[Serious] Please convince me gender is binary

[Jehanne]

I'll just mention self awareness again, I guess?  You're either stringing together random unrelated comments with individual dodginess...or you do think that they have some relationship to each other, and are instructive, in which case they represent a complex knot of unconfronted dodginess.

I've been there, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that you (and many other people) find themselves there now.  Maybe not about this particular issue...but the phenomena isn't limited to any particular issue.

I'm not pulling punches.  I think that gender dysphoria is related to anxiety, rage, depression, and a general psychological ill-being.  When you see a man in a dress, he may not be experiencing gender dysphoria, but you know that he's outside the normal psychological range in at least one area.  You could say the same thing with ANY display of atypical behaviors-- clenched fists, talking to oneself, or so on.  Maybe someone clenches his fists all the time and is a lovely human being in all other regards.

There are two reasons why people get that "creepy" feeling about people who behave outside the ordinary:
(1)  It's just superstitious nonsense, and they have to get over it.
(2)  The sense of creepiness is sometimes an indicator of danger, and the cost of ignoring it is potentially very high, evolutionarily speaking.

I'd say, on the whole, that the transition from first realization of dysphoria to its resolution by self-assignment of a new identity (with or without physical modifications) must be a very traumatic, and any expression of that trauma in facial expression is likely to make people uneasy.

I have never been happier and more at peace than I am now.