+- clovenhooves (https://clovenhooves.org)
+-- Forum: The Personal Is Political (https://clovenhooves.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=3)
+--- Forum: Gender Critical (https://clovenhooves.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=7)
+--- Thread: On gender dysphoria/euphoria (/showthread.php?tid=492)
On gender dysphoria/euphoria - YesYourNigel - Dec 28 2024
I like that feeling of karma when I see misogynistic transmedicalists fucks with their "muh gendersoul is real cuz I can feel it cause me dysphoria!" when they complain over the new hip genderqueer crowds that steamrolled them with their equally imaginary ideas of "gender euphoria". You no longer need any negative emotion at all to qualify as trans or to legitimise your gendersoul (what the hell does you feeling bad about yourself have to do with sex? By that logic, 90% of teen girls would be trans...oh wait 🤔), now all you need is to feel good if someone misgenders you.
The first thing I noticed about this is that I remember way back that it used to be normal in (liberal) feminist spaces to not really care about your sex. Most women would say that they wouldn't care if they woke up as a man, because men and women should be equal, and there shouldn't be anything THAT extremely different between them, save for genitals. The moment trans activism started gaining ground, though, this "test" started being used in earnest and, like some crappy online Hogwarts house test, your answer was taken as a genuine psychological reveal as to the nature of your gendersoul. As dumb as liberal feminism can be, at least it involves some kind of ideology, compared to purely emotional transgenderism which is basically "I jerked off to this once / I liked being called 'sir', I should look into surgeries and explore this deep nuanced possibly supernatural facet of my identity". All of a sudden, feminist spaces started muddying the waters. Women who said they didn't care about which sex they are started being accused of transphobia or told they might be nonbinary. Disclaimers started popping up that gendersouls are still valid even if one didn't really understand them (but surely they also have them, everyone must have them because trans people say so, and pushing back on that would cause them dysphoria, you monster). So this first order of business seemed to have been to medicalise these (especially female) feelings that react to the patriarchy and in the wider consciousness tend to be written off as just a part of the natural female experience / ladybrain / society, with little feminist explanation.
Gender dysphoria takes women's trauma and anxiety over their bodies and gives it a supernatural explanation over the far more obvious feminist explanation (much like how most of women's suffering gets written off by men using evopsych instead of the glaringly obvious "Hey maybe women would be more into this if men didn't spend every waking movement abusing and harassing them out of it?" - I swear one simple swoop of Occam's razor affirms 99% of feminism). Rejecting femininity in this era of YASS QUEEN feminism gets you labeled as suffering from internalised misogyny, and anyway beauty standards and femininity are marketed and more artificial than they've ever been. Gendersouls and trans ideology in general provide a convenient, non-politicised way of picking and choosing. It's not that you have a problem with femininity, or sexual degradation of women, it's just that this supernatural fantastical gendersoul of yours irrationally compels you towards one or the other. But anything anyone wants to do is o-kay, and equally feminist! It's much more scary to reject the one societally approved way of existing than to keep it as it is, while claiming that merely liking being called "boy" turns you into a beacon of genderfuckery. And who knows, you might even be allowed to play with your gender role more as a result of your new identity.
Women who live in a patriarchal society can react to it in two ways: they can try to play along with feminine standards and gain a superficial sense of approval and confidence (they still have massive insecurities over their appearance and not being good enough unless they imitate some fictional idea of an attractive woman) in which case being treated as a man will cause them distress and offence, or they can feel a sense of relief when they get a sense that these misogynistic expectations don't apply to them (which usually leads to NotLikeOtherGirls syndrome - misogyny is ok for other women who surely like it, but not for ME, because I'm special and more like a guy).
I think which one a woman falls onto is dependent on several factors, from how closely she understands these societal expectations in the first place, to how achievable she feels existing outside of femininity is for women. But the bottom line is that both of these feelings come from the exact same misogynistic source. These women are not a part of some natural division between girlbrained and boybrained women, they're just women reacting to the same societal pressures within the same patriarchal frameworks, except in different ways depending on their particular assumptions.
However, what the concept of "gender euphoria" changed is that it now medicalised not just hatred of one's body, but the sense of relief from not being treated in misogynistic ways. While all women hate their bodies to some degree as part of the patriarchy (whether they bend over backwards to embody beauty standards in order to escape their natural ugliness, or whether they run from these beauty standards and cover their bodies in order to not be sexualised in line with beauty standards), to most women, femininity is forced upon them and given as the only way to gain any sort of approval in society, even if said approval is a double-edged sword due to the Madonna-wh*re dychotomy. Because of this being the only carrot on a stick for women, and because there's a degree of disassociation from a large part of your upbringing if you forego it, it's extremely hard for women to reject what feels like objective, unavoidable ideas on their bodies.
The temporary, unhealthy relief that women feel from the "Your natural self is an ugly troll" brainwashing can now be packaged into a concept of gender euphoria, and women can be told this feeling comes from everything being right with the world, and their gendersoul responding to femininity in a positive way like it should. The primary purpose is to apply trans ideology and obsession with patriarchal gender roles onto women, but also to provide a biological explanation for liberal feminism's constant apologia for femininity, which has been pushed more and more in order to keep feminism appealing to men.
On the other hand, many women with the advent of the internet have experienced, if only for a brief moment, being assumed to be a man, and taken seriously for a change. Now, this can be used as evidence of a boysoul. You don't even need to go that extra step where you completely retreat and reject the entirety of your sexed body (which ofc would be very unfair towards poor men). You just need to have experienced a few instances where you recognised that hey, not experiencing misogyny feels pretty good, actually. And for men, they can just get an occasional hard-on from sissy porn or wearing pink panties. It doesn't even have to be their primary fetish anymore. ofc any actual consideration of women is completely irrelevant - women are an abstract sexy idea in men's head, so just because they're fixated on it doesn't have anything to do with real women's real life problems (hence why so many straight men feel 0 interest in actual female bodies and bodily functions and women's rights).
Gender roles are real. ofc they are real, we live in a patrairchy. ofc people feel a sense of ease when they go along with what society expects and demands of them, and get approval for all sides for doing it. Duh. Conservatives and trans activists both believe in gendersouls. The only measurable difference between the two is that Conservatives don't believe in magical sex changes. That's it. Gender critical feminism rejects the concept of gendersouls or brainsex in the first place as an explanation for gender roles that women are saddled with. You don't feel happy when you don makeup because your gendersoul lights up, or because you coincidentally and independently chose the same path in life that society's forced you onto. You feel happy because you're escaping the notion that you are lesser, that you shouldn't exist and that no-one cares about you if you don't at least get their attention by looking and being ever so "nice" to them. There are no ludicrously implausible explanations here.