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Pretty much. I get really intense dysphoria about different things at different times. I've also considered 'nonbinary' or 'androgynous' too. I just want to feel more comfortable with myself, and labels are more "what word seems closest" to help people understand. 

Can't wait to be kicked out of every single public restroom as a person with boobs and a deep voice/facial hair lol. 

Tell us more about the facial hair.

I sense you might be taking your werewolf obsession a little too far.

It's cause I'll be on testosterone to help with the dysphoria. Prolly just have a little bit tho, like this guy.

Oh, honey, please leave

So on the days you feel like a woman instead, what do you do, just shave and suck on a helium balloon?

I suppose so. I'll write "my dignity and self respect" on it so people don't know it's helium. That might be too long though, cause then you can't read it when the balloon is deflated.

well the balloon should be deflated all the time since you seem to be lacking both

yup, that was the joke

Not sure that will help. At least, there's no scientific evidence that testosterone treatments help with dysphoria long-term, even if there sometimes is a short term decrease in stress. There is a growing body of evidence that it makes anxiety and other health problems worse long term and do not cure the dysphoria. Plus, at least 80% (some studies as high as 95%) of people with gender dysphoria grow out of it at some point in adulthood.

Then there is the whole problem of a lot of recent dysphoria teens and young adults are facing is rapid onset gender dysphoria - the perfect storm of regular struggles with identity and not being neurotypical (asperger's, depression, anxiety, etc.) meeting a portion of the culture that embraces and even pushes identifying as something different to fit in.

And there is a lot of evidence that sex-reassignment, not that you seem to be going for that, increases health problems and doesn't decrease dysphoria long term.

But you are likely passed puberty, so the higher risk of outright dying from hormone treatments is less, at least.

A good question to ask is *why* you really feel like a different gender (e.g. don't fit in? Don't match perceived stereotypes? You watched a show or made some friends that claimed to be non-binary or trans? Identifying as non-binary gets more attention and sympathy from friends? Depression or anxiety that makes you feel you aren't quite normal and that maybe changing gender will fix what you thing ails you? Not to be harsh, but literally ever person I've known in the flesh (not online) who currently identifies as non-binary or trans fits one of those - from the guy who was most definitely a man but realized he was becoming near invisible to friends as he aged a creepy flirt, and now identifies as a woman, to the boy who liked girls then identified with being gay once that got popular then started acting girly when being gay wasn't enough, and now identifies as non-binary. Did you know something like 28% of teens in California now identify as 'non-bninary' - showing just how meaningless a term it is?)

Basically, dysphoria is a symptom, not the root problem. People with limb dysphoria think a limb is missing - that isn't a cue to chop off the limb to make it feel better. Gender dysphoria is generally accompanied by deeper problems, such as anxiety, depression, stress, restlessness, struggle to find identity, dissatisfaction with the world, etc. While the modern trend is to treat the dysphoria as the real 'problem' that hormones or a sex change can 'fix' and wipe away all the others (with no evidence of this actually happening long term,) it's more likely the opposite is true - if the depression and anxiety are treated effectively through behavioral therapy or meds or spiritual growth (never underestimate the power of just forgiving people and not holding grudges....) the dysphoria will likely lessen. But hormones can mess up your life; tread carefully.

Increased cardiovascular events  
deaths from puberty blockers
health risk of cross hormones in young adults

 

The "why" part is because I want to feel more comfortable with myself. I do think that if it's for attention or not fitting sterotypes, then it is not transgender. This skews data very frequently - people who identify as transgender, but aren't actually transgender, and will stop identifying as transgender at the first sign of negative effects. If you're not trans, then starting hormones or getting surgery will give you dysphoria. That being said, I personally don't have a problem with people who don't have dysphoria socially transitioning, even if they shouldn't physically transition. With social transitioning, all that's changing is names and pronouns and how they dress. That doesn't hurt anyone, even if it does end up being just a phase. *shrugs*

For me, I have dyphoria mostly around my face and voice. Those two are ones that are present every day. My voice sounds wrong to me, constantly. I also have days where I enjoy having feminine curves, and other days where just seeing it on myself feels very intensely wrong to me. If it were just voice and boobs, then there's easy solutions to those - voice training and chest binders. On my bad days, I do feel more comfortable with myself and function easier with a chest binder. But it's not just voice and boobs, there's a whole host of other little things that just feel wrong. Hips, neck, thighs. These are present very regularly, but not every day for me. Testosterone redistributes fat in your body, from hips and thighs to your midsection, as well as giving a physical adam's apple that voice training doesn't do. This is also something I've been feeling for several years. It's everything combined that's making me pursue testosterone instead of other options.

