trans person explains dysphoria in 9 levels of difficulty (beginner to expert) (MUST WATCH)
LEVEL 1: Only trans people can get dysphoria! Dysphoria is when you feel bad about your body while being trans! Cis people only say they have dysphoria because they wanna be us sooo bad.
LEVEL 2: No, if a cis person underwent the experience of feeling hormonal mismatch, and was legally prevented from doing anything about it, they would feel dysphoria as well. Saying it's a trans-specific emotion is a form of pathologization that obscures the role of the state in causing dysphoria.
LEVEL 3: But if a cis person felt dysphoria, what excludes them from being trans? In your fear to prevent dysphoria from being pathologized, you have enshrined transness as an ontological state.
LEVEL 4: No, a trans person claiming dysphoria and a cis person claiming dysphoria have intensely different pragmatics. A trans person is relating to their transness, and to their status as marginalized by their state and community; a cis person is relating only to their own feelings.
LEVEL 5: Foolish it is, to believe that the boots that crush us crush only us. Again, once we recognize that there is no particular ontological or neurological state that entails transness or cisness, we must realize that how we are punished is also a spectrum that includes those deemed cis. It does not diminish our pain to generalize our suffering to include all those perceived aberrant.
LEVEL 6: Dysphoria is a pathological term. It is a strange rhizome of medical-speak, trans intracommunication, and our interface with cis people; but ultimately like all legally laden words it will change with the state and its whims. The term must be obliterated, and in its wake the sentence "Cis people can get dysphoria" must be vacuously true.
LEVEL 7: In order to use the word "dysphoria" justly, in order to even conceive of a world where a cis person might make good use of this interface, we must first slay meaning, the state, and all its heads.
LEVEL 8: obliterate. obliterate. obliterate. obliterate. obliterate. obliterate. obl
LEVEL 9: Praise the machine of the universe, for the All-Tide has come! It crushes buildings as easily as limbs, statues as easily as their sculptors. My body yearns to be swept in it, to be obliterated; my body yearns to join the Locus Of All Things, to be free of its heavy name, and it tires of achieving enlightenment in its lifetime, with so much time wasted to sleep and sickness. I yearn to shout: "Crush me, O Storm!", for I trust its wrath and its might. But I cannot shout this, for even this, the indiscriminate smattering of all atoms, rendered free from their objects and into dust, is not enlightenment. So instead I shout: "O Storm let me meditate in your eye! Let me see the whirlwinds about me, suspended inside you, and let the beauty of objects-become-rubble inspire me to become a poet and prophet!" And even still my organs ache to be free of tissue specialization, to be free of their names. This, too, is dysphoria, homotopic to all others.