Transexuals

[I_am_not_mafia]

The odd thing is - and I don't mean that in any way representative for anyone else's experience - that while I do feel perfectly comfortable and at home with my current gender, if I were to wake up tomorrow in a woman's body, I would be very surprised, but I cannot imagine that I would be terribly troubled by it.

Seriously, I'm pretty sure I'd just go on living precisely as I do now - with some amount of unusual changes in lifestyle, obviously, but I am quite confident that I wouldn't worry about it too much unless I'd suffer from sexism in society.  Whether I'm male or female doesn't obviously (to me) figure into most of the things I do. To quote our Chancellor, I don't go around all day thinking "man! man! man!".

Not knowing too much about it, I still suspect for that reason that there is more to dysphoria than just being "trapped in a man's" body or vice versa.

I've heard that said before. But if you were to wake up in a woman's body tomorrow, then you've already lived many years as who you were meant to be. You were raised from birth without any problems with gender and without years of being forced to act and think like something you are not. Without the repression or all the associated problems of trying to fit in and failing, such as lack of self esteem and the self hatred etc. You have already grown up well adjusted and with the confidence in who you are.

Waking up in a body of woman the next day would be a novelty at first. Hey! Breasts! But then try living your life as a woman when you have been raised as a man. You'll find lots of things no longer work any more that did work before. 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.

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. 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.