I hate the current trand of claiming "gender dysphoria isn't real" when what they mean is "gender dysphoria is pathologized." Because there's pretty obviously a big fucking distinction between those two statements.
Dysphoria almost killed me. I had a gun in my hand ready to blow my brains out over it. And if it ever became clear that I wouldn't be able to get bottom surgery, I would have killed myself. Period. I was not going to live the rest of my life with a dick. My earliest memory is literally bottom dysphoria. I was 5 or 6 and I sat on my bedroom floor trying to push my dick up into my body cause I knew it wasn't supposed to be there. No amount of therapy could ever make that go away. Even if we lived in a society where transphobia didn't and had never existed, I would have that dysphoria.
Gender dysphoria is obviously very real and serious. And characterizing it as "not real" is how you get people like my former best friend who wouldn't stop trying to convince me to stop medically transitioning cause "it's just toxic beauty standards making uou hate your body."
Y'all absolutely fo need to fight against the pathologization of Gender Dysphoria. Because that is some evil shit that has killed countless trans people, especially trans women, over the last century by blocking them from being able to get access to HRT and surgery. Gender Dysphoria should not be diagnosed by any medical professional, because whether anyone has it or not should not be a metric in determining whether anyone "deserves" HRT or surgery. The fact that they want it and are asking for it should be the only requirement. All this should be over-the-counter.
But when you characterize that as "gender dysphoria isn't real", you create an environment that allows the kind of people and ideology to flourish that blocks trans people from access to HRT and surgery on the basis of "no one needs this."
