doing everything wrong in a there's no way I fit in properly way. Or it can feel like I my skin is too tight, like it's covering my actual body and if I were to rip it all away I'd see myself underneath. Other times it's not recognizing my own reflection or seeing it shaped completely different almost disgusting.

idk there was probably more in the past

I recognize my dysphoria as the feelings of numbness/nothingness I have over who I am. Like for most of the time, I feel a distance from my body like it's just kinda there rather then being me. Come to realize that there's words for this specific type of dysphoria Ie depersonalization and dissociation. I mean come to understand I do have the more traditional traits too, not liking my facial hair, body hair, face and body etc in general but most of the time it's just no feeling at all.

That's also why I believe people should focus on gender euphoria, because I think that every trans person does experience some dysphoria it's just can be extremely hard to recognize. The question that cracked my egg after doing research about trans topics was "do you think you would be happier as the opposite gender" and instinctively I knew the answer.