Dysphoria Quotes

dysphoria had to wrap its hands around my neck and hold me down, baptism in drowning, before I faced the fact that living as a girl would kill me long before the Angels did.

When King Lear dies in Act V, do you know what Shakespeare has written? He's written "He dies." That's all, nothing more. No fanfare, no metaphor, no brilliant final words. The culmination of the most influential work of dramatic literature is "He dies." It takes Shakespeare, a genius, to come up with "He dies." And yet every time I read those two words, I find myself overwhelmed with dysphoria. And I know it's only natural to be sad, but not because of the words "He dies." but because of the life we saw prior to the words.

The more I stare at my body, the more I hate it. It's the same feelings I had before I realized I'm nonbinary. Things just aren't where they're supposed to be, and I feel like I'm larger and smaller than myself at the same time. Like nothing adds up.

Several studies indicate that nearly 70 percent of kids who experience childhood gender dysphoria—and are not affirmed or socially transitioned—eventually outgrow it.23

That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this condition clinical depression or involutional depression or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by many names — anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton's melancholia or Yevtuschenko's more authoritative psychotic depression — but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It. It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self's most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible. It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing. This anhedonic Inability To Identify is also an integral part of It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one. The authoritative term psychotic depression makes Kate Gompert feel especially lonely. Specifically the psychotic part. Think of it this way. Two people are screaming in pain. One of them is being tortured with electric current. The other is not. The screamer who's being tortured with electric current is not psychotic: her screams are circumstantially appropriate. The screaming person who's not being tortured, however, is psychotic, since the outside parties making the diagnoses can see no electrodes or measurable amperage. One of the least pleasant things about being psychotically depressed on a ward full of psychotically depressed patients is coming to see that none of them is really psychotic, that their screams are entirely appropriate to certain circumstances part of whose special charm is that they are undetectable by any outside party. Thus the loneliness: it's a closed circuit: the current is both applied and received from within.

They're expected to forget everything they knew about being anything other than what they're supposed to be.

The dysphorias - the bitter fruits of the narcissist's impossible demands of himself - are painful. Gradually the narcissist learns to avoid them by eschewing a structured narrative altogether… The narcissist pays a heavy price for accommodating his dysfunctional narratives: emptiness; existential aloneness .. meaninglessness. This fuels his envy and the resulting rage.

Looking down, she became aware of the water, which was covered with a film of calcinous hard-water particles of dirt and soap, and of the body that was sitting in it, somehow no longer quite her own. All at once she was afraid that she was dissolving, coming apart layer by layer like a piece of cardboard in a gutter puddle.

Those looking to know how it feels, to have a chance at life in a congruent body, free of dysphoria? Just listen to trans people and what we know of our own lives. We have been speaking this truth for a long time.

When King Lear dies in Act V, do you know what Shakespeare has written? He’s written “He dies.” That’s all, nothing more. No fanfare, no metaphor, no brilliant final words. The culmination of the most influential work of dramatic literature is “He dies.” It takes Shakespeare, a genius, to come up with “He dies.” And yet every time I read those two words, I find myself overwhelmed with dysphoria. And I know it’s only natural to be sad, but not because of the words “He dies,” but because of the life we saw prior to the words. I’ve lived all five of my acts, Mahoney, and I am not asking you to be happy that I must go. I’m only asking that you turn the page, continue reading… and let the next story begin. And if anyone asks what became of me, you relate my life in all its wonder, and end it with a simple and modest “He died.

It’s not possible to live twenty-four hours a day soaked in the immediate awareness of one’s sex. Gendered self-consciousness has, mercifully, a flickering nature.

Not that I hate my body. There are just parts of it that aren't what they should be.

A common effect of dysphoria is that it places a cap on your emotions and tricks you into confusing contentedness for happiness. It tells you that being numb and dissatisfied with everything is the normal way to be.

Gender is a psychosocial virtual entity without location in a person's body. It solely exists in, and is perpetuated by, the society in which the person lives.

