That Time I Was Dysphoric

A commonly told story regarding dysphoric teen girls goes like this: Gender is a fucked-up system, so of course girls feel uncomfortable with it. Wanting to escape this is a normal reaction.

…most little girls feel the same indignation and despair when they learn that the accidental conformation of their bodies condemns their tastes and aspirations; Colette Audry angrily discovered at the age of twelve that she could never become a sailor; the future woman naturally feels indignant about the limitations her sex imposes on her. The question is not why she rejects them; the real problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, 1949

That’s certainly often true, but it’s not really my personal experience. My experience of dysphoria wasn’t about the social roles of gender. I’ve always been more-or-less gender-conforming. Not strictly gender-conforming, but the average amount of gender-conforming, in the normal pick-and-choose way. Gender-conforming enough that it was never really commented upon.

I was also remarkably sheltered from misogyny as a kid. Unlike many dysphoric teen girls, I’ve never been sexually abused. I was not getting inappropriately sexualized by men around me. I was not chided for my masculine interests.

When I was 14, and to a lesser extent when I was 13 and 15, I had sex dysphoria. It was of the loathing my body variety, rather than the dissociative variety. It was of a distinctly nonbinary nature — I never wanted a male body. (Not to be too gay, but male bodies are not desirable in any context.) But I didn’t want a female body either. The concept of “nonbinary dysphoria” overall significantly widens the parameters of what “dysphoria” even is, and dysphoria is already a fairly malleable concept.

I’m telling my story because I think it’s important to know that sex dysphoria can exist without gender dysphoria, and I haven’t seen anyone else talk about it. I also think it’s important because — under certain circumstances — sex dysphoria without gender dysphoria can be seen as more legitimate. “Clearly this isn’t just a social issue, so it must be innate and immovable!”

Carol: One of the “pure dysphorias” is when they talk about sex dysphoria. From what I’ve seen, the sex dysphoria tends to get a higher category than the social or more gender dysphoria. Do you guys have thoughts on that?

Mackenzie: I think part of the reason for that might be, I guess, obviously that the social stuff is more wiggly and people kind of can say like, “Well you know, there are masculine women and there are feminine men,” and stuff like that. So if you have social dysphoria, I think people will give some leeway for it to be affected by external things.

Post Gender Funk, episode 2, 2020

I was little when I first concluded that I was asexual. I was in 4th grade, and I was in the midst of my Percy Jackson/Greek mythology phase. I knew I didn’t like boys. I didn’t give much consideration to the possibility that I could like girls because I was a child and all the lesbians I knew were parent-aged. As a kid, adults just seemed too “other” for me to be like. I had never heard the word “asexual” then, and I didn’t think there were necessarily other people like me — I was just very convinced that this was the way I was. I was like Artemis.

In my late tweens or early teens, I found the word “asexual,” which lead me to the queer community on tumblr, dense with micro-labels and gender ideology. I never actually created a tumblr account — I think I intuitively knew that would be bad for me. But I lurked quite a bit, for a time.

I couldn’t really tell you how much I “bought into” queer theory. I was somewhat skeptical, and the inconsistences in the ideology bothered me. But I didn’t entirely write it off either. After the suicide of MtF teen Leelah Alcorn in 2014, I remember signing a petition and donating $15 to support “Leelah’s Law,” to ban gender conversion therapy.

I thought non-binary was kinda stupid, but I also read people’s descriptions of being non-binary and I thought, “Oh shit… that kinda sounds like me.” In particular, since I was asexual and aromantic, I remember at one point thinking that I “might as well” be agender too. Round out the trifecta. [Insert “triple-A battery” pun here.]

I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. I wasn’t interested in pronoun games, but then again, “Enbies who go by she/her are totally valid! they’re just words, and you should do whatever makes you most comfortable! uwu!” I didn’t want to look like a boy, or even particularly androgynous, but then, “Enbies can look however they want! They’re just clothes, they don’t mean anything!” I didn’t “feel like a girl,” and that was the core requirement, according to many; everything else was just window dressing.

And then there were the others, who said dysphoria was the core requirement. The “tucute” version was a bit too woo-woo for me, even then, and the transmedicalist side seemed more grounded. I always remember a YouTube video where a trans man says something along the lines of, “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. If you don’t mind your body, don’t alter it.” And I did feel distress about my body. I did not refer to it as “dysphoria,” even in my own head — which I think is significant and may have made it easier to overcome. But it certainly could be described as dysphoria, and I was very aware of that.

