"All Women Experience Dysphoria"

To begin with I have to deliver you a very unfriendly, ugly, in-your-face reminder that the LGBTQ+ community is not an accepting place when you are anything other than homosexual. If you're bisexual you're told you don't exist. If you're pansexual you're told you just want to feel like a "special snowflake". If you're asexual you're told that you just haven't found "the one". But god forbid you are transgender. That's a whole other ballgame.

For the uninitiated, transgender is a term used to describe someone who feels like they were assigned the wrong gender at birth. This can be in the form of FTM (female to male), MTF (male to female), or non-binary (does not feel like they are either male or female). For what it's worth, i think we can all agree that trans people who were assigned male at birth have it worse overall. However there is a new way for people to tell trans men that they do not exist, and this new way was delivered to me for the first time today. And it was a lesbian who proposed it to me.

My name is Nathaniel, I was assigned female at birth. After years of struggling and self-hatred I finally accepted who I am and came out as FTM. Despite all this, my lesbian "friend" decided she knows me better than I know myself.

In a conversation with her today she said "In a world where women are encouraged to hate their bodies all women experience dysphoria. What makes you so sure that you're a man and that you haven't just been influenced by the media?"

Now, I want to point out that the media definitely does encourage women to hate their bodies - I can't deny that. But I don't think you understand what dysphoria means.

Talk to me when you can't hug people because God forbid they might feel your chest binder under your clothes.

Talk to me when you want to sleep shirtless because it's 90 degrees outside but you can't because your chest makes you feel physically sick.

Talk to me when your voice sounds unfamiliar despite the fact it's the one you've had all your life.

Talk to me when you can't stop asking men what their shoe size is and feeling like crying when they say 9 or 10 because you're stuck at size 6.

Talk to me when you purposely put off showering for days because you can't stand to look at yourself.

Talk to me when you're hit with that soul crushing reality that you will never be able to donate sperm or have children the way you want to.

Talk to me when every hormone in your body is screaming at you to be sexually active but when you are everything about it feels wrong.

Dysphoria is not the same as disliking your body because of what the media has told you. You can think you're too fat, or your stretchmarks are ugly, or your lips are too small and still find your body aesthetically pleasing. Being a trans man is being totally isolated in your head and feeling completely and utterly foreign in your own skin.