Each trans and nonbinary person is like a unique and beautiful snowflake. Some people are more comfortable in their body and don’t need surgery or hormone therapy, and others do. No one way is right or wrong, and what you’re feeling is your gender dysphoria.

Dysphoria is that bitch who visits the family and wreaks havoc. Sometimes she plucks away, needling and poking, whispering doubts and lies and pulling at the threads of resolve. Sometimes she is in full-on assault mode, attacking the very core of belief, ego and confidence. Sometimes she lingers. Sometimes she disappears as rapidly as she appears, but not before she has darkened things, unsettled all and left a tumultuous mess.

hate crimes against transgender people is on the rise with an estimated 47% increase over the last decade.

I’m grateful this is what our kid got, gender dysphoria instead of cancer or diabetes or heart disease

Skydiving can be addictive and can lead to persistent dysphoria if engaged in repeatedly.

scientific data that does show that minor children with gender dysphoria grow out of it upward of 80–95 percent of the time if no gender-bending hormones are given to the child.24 Never

The act of consciously and purposefully paying attention to symptoms and their antecedents and consequences makes the symptoms more an objective target for thoughtful observation than an intolerable source of subjective anxiety, dysphoria, and frustration. In ACT, the act of accepting the symptoms as an expectable feature of a disorder or illness, has been shown to be associated with relief rather than increased distress (Hayes et al., 2006). From a traumatic stress perspective, any symptom can be reframed as an understandable, albeit unpleasant and difficult to cope with, reaction or survival skill (Ford, 2009b, 2009c). In this way, monitoring symptoms and their environmental or experiential/body state "triggers" can enhance client's willingness and ability to reflectively observe them without feeling overwhelmed, terrified, or powerless. This is not only beneficial for personal and life stabilization but is also essential to the successful processing of traumatic events and reactions that occur in the next phase of therapy (Ford & Russo, 2006).

Just because she saw that the vagaries of capitalism, patriarchy, gender norms, or consumerism contributed to facial dysphoria didn't mean she had developed immunity to them. In fact, a political consciousness honed on queer sensitivity simply made her feel guilty about not having managed to change her deeply ingrained beauty norms. Call her a fraud, a hypocrite, superficial, but politics and practice parted paths at her own body.

THE AFFECTIVE SHIFTS IN BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER, UNLIKE BIPOLAR II, OSCILLATE BETWEEN ANGER AND DYSPHORIA RATHER THAN FROM DEPRESSION TO ELATION AND TEND TO BE REACTIVE TO INTERPERSONAL CONTEXT RATHER THAN ENDOGENOUSLY DRIVEN.

In fact, they turned out to be unprecedented. In America and across the Western world, adolescents were reporting a sudden spike in gender dysphoria—the medical condition associated with the social designation “transgender.” Between 2016 and 2017 the number of gender surgeries for natal females in the U.S. quadrupled, with biological women suddenly accounting for—as we have seen—70 percent of all gender surgeries.1 In 2018, the UK reported a 4,400 percent rise over the previous decade in teenage girls seeking gender treatments.2 In Canada, Sweden, Finland, and the UK, clinicians and gender therapists began reporting a sudden and dramatic shift in the demographics of those presenting with gender dysphoria—from predominately preschool-aged boys to predominately adolescent girls.

you trying to take my life away from me?). I’d have to do my best to calmly reason away: “You can keep your life! You’re not like me. Someone would have told you if you were like me! You’d definitely know by now if you were like me. Even though I didn’t know I was like me until quite recently, and it came as quite a surprise. Oh, no—maybe you are like me. Maybe you would never have known that you were like me as long as I’d never told you, but now that I’ve told you you’ve started thinking about it, and once you start thinking about it you can’t stop, and now you are going to have to transition—my God, it is contagious! Get everyone else out of this coffee shop, for the love of Christ, if you want to maintain persistent gender continuity—it’s onsetting rapidly, this gender dysphoria, and I don’t know who it’s going to claim next!