I've done a lot of my own research into this, about risks, benefits, and origins. There's also an ungodly long screening process (it's been a year since I've started trying to get testosterone, and I'm nearly there), which weeds out the exact people you've listed. People confusing gender and sexuality, attention seeking, sterotypes. The people who actually start a physical transition generally don't regret it. It's rare for people who have started physically transition to want to detransition - out of these 22,725 patients, there were only 62 that wanted to detransition. The long term mental health problems you've listed are usually because of how people treat those that are transgender - with abuse, discrimination, exclusion, and judgment - not because of what they've done to themselves. Transgender people who are accepted for what they are and treated like a normal person actually do find a decrease in anxiety and depression.  Bullying and abuse is most likely what causes the depression and anxiety in transgender individuals.

Also, 'limb dysphoria' is body integrity image disorder (BIID). Dysphoria is solely about gender/sex, dysmorphia is usually about your physical appearance and feeling 'too ugly' to the point where you're self harming to feel pretty (anorexia is a common example), phantom limb is when an amputee feels a limb is there that isn't there, and BIID is when you want a healthy limb cut off to 'feel whole'. All four of these things are very different, and have different origins. Dysmorphia can be from peer pressure, sterotypes, and perception. Dysphoria is not. BIID is still something people are puzzling over and trying to figure out, whether it's a phycological, neurological, or a sexual fantasy (apotemnophilia), and is extremely rare. 

It's also been found that transgender people generally have brains that function similarly to their desired gender rather than what they were assigned at birth. That gives it an actual, physical, foundation instead of it just being something that is developed like ptsd, or caused by perception or trends like dysmorphia can be. Something with a physical foundation needs a physical treatment. This also leads me to believe that "rapid onset gender dysphoria" is either people who've been feeling that way for a long time and only just now know the words for it, or they might not actually be transgender. However, I do not know how 'non-binary' or 'genderfluid' plays into this, and it may end up being that I fully transition to male. I don't know. That's a decision for future me, all I know is what I need right now and the best words I have to describe myself right now.

There is very little research on the long term effects of puberty blockers, and I agree that at this point in time, puberty blockers should not be used on anyone (I mean, anything other than the original use of the medication). As time goes on and more research is done, there will most likely be a better and safer alternative than our current puberty blockers.

Also, please be mindful of your sources and inherent bias in articles like that. Generally, '.com' (short for 'commercial') is used to promote a specific message and will exaggerate certain statistics, pull research from questionable sources, or minimize contradictory numbers to help make their specific message more alarming. This would have been a better source to cite against puberty blockers. You can find these by throwing "-.com" in your google search, and it will exclude all sites that have '.com' in it. I usually throw in a '-.net' (network) too.

This academic article is a useful, balanced  piece evaluating many of the studies claiming brain changes for transgenders, and discussing the limitations and potential better explanations for some of the findings. (E.g. many of the tests looking for the brain's reaction to hormones like steroids or testing responses are done already after a person has begun hormone suppressants or in some cases after cross-hormone treatment and has lived as transgender for some time, so results that biologically female brains respond like typical biologically male brains in some instances could just as easily be tied to low estrogen, or brain changes could just as easily be linked to brain plasticity of lifestyle. Since the studies are limited and often self-contradictory, they don't prove at this time that there is a quantifiable, natural difference between transgender brains and the brains of their desired sex.)

