Transexuals

[Alex K]

Like the kind of language that you are supposed to use, how you are supposed to interact with people, body language, what people expect you to value, what people expect you to be capable of and what they think you'll be crap at regardless of what you can actually do. You don't realise how much you have been conditioned by society because it is consistent with your physical gender and your own values.

Those are basically the things my physicist wife complains about regularly. Ever since she's a mother, a whole new set of expectations and stereotypes on top of the other ones came into play...

These things aren't so obvious if you're not trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. We live in a society with strict gender codes. I like to refer to Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion here (My fair Lady). They educate the heroine to act and think like an upper class lady but they never treat her as if she is so her transition is never complete.

It's harmful the same way that all forms of prejudice are, because people treat others as a stereotype rather than who they actually are. But the cause is your own body rather than necessarily because of other people's prejudice.

That's not to say that it's all about how people think of you.

If gender based dysphoria were mainly caused by societal expectations, that would suck even more.

Most men would enjoy being more muscular and most women prefer having a curvy figure. And no one would like having a massive growth stuck on their forehead regardless of all the social problems it would incur.

If I were transformed into a woman overnight, I would of course like to be somewhat attractive, and if I weren't that might distress me more so than as a man precisely because of expectations from society.