I find envy far more politically and conceptually interesting than dysphoria because it is fundamentally relational, about yearning, desire, and becoming. Envy is an indicator what we want, of what might be possible, as much as it is an indicator of real, material forms of deprivation.

I always wanted to be a sad white girl. I wanted to be sad like Lana Del Rey. I wanted a sadness so universal, it'd move everyone to tears. A sadness everyone could related to. "I want a summertime, summertime sadness". My sadness is about domestic violence, homelessness, gender dysphoria, intergenerational trauma passed down from Salvdorean Civil War, etc, etc. My sadness is something to observe, consume, sympathize, but NOT EMPATHAZE WITH (not to mobilize for). Most people do not know how to interact with my sadness. My sadness is so multifaceted, it speaks twenty languages.

The pictures in this book are not of people suffering gender dysphoria but rather expressing gender euphoria. This book is about new possibilities and transcendence. The people in these pictures are truly revolutionary; they are the real winners of the battle of the sexes because they have stepped out of the ring.

Cisnormativity is a set of ideas, and the practices which reflect them, that assume 'sex' is binary (male or female), that 'gender' is necessarily and always the same as 'sex', and that people live in the gender they were assigned at birth. Moreover, it assumes that genders, bodies, and personal identities match each other.

People lose their jobs over this sort of thing. They lose their friends. Their families. They lose everything.

Trans-Masculine - a person (usually female to male) who may or may not be non-binary but leans towards the masculine side of the gender spectrum.

Sidi, I ache inside. I yearn to fly away, to feel free in the light, in the dark. I don't ever want to come back.

Drag intends to make a parody of what society believes to be the domain of either gender, in order to make us realise how tenuous and ridiculous such constructs are. The drag queen may have all the accessories and paraphernalia which society uses to determine femininity, but the result is not feminine at all. Drag is a creatively subversive performance, inviting the audience to question frameworks of gender.

Mr. Tongo tells Rosie, "We discuss lots of intimate things with our friends, but our genitals, and those of our children, are private. Many of my patients and clients-kids as well as their parents, people dealing with a whole range of conditions, not just this one-find they don't want to explain themselves every time they meet someone new. They don't want to be responsible for educating everyone they meet. They don't consider what's in their pants to be any of anyone else's business." (Chapter "Everyone Who?)

Of course people still feel gnawing anxiety, depression and despair. But these do not trigger religiousness, being increasingly dealt with by 24/7 distraction provided by the mass media, interpersonal communication and quick transportation; any dysphoria (mild depression or otherwise unpleasant feelings) is dealt with by mass medication with tranquillizers and emotionnumbing ‘antidepressants’, ‘antipsychotics’ or ‘mood stabilizers’ (these words are placed in ‘scare quotes’ because they are all marketing terms with negligible scientific or clinical rationale).

Biological, phenotypic, and chromosomal sex differences of 'male' and 'female' are considered as having a biological (organic) basis, in contrast to the role meanings afforded to these sexes in the form of 'masculine' and 'feminine' genders, which may be considered as social constructs.

Penn, in so many ways, we’re so lucky. In so many ways, I’m grateful this is what our kid got, gender dysphoria instead of cancer or diabetes or heart disease or any of the other shit kids get. The treatment for those isn’t necessarily clearer. The drugs are harsher and the prognosis scarier and the options life-and-death but never black-and-white, and my heart breaks every time for those kids and those parents. But those are more or less medical issues. This is a medical issue, but mostly it’s a cultural issue. It’s a social issue and an emotional issue and a family dynamic issue and a community issue. Maybe we need to medically intervene so Poppy doesn’t grow a beard. Or maybe the world needs to learn to love a person with a beard who goes by “she” and wears a skirt.