If I could’ve snapped my fingers and had puberty blockers and surgery, I would have. I had no real intention of actually getting these things — the prospect of talking to my parents or doctors about it was daunting and humiliating. I did not want it enough to do the things necessary to make it happen, but I did want them. If physical transition had been easily accessible to me, I would have gone for it.

It was during this time that I started going by the androgynous nickname Mo, which I still use and like to this day.

I never really adopted a nonbinary identity. I didn’t want to be nonbinary (even then, I had some idea of how annoying it was) and so it was never part of how I conceptualized myself. I never came out to anyone. I was shy, and didn’t want attention. But I was dabbling with the idea that I might be nonbinary. I knew that if I ever was to try to explain this to someone, I would have to use the language of gender ideology, even though that wasn’t quite the language I used in my own mind.

Basis

My dysphoria was, first and foremostly, a reaction to puberty.

I did not want to go through puberty. My body up and changed on me without my consent, and it felt like a betrayal, like I was losing myself. I wanted a body more like my prepubescent body. I wanted a de-sexed body.

(To be fair, I should mention that I did not hit puberty unduly early. I got my period on my 13-and-a-halfth birthday. Regarding my development in regard to that of my peers, I was in the slower half. It was not premature in any objective sense.)

Beyond the physicality of it, there was also a mental component to my Peter Pan Syndrome. The teen years are a weird time for everyone, no longer a child and not an adult yet either. Real genders distinguish based on age: women vs girl, man vs boy. But nonbinary is ageless.

From a naturalist point of view, physical maturity — aka starting to actually look your sex — is the defining feature of becoming an adult. But the process of puberty is traumatic for most. If your body is done with puberty by the time you’re about 15, and yet your brain is not fully developed until you’re 25, it’s easy to see how that could feed into the idea that you’re “wrong in your body,” or that “your brain and body don’t match.” At 13 and 14 I felt too young for my body; at 17 and 18 I felt too old for the way society treated me.

There is also inherent alien or transhumanist quality to the concept of “nonbinary”, in that the ideal or sought-after state is not one which actually exists for human beings. While hermaphroditism, parthenogenesis, and other similarly exotic reproductive systems do exist, they do not exist in any mammals. In humans — and in all species even remotely similar to us — sex is exactly what you think it is: classic male-female. Thus, nonbinary contains an inherent desire to escape the bounds of humanity. I felt “other,” impossibly different from everyone else. I could well believe that “otherness” made me somehow not-really-human. And I wanted to enact this otherness onto my body.

Menstruation

My period started on my 13-and-a-halfth birthday, in July, the summer between 7th and 8th grade. In the year that followed, thought about lots of different ways to get rid of it. I read online about how to use birth control pills to stop your period. I read online about someone who was developing menstrual suppressant pills, which worked kind of like birth control pills did, but their explicit goal was to stop periods. I thought about surgically getting my reproductive system removed.

I looked into many different thinks, but ultimately they all required getting my hands on something, and didn’t yet have my own bank account so I couldn’t order stuff online. And so anorexia won out as the way to stop my period, because it was DIY.

Disordered Eating

When I was in 8th grade, I read an article about a pair of twin sisters, one of whom had serious anorexia in her teen years and was left waifish and infertile by it, in sharp contrast with her sister, who ate and developed normally. The second sister created a sort of control group, and served to highlight the effects of anorexia on her sister.

Because I have only had one period as a result of the anorexia, my fertility is damaged beyond repair … Ironically, I look at Lisa’s curvy figure and I think she looks beautiful. She has a proper bust while my dieting meant my breasts never developed properly.

“Twins at war”, 2009

Inspired by that story, I began a bout of anorexia, attempting to invoke those same effects on myself. Without hormone blockers, this seemed like a DIY way to dampen the effects of my hormones on my body.

I wanted to starve my period away, curb the development of my hips and breasts. The part that really interested me was that the woman in the article still had these effects — even years later, after having recovered from her anorexia. I thought if I could just stave myself for a few years now, I could have the effects I wanted for life. That seemed like a reasonable trade.

