Is There A Future for Dysphoric Trans Women?

For several years now, I have suffered periods of total hopelessness. I often lose weeks at a time to this feeling that my life can never get better. Hopelessness has become my default state of being; but, in those sublime few days in a given month where I can move through the world without being brought to tears, I am able to see a future where I am liberated.

The hopelessness does not come from nowhere. I am a trans person. What is a trans person, or transgender, person? Dictionary definitions point to transgender being a feeling:

“transgender : of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity differs from the sex the person was identified as having at birth

“gender identity : a person's internal sense of being male, female, some combination of male and female, or neither male nor female” (Merriam-Webster)

Perhaps transgender, then, must refer to a variety of feelings. A trans person could be someone who was born with a penis, but wishes to be rid of it; they could be someone who was born with a vagina, but only has interest in getting a mastectomy, and has no interest in acquiring a penis; they could be someone who doesn’t want to change their body at all, but wants very much to be able to dress as they please without harassment. This understanding of gender diverse people is fine if you are a cis academic who wants to sell papers about ‘gender freaks’, but for trans people, it does not seem to have served us very well over the past 20-30 years in our quest to fulfil our legal and medical needs.

In truth, trans is an invention of a world that views gender diverse people, with all their different wants and needs, as fundamentally the same. In social/mass media, this leads to intracommunity antagonisms, as different kinds of trans people fight to be understood. The so-called ‘trans community’ has weathered decades of ‘discourse’, from without and within, over discrimination, dysphoria, pronouns, healthcare, and representation (among other things), and now here we are, in the year 2026, where trans has reached its ideological apex: the third sex¹. That is all a trans person is now. We are the Others. We are the Not-men, Not-women; we are the Something Else.

What I find strange is that there is already a term which ought to function as trans does far better: ‘gender diverse people’. It casts a more suitably wide net for the ‘umbrella term’ conception that trans has always been. One wonders then, why trans was invented in the first place. I can only assume it came from good intentions; hindsight is 50/50, and I doubt anyone in the 1990s could have foreseen the problems we now face.

Our current moment is defined by intracommunity vitriol. The attitude of the 2015-26 LGBT scene has been highly concerned with validity, perhaps more-so than the material concerns of the various kinds of people that make up the LGBT population. Ten years on, trans people in particular don’t seem much closer to getting what we want.

What is it that we want? Well that depends on who you ask. Like I said, there are different kinds of trans people, with different wants and needs. The language and advocacy available to us over the past 10 years has been largely identity-based rather than needs-based. It has become difficult for all kinds of trans people to talk about themselves on the internet without inviting some kind of pushback from other trans people. Yet despite all the ‘discourse’, nothing really ever seems to get done. My life certainly hasn’t improved over the last ten years. It hasn’t even really changed; the scenery shifted, but I’m still stuck in the same rotten body, still unable to truly live.

It is my conviction that a society which accounts for the colourful variation of humanity is one structured around the total flourishing of each and every human being. People ought to be able to do whatever they wish with their bodies, in every sense of that phrasing – presentation, body modification, sexual relations, etc. – and only the abolition of gender, at the hands of the destruction of the commodity and of the concept of value itself, can create that perfect, beautiful world. What this essay hones in on, though, is the experience that I know intimately; of dysphoric transsexual² women: our pain, how it can be eased, and how society at large has so brutally left us all behind. That being said, I hope that every trans person who reads this can glean something from it – perhaps some sense of comfort, or of greater understanding between us – even if our experiences are not exactly the same.

I will begin by saying this: for me, gender dysphoria is a disability. It prevents me from living an ordinary life in more ways than most are willing to believe. It is the reason why I am homeless. I have extreme difficulty talking to strangers, I go through long periods of severe hopelessness, I am almost always passively suicidal, and I cannot fully take care of myself without assistance. I have no idea how I will ever manage to have a job while living with this condition. My entire body – not merely my genitals, but my limbs, my torso, my shoulders, my pelvis, my face – reads as a foreign object to me. I cannot recognise my own reflection. The performance of gross motor actions – standing up, walking, picking things up and moving them around – do not feel ‘real’, to the point where I will forget performing them; these are actions done not by me, but by my body, which is a thing separate from me. Nothing feels real to me at all anymore. The world outside of my imagination and my computer may as well not exist, no matter how much I try to engage with it.

I am living in a body horror flick. Standing up makes me feel incredibly uneasy, as my mind expects my eye level to only be around 160 centimetres off the ground. Sometimes, I cry when I stand up, and long instead to lie down forever, wrapped in sheets and blankets. Looking down at my arms, I wonder how they can be real; they seem far too long to be my own arms. I avoid my own reflection on instinct – if I see it, I know I’ll start to feel like dying is the only way I can escape this nightmare. Often, I feel ashamed for not being dead. Living feels like acceptance for what has happened to me.