Interestingly, forced feminization fantasies are also symbolic representations of our actual life experiences. Because we fi nd the prospect of becoming women so shameful and humiliating, we really do have to be forced into it. We are forced by our unremitting gender dysphoria, by our powerful erotic desires, by our love and admiration for women’s bodies and our wishes to turn our bodies into facsimiles of them, and by our need to honor our strongly held cross-gender identities in order to give meaning and vitality to our lives. If we are prudent, we autogynephilic transsexuals undergo sex reassignment only if we feel we have no other viable alternative: We transition because we feel forced to do so. Forced feminization is, in a very real sense, the story of our lives.

Self-diagnosed adolescent trans boys – natal females – started to fill up GIDS’s waiting room with similar stories, haircuts, even names – ‘one after another after another’. They’d talk about their favourite trans YouTubers, many having adopted the same name, and how they aspired to be like them in the future. Given how complicated these young people appeared to be, could something else be going on that explained this, something other than them all being trans?

Gender identity is not about sex, partners and genitals. That would be ‘sexuality’. Instead, it is about comfort in one’s own gender and how they are treated in society as their preferred gender. It has no impact on who they are sexuality attracted to, and let’s face it, who would go through all of the struggles of being trans just for the sake of being hetero: mistreatment by society, discrimination, and expensive procedures/makeup/binders/body shapers and so on?

The sex ratio of those being referred had shifted dramatically too. The number of girls (known at that time at GIDS as ‘natal females’, now ‘birth-assigned females’) seeking help had equalled the number of boys for the first time in 2011. Previously, GIDS’s caseload had been nearly three-quarters male for those referred in childhood, or two-thirds overall. At first, this change was understood to be positive – a sort of balancing-out – and attributed to the fact that the girls were perhaps being better supported to seek help. But by 2015 it was clear that, in fact, something bigger was happening. There had been a complete reversal. Referrals for natal girls made up 65 percent of the total. In 2019/20 girls outnumbered boys by a ratio of six to one in some age groups, most markedly between the ages of 12 and 14 … Moreover, the majority were girls whose gender-related distress had begun after the onset of puberty, during adolescence. They didn’t have a history of childhood dysphoria.

Heather Looy, in offering some tentative considerations about the image of God in her discussion of intersexuality, offers that it is possible that the “genderfulness” of God [may have been] deliberately separated into female and male by God in the creation of humankind as a way of structuring into creation a basic need for us to be in relationship, so that it is in community, not individually, that we most fully reflect God’s image and are most fully equipped for the tasks to which we are called.31

It seemed evident to me that this client was not genuinely androphilic: He was clearly an autogynephilic man whose most intense source of erotic arousal involved the most common type of behavioral autogynephilia, autogynephilic interpersonal fantasy involving a male partner. But what was evident to me was not at all evident to this client, even though he was probably more intelligent than 99.9% of the population and had read more about autogynephilia than most psychologists and psychiatrists who specialize in the treatment of gender dysphoria. The most intense and rewarding sexual experiences of this man’s life had involved sex with male partners. How could he not wonder whether his real sexual attraction was toward men? His uncertainty about an issue that seemed so straightforward to me was a reminder of how profoundly confusing this type of behavioral autogynephilia can be, even to highly intelligent, well-informed people. Eventually, this client recognized that he was not genuinely androphilic, but this realization occurred only gradually.

When I was pushed to the brink of loneliness and gender agony as a third grader, when I didn’t know how to communicate with the adults in my life about what was going on, I channeled my anger at my own body, my own existence. When the world made who I was feel impossible, I began to see my own body as an impossibility. For years of my life, I told myself this was normal. That kids just thought about killing themselves sometimes. That every third grader had experienced that. In order to move on with my life, I had to normalize it.

Clinicians like Anna Hutchinson and Melissa Midgen have posited that ‘there are multiple, interweaving factors bearing down on girls and young women’ that help explain why so many are experiencing gender-related distress. They say they have witnessed a ‘toxic collision of factors: a world telling these children they are “wrong”; they are not doing girlhood (or boyhood) correctly’, girls struggling with their emerging sexuality, and girls who ‘struggle in puberty because it is uncomfortable, weird and unpredictable (particularly heightened if they happen to be on the autistic spectrum)’.