I never really took much issue with my breasts. I’m relatively small-tittied to this day, and I was even smaller back then. I definitely didn’t want them to get any bigger, and at this point I didn’t know how big they would get if left to their own devices. But I didn’t wish I was as a flat as a boy either. As long as I could curb my development and freeze things where they were, I was fine with that. I never tried binding.

My hips, however, I hated. This was severely exacerbated by the fact that — at this time in my life — I would sometimes crawl through the doggy door at my house, and my hips just barely fit. This consistent measuring of them against a fixed object for scale was probably the worst thing I could have done. I was hyper-aware of the fact that someday very soon I would not be able to fit through the door, and this loomed heavy and ominous in my future.

Back then, I knew relatively little about disordered eating. I had a single, very narrow idea of what disordered eating was about: It was something that stupid straight girls did because they bought into toxic societal beauty standards.

I looked up anorexia online. I read articles cautioning girls away from disordered eating by insisting that, “There’s nothing sexy about anorexia.” I thought, “Excellent — that’s exactly what I want then.”

I did not think starving myself would make me attractive, and I didn’t want to be attractive. Earth goddesses are usually depicted as voluptuous; they’re sensual; they’re fertile. “Real women have curves,” and I didn’t want to be a “real woman.” I wanted to be an angel or fairy — not unfeminine, but ethereal, alien, waifish, sexless.

I viewed my body as a trope, as a canvas for literary symbolism, rather than a flesh and blood thing to live in. (I am too much a writer, sometimes. This is a recurring motif throughout my life.)

I was aware that there was a small population of anorexic boys. I remember googling, trying to find out what motivated them psychologically. I wondered if my paradigm and motivations were more in line with theirs. This would’ve been circa 2013, and I found very little online about anorexic boys. What little I did find essentially said, “Boys face societal body image pressures too. They’re also trying to be fit and hot.”

At the time, I was unaware that disordered eating is extremely common among the trans population. Nowadays, I know that their patterns of disordered eating were the paradigm I was looking for. My disordered eating was completely in keeping with those patterns and thoughts. It’s about gaining control over a disobedient body, enforcing your will over it, perhaps even punishing it. The goal isn’t to be hot, but to be androgynous.

A couple years before this, my family had gotten our first dog. I was taught was that if a dog nips at a person, or steals food, you need to assert your dominance. The way to do this was to wrestle the dog to the ground, pin them on their back, and growl in their face. Then, after a minute, you can let them up, and they will be polite and docile now that they understand you’re in charge. I imagined my anorexia as a metaphorical equivalent; wresting my body to the ground and asserting my dominance over it. I hoped that — like with dogs — once I got the message across, it would not be necessary anymore, that I could let it up, and it would be well-behaved and chastened.

My view of disordered eating as “feminine” also played a role in which techniques I used. I treated my anorexia as an test of endurance, in contrast to the intricate, detail-focused anorexia I’ve heard other people describe. For example, I never counted calories, and I didn’t pay overmuch attention to which foods I did eat — I would just fast. I never ate lunch, and other meals might be small. Talking about calories seemed like a stupid straight girl thing, while enduring hunger seemed tough and strong. I could endure a famine and survive it. Calories felt capitalistic and artificial, while good old-fashioned hunger seemed naturalistic.

If I had known there were others who engaged in disordered eating like mine, I would very likely have gone full steam ahead. But I didn’t know. The only image I had of anorexia was stupid straight girls trying to be barbies. I was not that. In my self-conceptualization, I was aggressively not that — I was the antithesis of that. So why, then, was I engaging in the same behaviors as them? Ultimately, this really held me back and kept me from going too far with it.

I managed to starve my period away once. I was proud, I felt victorious — but it also frightened me. It started to feel too real. I’d been anticipating stomach pain, and I was prepared for that — I told myself I was strong enough to endure pain. But what I wasn’t expecting was the mental fog that comes with low blood sugar. Feeling like that constantly was starting to take its toll on me. I started to wonder if it was worth it to feel like that all month long in order to avoid my period, which was only a sometimes issue.

And so — between the mental fog and not wanting to act like a stupid straight girl — I decided to stop. In all, from beginning to end, the whole anorexia thing ran its course in something under a year.

Hormones

I was told by the trans internet that hormone blockers were completely harmless. I suspect the people telling me this genuinely believed it, but now that it’s coming out how dangerous hormone blockers actually are, this has become one of the most unsettling parts of this story. Hormone blockers are widely given to dysphoric teens, despite this being an off-label — aka untested — usage of the drug. This was something I might actually have been able to get my hands on, if I’d tried.

