Every now and then I encounter perspectives where my disagreement is relevant. Sometimes I will dump responses here, rather than go down the additional social complication of arguing forever with the person. My thoughts get better anchored by writing them out.
Noted a transgender voice with some various core claims problematic to me, chiefly that there is a strict distinction between needs and desires, that only gender dysphoria causing significant distress is a true need for transition, and that access to transition should be restricted to people experiencing it. The obvious counterpoint being, there is no obvious zero point in terms of happiness or functioning. This is equally true for most physical or mental health conditions where happiness or functioning are impaired. An injured athlete may still be faster than I am, yet we would have no qualms treating her as injured and in need of care. Similarly, happiness and functioning on a scale of perceived or reported gender dysphoria or euphoria will compound individual baselines, potentials, and coping strategies all together. The same underlying mechanisms may become apparent as an unhappiness that will kill unless treated in one person, and as the potential for greater flourishing still in another.
Honestly, I have always rejected the needs versus wants distinction out of philosophical conviction, but my emotions surrounding it also reflects thinking – even long ago – about these sorts of situations, about how individuals must be allowed to define their own utility measures and therefor also their needs versus wants thresholds. And this is not just splitting hairs. I could live without sight or hearing or touch or taste or mobility or sexual function or much intelligence, without self-realization, without pride or companionship. Do I really need those things then? Don’t I just want them, if I would still seek to stay alive without them? Seeing needs and wants as separate kinds of yearnings is absurd.
That said, this person had a pragmatic baseline relating to triage and priorities. They oppose changing diagnosis requirements from requiring significant distress, because if that is not intrinsic to recognized trans alignment, then, they argue, states and healthcare providers will easily be able to deny transition help. Here my counterpoint would be: the potential for relative improvement can be kept as a necessary requirement for accessing this care, whereas the extent to which this improvement starts from a dark enough place can be used as a sufficient requirement for prioritizing public use of funds to do so. I don’t see this as likely to end up reducing access to care; elective cosmetic surgery has not drained insurance support for reparative such, for example, nor does increasing access by self-perceived gender euphoria-driven transitioners to medical intervention seem to have reduced access to those treatments for those driven by what they describe as dysphoria.
That too all said, I realize more things about myself in these ruminations. This really matters to me. While I cannot know precisely how, it is apparently very important to me that I can transition. It seems like I am reducing a form of indirect dysphoria, which when considered as such is certainly not small in terms of its impact on my life. I just tend to doubt everything, so it is hard to pin it down, prove that this actually is the most adequate description of what I feel. This is why I took this year now to check what I feel persistently, and to experiment more subtly. But if I am right, and others certainly have similar stories, then this sort of experience does describe dysphoria masked by coping strategies and seen against an individual baseline.
The second realization: ultimately, I don’t care. In my non-transitioned identity, it would be hard for me to see myself as a person, not just the backdrop of the perceived world, so considering my own needs and wants as valid in and of themselves, when in conflict with anything political, has been difficult. From that perspective, the spectre of harming others statistically, whether by appropriating “truetrans” identities and somehow running the risk of reducing access to treatment, or by luring innocent young questioning-but-cis people into taking steps they later will imperfectly detransition from, that might have been enough for me to deny myself transition steps, at least partly. It may have been one reason why I stayed seeing myself as agender for so long, really.
But after coming to consider that some of my darkness could be dysphoric in nature, and trying things that let me see what may be an experential gender identity for me (i.e. perceived sameness or otherness with gendered virtual or actual persons, embodied) and finding this is euphoric, that is producing a change. When I know myself as woman, I know that I personally matter, and I find that I am ready to disregard that spectre of statistical harm. It’s not that it doesn’t matter. But it’s that I also really do matter to me, and I will to what I strongly yearn to. Whether I call that a need or a want is complicated and situational and perhaps not so important. I will do what I yearn to, and I feel liberated by this insight.
lost in transition 