Esas cajas que contienen mi biblioteca constituyen mi biografía. Hay muchas maneras de narrar una vida. Es posible decir, como suele hacerse, la fecha de nacimiento, la nacionalidad, el estado civil, la profesión..., pero, en muchos casos, sería más pertinente hacer una lista de libros [...]. Una biblioteca es una biografía escrita con las palabras de otros, hecha de la acumulación y el orden de los diferentes libros que alguien ha leído durante su vida, un puzle textual que permite reconstruir la vida del lectore. Además, y aunque eso pueda resultar paradójico o pueda enfadar a aquellos que se dedican profesionalmente a la escritura, al mismo tiempo que alegrar a los libreros, para constituir una biblioteca como biografía, a los libros leídos habría que añadir los libros que poseemos sin haberlos leído, aquellos que reposan en las estanterías o esperan sobre las mesas sin haber sido nunca abiertos y recorridos con la mirada, ni total ni parcialmente. En una biografía, los libros no leídos son un indicador de anhelos frustrados, deseos pasajeros, amistades rotas, vocaciones no realizadas, depresiones secretas que se disimulan bajo la apariencia de la sobrecarga de trabajo o la falta de tiempo, son, a veces, máscaras que le false lectore lleva para emitir señales literarias, buscando suscitar la simpatía o la complicidad de otres lectores. Otras veces, como en una página de Instagram, solo cuenta la portada, el nombre del autor o incluso el título. Otras, los libros todavía no leídos son una reserva de futuro, trozos de tiempo contenido, indican una dirección que la vida podría tomar en cualquier momento. Hecha de ese cúmulo de palabras leídas, recordadas, olvidadas y no leídas, una biblioteca es una prótesis textual del lectore, un cuerpo de ficción externalizado y público.

Kaffman (2009) described childhood victimization as a "silent epidemic", and Finkelhor, Turner, Ormrod, and Hamby (2010) reported that children are the most traumatized class of humans around the globe. The findings of these researchers are at odds with the view that children have protected status in most families, societies, and cultures. Instead, Finkelhor reports that children are prime targets and highly vulnerable, due principally to their small size, their physical and emotional immaturity with its associated lack of control, power and resources; and their related dependency on caregivers. They are subjected to many forms of exploitation on an ongoing basis, imposed on them by individuals with greater power, strength, knowledge, and resources, many of whom are, paradoxically and tragically, responsible for their care and welfare. These traumas are interpersonal in nature and involve personal transgression, violation and exploitation of the child by those who rely on the child's lesser physical abilities, innocence, and immaturity to intimidate, bully, confuse, blackmail, exploit, or otherwise coerce. In the worst-case scenario, a parent or other significant caregiver directly and repeatedly abuses a child or does not respond to or protect a child or other vulnerable individual who is being abused and mistreated and isolates the child from others through threats or with direct violence. Consequently, such an abusive, nonprotective, or malevolently exploitative circumstance (Chefetz has coined the term "attack-ment" to describe these dynamics) has a profound impact on victim's ability to trust others. It also affects the victim's identity and self-concept, usually in negative ways that include self-hatred, low self-worth, and lack of self-confidence. As a result, both relationships, and the individual's sense of self and internal states (feelings, thoughts, and perceptions) can become sources of fear, despair, rage, or other extreme dysphoria or numbed and dissociated reactions. This state of alienation from self and others is further exacerbated when the occurrence of abuse or other victimization involves betrayal and is repeated and becomes chronic, in the process leading the victim to remain in a state of either hyperarousal/anticipation/hypervigilance or hypoarousal/numbing (or to alternate between these two states) and to develop strong protective mechanisms, such as dissociation, in order to endure recurrences. When these additional victimizations recur, they unfortunately tend to escalate in severity and intrusiveness over time, causing additional traumatization (Duckworth & Follette, 2011). In many cases of child maltreatment, emotional or psychological coercion and the use of the adult's authority and dominant power rather than physical force or violence is the fulcrum and weapon used against the child; however, force and violence are common in some settings and in some forms of abuse (sometimes in conjunction with extreme isolation and drugging of the child), as they are used to further control or terrorize the victim into submission. The use of force and violence is more commonplace and prevalent in some families, communities, religions, cultural/ethnic groups, and societies based on the views and values about adult prerogatives with children that are espoused. They may also be based on the sociopathy of the perpetrators.