From the ages of 8 to 13, I lived as a gender-nonconforming boy. I stopped getting regular hair cuts at the age of 7, and it wasn’t long after that that the world began to receive me as a girl, even if my caregivers didn’t understand me as such. Despite being at the time relentlessly bullied and ostracised by peers and adults alike, I look back on this period of my life as the only time I was ever able to feel happiness. It was a period that ended quickly, hopelessly, shamefully.

Somewhere between 2011 and 2012, I discovered the existence of trans women. I would read all about them – hormones, surgery, puberty blockers – with tears in my eyes. I knew that I wanted to transition, to escape my imminent and irreversible masculinisation, but out of shame and alexithymia I had no idea how to explain to my mother that this was what I wanted. I watched as my face morphed into something unrecognisable, and listened as the language of my bullies changed from ‘You look like a girl,’ to ‘You look like a freak.’ It wasn’t until quite a bit later that I built up the courage to put my feelings into words and, tragically, my worst fears came true; I was not accepted as a girl, I was labelled as confused, and I was scared back into the closet. I stopped growing taller a year later, meaning my pelvis would now never widen even if I took oestrogen. At the age of 16, I nevertheless began taking oestrogen in secret – though it was now far too late for me to ever achieve the body I had always hoped for. Almost ten years later now, I am still trapped in a body that does not feel like my own.

It’s difficult to make people who don’t experience dysphoria truly understand what it feels like, and how it atrophies one’s ability to live a normal life. This, perhaps, may not be helped by the discursive tone I ordinarily adopt for long-form writing. Below is from an earlier, more emotional draft of this essay:

“I am crying now as I type this, because this is a very harrowing predicament to be in. I want to feel real, embodied, actualised. I want to stand up and have my eye level be no higher than around 160 centimetres off the ground. I want to stand in front of the mirror and see the tomboyish little girl I used to be – a round face, a neatly brushed bob of thick brown hair, square-framed glasses, baggy trousers and a graphic tee, clutching my favourite stuffed toy. I am sobbing now. I want to go back. I cannot tell you how many hours I have spent imagining the ways that I could have saved myself from male puberty, from this unreal reality which I am now trapped in. Sometimes I lie for hours in the dark, eyes closed, imagining the life I could have had if I had said the right words and done the right things. It is only when I daydream like this that I am now able to feel something close to happiness.”

Women like me are often told that we simply have unrealistic expectations. We are told that lots of cis women are tall, lots of cis women have facial hair, lots of cis women have ugly faces, lots of cis women have wide shoulders³. We are told that we hate ourselves, that our pain is aberrant even among trans people, that it’s possible, through therapy, to ‘accept’ existing in a body that no longer feels real. This is, in no uncertain terms, hateful and dismissive rhetoric. It ignores the very real fact that many of us expected something else, could have had something else, and were violently, permanently denied that something else. Being forced through an incongruous puberty is such a violating experience that many dysphoric trans people, when reaching for something to compare it to, land on rape. I would go as far as to say, as someone who has been raped numerous times by men, that rape was the lesser of these two traumas. Rape did not leave me disabled; it did not leave me unable to exist; it did not leave me homeless; it did not permanently alter my skeleton in ways that distress me.

Frustratingly, many do not believe us when we describe our dysphoria. We are made out to be crazy, hysterical, making mountains out of molehills. Perhaps it is easier to believe that dysphoric people are crazy than it would be to acknowledge what is really happening. We are living in a humanitarian crisis, and almost nobody is talking about it. My mutilation was just a small part of that crisis; there are potentially millions of people, globally, living in bodies that make them want to die. I have known many like me over my 15 years of life inside the computer. We are all suffering in the same way; but, make no mistake – there is no real community to be had among us⁴. It is a rat race. We don’t want to be activists; we want to live quiet lives, ‘blending in’ as if we were cis women. As such, almost nobody is advocating for us and the things we need and want.

It seems that a quiet life as a cis-passing woman has been permanently locked out of my reach. So allow me to take one for the team here, and be the advocate nobody wants to be. I shall nail my list of demands to the church of the internet.

Demand number one: free endocrine care, available immediately at the point of request, to anyone of any age who asks for it. You would be forgiven for thinking that this demand already exists in public discourse; it does not. The existing ‘debate’ is instead around so-called ‘puberty blockers’ – not hormones, not holistic endocrine care. A trans girl on puberty blockers from the ages of, say, 11 to 16 is likely to grow abnormally tall, which (from my experience of talking to those who have undergone such treatment) leads to feelings of dysphoria. The excessive height in such trans women is due to growth plates fusing far later than they would in cis women – the epiphyseal plate fuses at around the age of 14, for example. Britain’s former ‘best practice’, then, is an unnecessarily cruel predicament to put a teenage trans girl in, but the cruelty is the point – puberty blockers were always a mere compromise to appease transphobes. Nowadays, though, the phobes aren’t even happy with the compromise.

