A lot of people, mostly cisgender folks, think that Gender Dysphoria is a “disorder” or an “illness”, something that should not happen and needs to be fixed or cured immediately in the person. They believe that those who experience it are failing to live according to the gender identity that is assigned to them and that is their problem.
However, the word “dysphoria” does not actually mean “disorder” but rather “uneasiness” and “dissatisfaction”. Even in the DSM-5, Gender Dysphoria is included as a phenomenon that causes distress (which might be more or less stressful, varying from person to person) with concerns about how a person’s gender identity may intersect with other conditions like depression, anxiety, eating disorders that might coexist, but are not inherently caused by the former.
In simple words, Gender Dysphoria is not some psychological illness or disorder that a lot of people think it is. What more they assume wrong is that they just try to look for a cure after assuming that it is an illness without trying to find out what causes it – people’s behaviour towards the person, social attitude towards gender identity and expression, and lack of affirmative action to protect the rights and well-being of gender-diverse people.
Gender dysphoria is caused by the stress, pressure and suffocation of being expected, or I dare say, forced, to follow certain gender roles that do not align with the person’s idea of their own gender identity. It is more of a response to the failure of their fellow human beings’ attempts to put them and others in neat little boxes of the gender binary for the sake of oversimplifying our own nature, at the cost of ignoring how complex we truly are.
The unrealistic expectations of the rigid gender binary that humans have made not only affect trans and other genderqueer folks, but also the cis people themselves. From young boys to grown men, the pressure of being “masculine enough” and the fear and embarrassment for not being able to meet those expectations can make them feel dysphoric. The same goes for those who have been assigned female at birth and allow it to dictate their gender identity. Thus, the presence or absence of gender dysphoria is not the difference between being cis and trans.
I have read in my class 12 psychology book that pain is not our enemy, but our friend, because it indicates that there is something wrong with our body that needs our attention. Otherwise, we could be bleeding to death without even being aware of it. So now, if I compare gender dysphoria with pain, both of which aren’t very pleasurable experiences, we can not blame the person who is going through the dysphoria for experiencing it just like how we don’t blame someone for getting hurt. What causes the dysphoria is the systemic bias for the gender binary.
To address Gender Dysphoria, the solution is to build a free-er world that is more accepting and does not force stereotypical gender roles upon us from as early as our birth, and just letting us to explore and love who we truly are and do whatever that gives us gender euphoria and makes us feel true to ourselves.