The trouble is that gender dysphoria is not something you can see so Mom and Dad thought they had a son. They’d spent ten years thinking they had a son before my continued insistence that I was a girl wore through Mom’s defenses and she realized what I was trying to tell her.

affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days) When most people feel bad, they can take steps to feel better.

Gender Dysphoria (GD) in high altitude astronomy workers was occurring as low as 2,423m (7,949ft).

I became aware during my time in high altitude astronomy that some workers would develop Gender Dysphoria (GD).

The dirty secrets of high altitude astronomy are unnaturally high solar radiation levels, Faraday cage sickness, man-made electromagnetic exposures, breathing industrial gas, oxygen starvation, organ damage, gastrointestinal problems, malnutrition, altered hormones, Gender Dysphoria (GD), shift work disorder, mental illness and occupational diseases.

Hello high altitude astronomy, goodbye gender.

I was aware of approximately 50 high altitude workers histories during my time in astronomy. For 3 of those workers to be displaying Gender Dysphoria (GD) puts the rate at 6%. The rate is probably higher, as I suspect that some workers were hiding it.

I have the rate of Gender Dysphoria (GD) estimated at 6% of high altitude workers that I know disclosed the condition. I suspect the rate is higher due to some workers not disclosing it and the actual rate may be approximately 12%.

It has been estimated that roughly 80 per cent of children diagnosed with what is now called gender dysphoria will find that this problem resolves itself during puberty. That is, they will come to feel at ease with the biological sex they were identified as being at birth. A majority of these children will grow up to become gay or lesbian as adults.

Rather than select one lens to look at gender dysphoria, we can look through all three, identify the strengths of each framework and apply it to how we approach the topic and the person who is navigating this terrain. What we have then is what I refer to as an integrated framework that draws on the best of each existing framework.

If you've never experienced a sense of dysphoria with your own body, all I can say is, Lucky you. But just because you have not experienced this yourself does not mean it is not real in the hearts of others.

For academic psychologists like Dr. Bailey, the entire issue of gender dysphoria ought to be a matter of evidence. Rigorous empirical study should guide diagnosis, understanding, and treatment. Instead, today, the language swirling around the transgender debates has tended to make such science all but impossible.

In fact, there are no good long-term studies indicating that either gender dysphoria or suicidality diminishes after medical transition.

The trans sites ridicule “cis” people and depict gender dysphoria as a valorous condition—and those without it as ignorant or benighted. It reminded her of the culture

We can be fully sympathetic to the complicated (and mysterious) experience of those who struggle with gender dysphoria, without buying into the new gender ideology that has been built around it.

Ganges, the Carrier of Corpses Don’t worry, be happy, in one voice speak the corpses O King, in your Ram-Rajya, we see bodies flow in the Ganges O King, the woods are ashes, No spots remain at crematoria, O King, there are no carers, Nor any pall-bearers, No mourners left And we are bereft With our wordless dirges of dysphoria Libitina enters every home where she dances and then prances, O King, in your Ram-Rajya, our bodies flow in the Ganges O King, the melting chimney quivers, the virus has us shaken O King, our bangles shatter, our heaving chest lies broken The city burns as he fiddles, Billa-Ranga thrust their lances, O King, in your Ram-Rajya, I see bodies flow in the Ganges O King, your attire sparkles as you shine and glow and blaze O King, this entire city has at last seen your real face Show your guts, no ifs and buts, Come out and shout and say it loud, “The naked King is lame and weak” Show me you are no longer meek, Flames rise high and reach the sky, the furious city rages; O King, in your Ram-Rajya, do you see bodies flow in the Ganges?.

