This thread is pretty excellent, and it's difficult to put across because a lot of people talk about dysphoria as feeling constrained in your assigned role or something whereas (like this thread and ppl responding to it), my primary experience was of identifying *with* women. https://twitter.com/shadipetosky/status/1288923652180676608

Like literally all I wanted to do growing up was to be just like my mum. I didn't want to be like my dad. From early. When my mum was trying to be a nurse I was reading books with her. When my mum was reading baby books and expecting babies I was imagining being a mum one day.

It was profoundly odd snapping out of that and realising that wasn't going to happen as I ended up learning more about biology. Somehow people telling me I was wrong for picking the wrong stuff out of the dressing up box at kindie didn't get it into my head that I wasn't a girl.

And it's not even just about wanting to do things like my mum did. It's NOT EVEN THAT. It's not the stereotypes of it. I can't even put together what that feeling is. We tell folks "I feel like I'm X/Y" as a way of trying to explain this weirdass subconscious variance we have.

Of course some trans people do not have this experience, and I'm not saying this is the one true core experience of being trans but it feels galling every time I see someone trying to put transition down to "would have rather been X but it doesn't bother me that much in the end".

Just the fact someone can say "I kinda fancied the idea of being the other gender but I learned to deal with it" makes it *ABUNDANTLY* clear to me you have not experienced the same thing I describe as dysphoria, but might more accurately be described as trans-sex identity.

I barely survived getting through childhood with the realisation that I wasn't going to develop the way I thought I did. Like pretty much straight after puberty onset that was nearly it for me.

I feel like @jk_rowling doing this is like if someone had had post-partum depression, and I (who have never and never will be pregnant, much less have PPD) said "You know, I've felt pretty down sometimes".

I still don't think most cis people could hack transition. I don't think you have it in you without going fucking insane trying to cope with the stress of it all. We only manage it because for most of us it's the only way we can manage at all.

I'm not a believer in neurosexist pink/blue brain theories in the slightest (nor do I believe in a gay gene) but I also don't believe our brains are complete blank slates either.

In this regard, I think historic and present day evidence is clear that people who are compelled to transition are a fundamental reality of our developmental processes as a species.

Trans girls in the ancient middle east were self-castrating with bits of flint for fucks sake.

You know the funny thing? My mum "wanted to be a boy" growing up. She was a tomboy, she still is kinda masc of centre for a straight woman, she's a chainsaw wielding, shed building, sea kayak fishing ultra competent person that I kinda ended up wanting to be in my weird way too.

I got into rugby because my mum was (and still is) extremely into rugby, like literally all my life I just wanted to be as cool as she was, and still kinda do, besides now being a grown up and appreciating that her values aren't my values.