My first demand is likely to be met one day. So long as gender exists, it is far easier for society to ensure that successive generations of transsexuals are able to blend in at a relatively low cost to the healthcare system. Putting a transsexual child on hormones at 12 is far cheaper and safer than having them undergo numerous surgical procedures in adulthood to try and replicate the body they would otherwise have from simply starting hormones early enough. Letting kids be themselves also, obviously, has better long-term psychological outcomes. Adult trans women tend to feel trapped in this strange state of non-adulthood; many age regress as a coping mechanism. I am typing this right now with an old stuffed toy held close to my chest. There is nothing necessarily ‘wrong’ with liking childish things, but it is cruel that we are often left frozen in time for the rest of our lives.

A question I often have when confronted with the ‘debate’ over puberty blockers is: what is to become of those of us who are left behind? It is all well and good if, in the year 2030, no trans girl ever has to go through male puberty ever again. But there would still be millions of trans women like me, left trapped in bodies that aren’t ours. Nobody on either side of The Debate ever seems to think of us. Will we be saved?

My second demand is thus: free surgery, without limits, for any woman who underwent male puberty. Facial feminisation, clavicle and scapula reduction, rib resectioning, breast augmentation, pelvis widening, fat transfer, height reduction – all must be made available to us for free, without limits, at the point of request. We must be allowed to quickly and easily take the steps necessary for us to replicate the bodies we would have had if we were allowed a female pubertal development. It is not enough to simply save the future generations; we must save also those who were already born, who were forced to undergo changes which cause distress and hopelessness and disability. Until such time, there can be no justice.

Sometimes, even all the surgical operations on the market are not enough to make the dysphoria go away; the extent of the changes wrought by an incongruous puberty is sometimes simply too great. Hence my third demand: the development of new procedures to alter any sex characteristic one could care to mention. Height, body shape, skull shape and size, genitals, voice, torso length, size of the hands and feet, length of the limbs. To liberate each and every person living with dysphoria today, the human body must be rendered totally malleable. Until such time, there can be no justice.

Those are my three demands. It is by no means an exhaustive list; dysphoric trans men and non-binary people may have their own demands. To many, my demands may seem radical. They may seem impossible. But, in truth, there is no need to upend the fabric of capitalism to meaningfully move towards the realisation of these demands. The world would keep on turning. Society would continue to function as normal. If anything, society would benefit from the transsexual population being able to reach its full potential. More art, more employment, more earning, more currency circulation – more accumulation of commodities. If anything, capitalism is bafflingly handicapping itself by dragging its feet on the issue of ‘are people who have gender dysphoria human?’

So what are we to do now? I would love to say that change is coming, and to offer a path to that change. But I’m blind, and powerless; I have nothing to offer beyond my pain. The destruction of capitalism, of gender, of value – this is all inevitable, eventually. It is great news for the sex-dysphoric people of the future, but it brings me no comfort. Because, in truth, what the title of this essay really asks is: ‘Is there a future for me?’

I don’t know. I don’t know if there is a future for me. I don’t know how to escape this nightmare. I don’t know how to bring back the body I always hoped for. But dying now would lock me out of those infinitesimally unlikely futures where I can have that body. It is a ridiculous thing to hope for; it is also the only thing I have left to hope for. For as long as I can keep myself alive, I will always demand the impossible.

Footnotes

1. What we see here is a possible progression in the ideology of gender, towards its eventual abolition. First, sex had to be invented; there were two sexes, with no possibility for movement between or away from them. Then, the transsexuals of the 20^th Century demonstrated that movement between the sexes was possible. Going into the 21^st Century, the ideology of medicine then lumped so-called transsexuals and transvestites into a third sex, and called it ‘transgender’, ‘trans’. This was, in truth, something between a compromise and a reification of the sex binary and its supposed immutability. It was ideology stabilising under the stress of real conditions which contradict it. The only way this antagonism can truly end is if we do away with ideology entirely. Now a quarter of the way through the current century, non-binary people who medically transition have begun to find ways to move away from the sex binary entirely, rather than merely move between them. How might ideology try to cope with this, I wonder.

2. I define transsexual as someone who modifies their sex characteristics in some way; hormones, surgery, etc. It is a descriptive term, not a value judgement. It has long been considered offensive (I can even remember a time where I felt as such), but there has in recent years been a gradual increase in people identifying with the word, both among binary and non-binary trans people. I view this as symptomatic of the trans population’s starvation of effective language to describe its various needs. It is an interesting linguistic development.

3. One cannot help but feel sorry for the one cis woman in the world who is simultaneously taller, broader, uglier, hairier, balder, and deeper-voiced than every dysphoric trans woman. I hope she doesn’t mind being compared to us like that all the damn time :^)

4.