It had never really crossed my mind I guess to think about doing self portraits. They've always felt a little narcissistic to me and I'm not exactly the guy who wants to, or is even able to, stare at myself all day. I never take selifes and I barely like glancing at myself in mirrors. Dysphoria has played a huge part in that. It's what Dr. Rodriquez first called the feeling I have when I see myself and I know I don't look the way I'm supposed to. The discomfort I used to have in seeing my hair long and a chest that wasn't flat. I've been lucky enough to see most of the changes I want to see, but I'm still the shortest guy of all my classmates and sometimes I can feel strangers' stares as they watch me, questioning my gender. "Self-portraits are empowering," Jill says. "They force you to see yourself in a way that's different than just looking in a mirror or snapping a picture on your phone. Painting a self-portrait makes you recognize and accept yourself, both on the outside and within. Your beauty, your intricacies, even your flaws. It isn't easy by any means," she tells me then shrugs. "But anything that reveals you, the real you, isn't easy.

Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance. You are told, “Things are so much better,” while you think, Things are the same. You are told, “Asian Americans are so successful,” while you feel like a failure. This optimism sets up false expectations that increase these feelings of dysphoria.

It's the strangling feeling, like you've been buried alive and are struggling to breathe, like you don't exist. That the most important part of you is invisible and, thus, unreal. If people don't see me as a boy, then they don't see me at all.

We are poison women, Diane, because our bodies do all turn what enters them into poison, and we make poison and spread poison, because we are sadness itself. There is no way for us not to be that.

These crises (in addition to trauma endured during the war) led to identity issues, anger, depression, anxiety, physical illness, sleep and dream disturbance, neurological disorders, post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), addictive behaviors, eating disorders, attachment issues in personal and familial relationships, developmental delay, phobias, aggression, fear, gender dysphoria, self-harm, learning difficulties and disabilities, psychosomatic disorders, psychosis, and resentment for everything that they endured.

I like my body. It's my body. There's nothing wrong with it. And, yet...

...how much easier would it be to walk through the world without armor? How much lighter might I feel, if I didn't feel the need to put on some barrier all the time, some protective layer between me and everyone else? Not because I hate my body, but because I don't want to deal with anyone else's feelings about it. Maybe it'd be nice.

And I don't need to keep hiding myself, either.

First, we autogynephilic transsexuals often observe that autogynephilia seems to exert its motive force indirectly, by giving rise to our strongly held, highly valued cross-gender identities. Second, our lives often do feel as though they lack vitality and purpose if we fail to express our cross-gender identities. Finally, we often pay a heavy price for expressing our cross-gender identities, because we are not naturally feminine and because the female personas we create sometimes appear unusual or inauthentic—to ourselves as well as to others.

The neuroscientist George Koob calls this phenomenon “dysphoria driven relapse,” wherein a return to using is driven not by the search for pleasure but by the desire to alleviate physical and psychological suffering of protracted withdrawal. Here’s the good news. If we wait long enough, our brains (usually) readapt to the absence of the drug and we reestablish our baseline homeostasis: a level balance. Once our balance is level, we are again able to take pleasure in everyday, simple rewards. Going for a walk. Watching the sun rise. Enjoying a meal with friends.

Gender issues are fundamentally a developmental problem that has its roots in pollution. It is seen constantly near polluted rivers and in animals and aquatic life that use the water.

My ex was super confused and really upset when she started to change gender!

My ex now lives with a woman!

But they all believe gender dysphoria is, first and foremost, a psychopathology—a mental disorder to treat, not primarily an identity to celebrate. They all agree that the current epidemic of gender dysphoria among adolescent girls is atypical (some deny it meets the requirements for “gender dysphoria” at all). And they believe that “affirmative therapy” is either a terrible dereliction of duty or a political agenda disguised as help.