Personal - I also struggle with a similar dysphoria of not feeling I 'match' the mirror. It's not the exact thing as being transgender, but I understand the dissonance of feeling like the reflection is sometimes a complete stranger and sometimes just off - like some parts are right, but others wrong. Not a feeling like the body I have is bad, but that it isn't 'correct.' I went through a lot of anxiety in my young adult days because of this, as well as things like my voice being higher at that time than I felt my 'real' voice should be, and being treated as effeminate by other men and women. I also identified as gay at the time, and it didn't help that my boyfriends, comparatively, were stereotypically a lot more masculine than I was, and that a couple of my female friends liked to refer to me as a bishie.

What got me over my anxiety wasn't surgery or clothes to change or hide my face or parts of my body or appear more masculine. It wasn't acquiring more affirming friends. (In fact, stopping hanging out with the friends that would pander to me or try to seduce me or tell me I was an oppressed victim of a harsh world helped a great deal. Strangely enough, when your friends are stable and well-adjusted it tends to help one's frame of mind more than when all your friends have their own issues they want to blame on other people. It also helped to stop watching anime where hyper-feminized men were contrasted with hyper-masculine gangster and cowboy types, with rarely a balance between.) Rather, I decided to be secure and confident in my own self. The body is like a vessel and to be respected, and can certainly affect the mind, but it is not the same as consciousness. I find it helps to imagine: if my consciousness and memories were downloaded into the body of a futuristic robot whose neural pathways were a dupe for mine, would I stop being myself just because my flesh was now steel? Once I stopped blaming my anxieties on the reactions of others, took responsibility for the flaws and poor choices in my own life, and stopped evaluating my masculinity on my own warped stereotypes, I found that the dissonance of the mirror stopped being a big deal to me.

Admittedly, I try not to spend more time in front of the mirror than I need to because it still feels weird. Aging doesn't help ;) But I don't make the face in the mirror, and people's potential reactions to it, the sum of myself or my identity.

But things like this hit me hard, since I know more than a few people who, rather than address their childhood traumas or underlying anxieties and relational rifts, have plunged headfirst into the transgender movement or changed their sexual orientation or self-identification, sometimes more than once, to something more attention-grabbing. It's like, for a large part of current culture, things like hope and self-reflection have been traded in for trying to conform reality to personal wishes or to stay, on purpose, in some sort of (relatively safe) victim role where they can blame their problems on others and continually have something shocking (but not too shocking) they can be sure to let everyone know about.

Excuse me sir, but this thread is for shitposting only. Gonna have to ask you to move along.

I need to move along, anyway; I have way too much left to write on my ruins project, and if I don't finish it on time that would be pretty embarrassing. It's just that small glimmer of naive hope that someone on the internet can be persuaded from needlessly sabotaging their own body. Never happens, mind you.

Good luck on your ruins project! And thanks for that link to the brain research. I'll stop using 'transgender people have brains structured like their desired gender' argument until there's more research done in that area, since it seems pretty uncertain right now. 

Thank you for your concern too! If I do end up regretting the decision in the future, that's my problem I guess. But as I am right now, testosterone is still something I want to pursue. If you want to talk about transgender things again though, lemme know and I'll gladly continue talking about it.

that's the plan

I am jelous, i have been trying to grow a beard for so damn long and all i got is this dissapoint of a stubble. 

Ah, CYS might be a very.....Hmmm, shitposty place to post all this stuff, you'll probably get all sorts of silly comments and get called fag a lot! It's okay though, everyone knows reading is gay, and this site is all about reading and stuff. I never read. I just drink code red mountain dew and play mafia wars on my shitty blackberry.

I'm pretty set on top surgery. Eventually. One day. I will never forget when my one dear friend, that country thinks-ketchup-is-spicy white boy, walked into work and screamed "MY NIPPLES HURT SO FUCKING MUCH" before ripping off his shirt to reveal his new top surgery scars. Apparently they have to take your nipples off, and then reattach them after? So now you just have weird nipple forever. I asked him and he said that they just feel really tingly. Also the kid has never eaten a taco before. He's so white it hurts.

>you'll probably get all sorts of silly comments and get called fag a lot!

Everybody's waaay ahead of you, this thread was split from the much funnier Newbie board one after Camelon started responding seriously.

How cute. Tranny fags unite.

 

Emphasis on the fags, am I right?

Because you're a faggot.

Ha, comedy gold, that.