I wanted a hysterectomy, to be rid of periods — I already planned to adopt my kids, and had since I was like 7, because the idea of childbirth frightened me from a young age. I knew nothing of the risks associated with hysterectomies. For example: I had never heard of pelvic prolapse. To be fair, I wasn’t read up on the medical logistics of it in any manner. I think I thought a hysterectomy included removing the ovaries (oophorectomy) too? I don’t know if I was entirely aware that getting an oophorectomy would cause what is known as “surgical menopause.” I think I may have known, and liked the idea — I wanted hormone blockers, after all, and this was another way to get that same effect. I certainly wasn’t aware of the health risks associated with that, such as an increased risk of osteoporosis and dementia.

Bottom Dysphoria

Along with not wanting internal organs or a vaginal opening, I also didn’t want a vulva. I actually wanted that more, because at least my internal organs were out of sight, out of mind. Society’s general disgust with vulvas, combined with thinking I was asexual, created the conclusion that it was gross and useless. I wanted to be smooth like a Ken doll, with just a urethra.

Nowadays, the term for this would be “gender nullification surgery” although I don’t recall that being a term circa 2013/2014. I do, however, I remember reading on tumblr once that a nonbinary bottom surgery had been done on someone somewhere. (I don’t remember what that surgery actually entailed.) To my mind, the takeaway was that — while such procedures were uncommon, and find a doctor willing to perform one would be difficult — it did exist, and it was on the table, at least in theory.

I was fairly certain I would never get bottom surgery myself, because the idea of surgery frightened me in general, and the idea of surgeons seeing me naked was appalling. But I thought about it, fantasized about it.

I wondered how feasible it would be to cut off my labia minora myself using an x-acto knife. I wondered if I could stand the pain, if I would be able to follow through on it once I started. I imagined doing it in sections: cut a centimeter, let that heal, then do the next centimeter. Maybe that would make it easier to endure.

Risk Factors

Lisa Littman’s 2018 study, which coined the term ROGD (rapid onset gender dysphoria) describes common traits among teenagers who develop a transgender identity “out of the blue” after a period of increased internet usage. Anecdotal evidence from detransitioners backs this up: there seems to be a common mold for these kids, namely, high achieving, emotionally sensitive, socially awkward girls. I fit that mold to a T.

Gifted student

47.4% of Littman’s participants were “gifted” students. So was I; I was in the GATE program.

ADHD

I have ADHD, which 14.8% of Littman’s participants also have. Of suspected risk factors, ADHD is among the most frequently mentioned by detrans people. Specifically, it’s easy to see how the ability to hyperfocus (which is found both in ADHD and autism) would facilitate it.

…when you get really into a hobby, or really into researching something, for like two or three years or like a couple months, and then you switch to something else after. I’ve done that so much. With arts and crafts I can do like in a timeline. Like I was really into like knitting when I was a kid, and then I was into sewing, and then I was obsessed with origami for like two years, and then I was doing pin back buttons for like three years and photoshop at the same time, and then I was really into embroidery for like two years. I can literally track my obsessions as I go. And I wonder now, looking back, if there was just certain times in my life when my obsession was trans stuff.

Ben, Post Gender Funk, episode 3, 2020

ADHD is also under-diagnosed in girls, and I suspect this may be another factor. A documentable difference in how the brain handles neurotransmitters + that condition being associated with males… it’s easy to see how that might connect to the idea that an ADHD female has a “male brain.”

Around that same time I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD … I remember seeing an article about how ADHD was being used to discriminate against little boys who are just behaving the way normal, healthy little boys behave, because that’s the way their brains are. And I remember thinking, “Maybe I have a boy’s brain.”

Laura Reynolds, Benjamin Boyce interview, 2020

OCD

I suffered from OCD for a few years as a result of bullying in middle school, beginning slightly before my dysphoric window and ending slightly after my dysphoria subsided. 12.3% of Littman’s participants had OCD. Beyond general comorbidity, it has been theorized that OCD and dysphoria are linked in their obsessive character, and the quieting of anxiety and discomfort by strictly controlling yourself and your immediate environment.

