Hard to bear
My gender is nonbinary. That means that I don't identify within the socially defined constructs of masculinity and femininity. I also use the word transgender to describe myself, because as per the definition, I identify as a gender that is different from the one I was assigned at birth. Some people say that in order to be trans, I need to experience dysphoria. This post is a catalog of my dysphoria.
Most of the time, when people discuss gender dysphoria, they are talking about body dysphoria. Essentially, this is the idea that the person in question feels as though their body is wrong; it's not a match for their gender. I have trans friends whose body dysphoria makes them cry. Mine doesn't. In fact, I don't have a lot of body dysphoria, and I don't want to transition physically. I could take testosterone and have my breasts removed, but I currently experience body dysphoria less than 30% of the time (as opposed to social dysphoria which I experience close to 90% of the time) and if I were to transition I don't think it would change the amount of body dysphoria I experience -- that is to say, I would spend about as much time missing my breasts as I spend now disliking them.
The main kind of dysphoria that I experience is one that I don't know what to call. Simply put, I don't want to have a name. I use Aurora because it's the name my parents gave me, and I use a couple of other more gender-neutral names with friend groups of varying sizes, but none of them feel like me all the time. I dislike the connotations that names have and the assumptions that people make based on the name(s) that I use.
Often this dysphoria goes hand in hand with some of the symptoms of my mental illnesses. For example, my fairly frequent feeling of intellectually knowing but not viscerally knowing who someone is talking to when they say my name is usually part dysphoria, part dissociation. (Dissociation is when my brain disconnects from my physical self; I'm still aware of everything I'm doing and saying, it just feels like it's happening to someone else.) Very occasionally, I'll feel physically ill when I see my name written down -- this happens when I look too closely at my driver's license, where I see a big F under my name designating what genitals I have.
I don't have coping mechanisms for this. I don't know very many other trans people who experience this. It's not something that the trans community talks about as being normal. Would I experience this kind of dysphoria if I were not also mentally ill and dissociating a lot of the time? I don't know. Does part of my desire not to have a name stem from my unreasonable need to be completely independent and unique? Probably. My brain hurts.
I also experience social dysphoria. This is related to the way I present myself. Because I am AFAB (assigned female at birth) and visibly curvy, I can't wear a skirt and be androgynous at the same time. Even when I wear pants, people read me as a woman. As I said above, physical transition is not something I want; my solution to my social dysphoria is for people to stop gendering me without my consent. This isn't particularly viable at the moment, as a lot of the world has yet to catch up with recent shifts in how we think about gender.
One way I combat my social dysphoria is by asking people to refer to me using the singular they pronoun. She/her are not inherently feminine pronouns, but it seems to be easier for most people to see me as not a woman when they're not using the same pronouns for me that they use for most women and many feminine-aligned people.
As evident in much of what I've written, there aren't clear-cut solutions for kinds of dysphoria that aren't body dysphoria, so I don't know how to combat those, but at least I know what I experience and can categorize it, and that's more than I could do last week.