The gay pride celebration is part of the USA culture.

El apartamento está totalmente vacío. Nunca me gustan tanto los espacios como cuando están desnudos. Solo antes de que lleguen las convenciones y los muebles es posible tener un cuerpo a cuerpo con la arquitectura. Los muebles son dispositivos de captura que codifican el cuerpo en el espacio y determinan su movimiento, proponiendo un plan de acción en el tiempo: la cama, la mesa, el sofá, la silla del despacho... introducen disciplinas y usos específicos del cuerpo. Amueblar un apartamento es predecir una vida.

There are some really messed up people out there on the dating scene.

You are bisexual? I am bye-bye!

My ex never told me about her gender confusion until after we broke up, I was mystified as to why the relationship was failing!

For many gays, it is not such a rosy rainbow.

It's hard to explain gender dysphoria to people who don't experience it. It's an awful voice in the back of your head, you assume everyone hears it, but they don't.

Biology creates males and females. Pollution creates gender issues in them.

You can never tell who is gay if they are ‘in the closet’.

People have been changing gender throughout history, just not at the very high levels we see today.

People have been changing gender throughout history and it has peaked in this generation of ‘modern’ humans.

How is your high altitude induced Gender Dysphoria (GD) working out for you?

If you are vulnerable to gender issues, working or living at high altitudes may bring on Gender Dysphoria (GD).

We usually think of disorder as a word reserved for more extreme conditions or experiences, such as significant depression or anxiety that keeps us from going to work or being present to our kids. We think of disorder perhaps in medical conditions, such as cancer or heart disease. But all of it is disordered. Even the healthiest of us is still living in a fallen world as a fallen person.

I suspect that if the long term summit workers of the Mauna Kea Observatories (MKO) were studied, they would find elevated levels of mental and physical illness, gender dysphoria, disease and premature death that comes from keeping them in an abnormal state of mal-acclimatization.

rejection-sensitive dysphoria,” or RSD, which describes a tendency on the part of people who have ADHD to overreact precipitously and disastrously to even the slightest perceived put-down, dis, or vaguely negative remark. They can spiral down to the depths in the blink of an eye and become inconsolable.

When Stonewall reframes gender dysphoria as an identity badge, it absolves schools of the responsibility to offer individualised support to each child and replaces it with a blanket politicised approach. The child is presented as a member of a political rights group, rather than as a child who may be experiencing distress and confusion and who is in need of careful and thoughtful support.

Nuestra alma inhumana e inmensa, geológica y cósmica, recorre y satura el mundo, sin que logremos darnos cuenta de ello.

There's far too much focus on dysphoria, on the pain and trauma of the trans experience, and it's time to change that narrative. We should not have to probe that we are lacking joy in our gender to get the gender-affirming care that we need. We deserve care, period.

Was it possible no one had asked? Psychotic symptoms such as auditory or visual hallucinations always warrant further questions. An obvious one: What did the voices say? Was Zach hearing voices telling him he’s a girl? These were questions that demanded attention from his clinicians prior to affirming a new identity. Maybe Zach’s gender dysphoria was related to his disordered thinking and hallucinations. Perhaps instead of lip gloss he needed Risperdal (anti-psychotic medication).

Imaginar es ya actuar: reclamar la imaginación como fuerza de transformación política es ya empezar a mutar.

Though ADHD is not believed by professionals to affect emotional processing and social skills development directly, one prominent experience among ADHDers is rejection-sensitive dysphoria, feeling intense panic and distress when receiving negative (or even neutral) social feedback from other people. Because ADHDers find rejection so terrifying and painful, their social behavior can be just as restrained and people-pleasing as that of masked Autistics

If the rise in gender dysphoria is due to social acceptance, where are the hordes of eager, newly identified trans, nonbinary, gender-fluid adults in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies? Why do we see only teens and young adults coming out with their friends after binging on social media?