Autism

Lastly, autism also seems to have some link (12.3% of Littman’s participants). Just last month, I was helping my dad organize some old stuff of his, and we came across a box of self-help books. Among them were a few books about Asperger’s (aka mild autism) in girls, and what parents can do to help. Seeing them, I asked my dad, “Did you think I had Asperger’s when I was in late middle school/early high school?” I knew, even without asking, that they would’ve been from that time period.

He said he and my mom considered the possibility for a while, consulted a professional at one point, and eventually ruled it out.

What I find really interesting about this story is that even though I don’t actually have autism, when I had dysphoria I was exhibiting autism-like behaviors anyways. I don’t really know what to make of this, but I think it’s worth noting in this account.

Gender

My dysphoria was mostly about sex, rather than gender, but it didn’t exist in a genderless vacuum.

I was able to recognize that the bits of gender I was most bothered by were the pieces that involved — or were somehow related to, or based on — heterosexuality. Sometimes I started to dip into “not like other girls” territory, but when I did, I conceptualized the “other girls” who I was dissimilar to as straight girls.

This was, of course, unfair and judgmental of me. More than anything, this idea of straight girls as a monolithic group is simply inaccurate. I was especially oblivious to how straight girls — more than anyone! — have problems with the way heterosexuality gets framed by gender.

But it did allow me a way to divorce from parts of women’s social role, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And I think that was valuable to me at the time.

Aftermath

I stayed off tumblr, and it ceased to be something I thought about much. I got on with the business of living. I slowly settled back into my body over the next few years. I didn’t like my body, but I didn’t think about it enough to have strong feelings like hate about it either.

I wore boy’s jeans and oversized shirts, which hid my body. I still thought I was asexual for many more years. I thought no one else would ever see my body but me, and so ultimately it didn’t matter very much. My body was just for me to live in; it didn’t need to be anything for anyone else. I didn’t think about how other people would perceive it, because they weren’t going to perceive it.

And then one morning when I was 18, I was getting dressed when I caught a glimpse of my naked body in the mirror and was blind-sighted by the thought, “Oh. I’m actually kind of beautiful.”

I think my dysphoria cast a shadow on my sexuality as well. I had to get to a point where I didn’t hate my female body before I could realize I didn’t hate other people’s female bodies either.

These days, my body and I are on animable terms.

I’m glad I didn’t make myself infertile, because nowadays, I’d like to have one of each: a biological child and an adopted child.

In many ways, I don’t think what I experienced was “classic dysphoria,” the sort that is more often found in butch women. That kind of dysphoria is often talked about as something more persistent, something that you can manage and learn to live with, but may last a lifetime. In contrast, mine was a relatively short-lived thing that happened as a direct response to puberty, and has since gone away entirely. Were I writing the DSM, I don’t think I would consider these two phenomena to be the same thing. But in the language of “dysphoria” they are the same, which is the point: dysphoria is a very loosely-defined and amorphous concept that does not always come from the same place, and is not always indicative of the same thing.

Misogyny is not the only cause of dysphoria. Mine was primarily rooted in the trauma of puberty, and understanding the world through narrative tropes. And it was still a dysfunction, and not something I should’ve made life-changing decisions on the basis of.

Re: Disordered Eating

While writing this account, I tried multiple times to find that article about the twin sisters which had such a large hand in inspiring my disordered eating when I was 14. At great length, I found it again. I then searched their names (Louise and Lisa Wrightson) and found a page on JustGiving.com from 2017, where a friend of Louise’s was raising money to donate to Beat, the UK’s eating disorder charity.

Over the years Louise suffered as the disease claimed her. She lived with a number of awful symptoms caused by the disease. I always tried to make light of it and would often take the piss out of her. … Louise died on her 36th birthday. She was so frail at the end. I know I was lucky to be able to see her and say goodbye and I’m so thankful I could spend time with her.

“Remembering Louise Wrightson” by Kathryn Common, 2017

This shakes me. This woman’s story was where I got the idea that I could be anorexic for a while, mess up my body in the ways I wanted, then go back to eating normally and be fine for the rest of my life.

But that wasn’t possible for her; it killed her.

As a teenager, I’d thought Louise was recovered by the time the first article was written. Looking back at the article now, I see that wasn’t exactly true. It said, “she is recovering but is still too unwell for work.” The article didn’t do anything wrong, or romanticize anorexia; I was just a really messed-up kid when I saw it. But looking back on it now, I’m reeling.