Gender Euphoria

by Laura Kate Dale

If you try presenting yourself as something other than your birth-assigned gender, and it makes you feel euphoric, that’s just as valid a reason to claim your identity as escaping dysphoria. Gender euphoria is an equally valid reason to decide who you are.

I’d never had a good relationship with my mother, but when I told her I was trans, she said, ‘I know. I always knew.’ And that was an amazing moment, because for the first time it felt like she understood me.

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a more gender-euphoric moment: undeniably, indisputably, I was male.

In my young mind, happiness was just a luxury I wasn’t entitled to.

This fixation on fiction is something a lot of trans people experience. I didn’t want to engage with real life because it held nothing but disappointment for me. I just wanted to get lost in fantasy so I could forget who I was and live through the characters.

I didn’t need anyone’s permission to be my authentic self, and neither do you.

The experience of breastfeeding is anchored in womanhood. I’m not a woman, but I feel that anchor dragging on me.

Boo: partly for Big Boo from Orange is the New Black, a soft-butch-queer-daddy icon, but mostly short for Boob Parent.

Simply claiming non-binary identity isn’t enough to opt out of sex-based oppression – we also have to radically shift the patterns of our lives.

Gender is a figment of consciousness, and I’m free to conceive of my role however I want.

There’s a radical self-acceptance in seeing myself without decoration. This is me. This is what I look like.

By not assigning a gender we’re not only disrupting the male/female binary, we’re disrupting the trans/cis binary. If trans is not being the gender you were assigned at birth, and cis is being the gender you were assigned at birth, by our current definitions Ember won’t be trans or cis. It feels healing and radical to change the rules of the game. I look forward to learning what Ember’s generation has to teach us about gender.

Sometimes gender healing is sorting out the division of labour in your household – or changing the way you relate to it. Sometimes it’s writing a chapter about gender that forces you to confront your dysphoria and change your clothes and hair. And sometimes it’s parenting in a way that heals gender trauma rather than perpetuating it.

We only live once, and since we are all in danger, I do not intend to take any regrets to my grave. I’m not going to live in fear and let that stop me living my life.

It is such a simple act to affirm someone’s gender but it brings so much positivity for all.

I had never disliked being a girl, but it always felt like a tight sweater on a warm day: wearable, possibly fashionable, but overall uncomfortable.

It’s difficult to live with a parent you love and care for deeply, who is supposed to love you back unconditionally, and know that they see some part of you as wrong. I never took the words themselves to heart, but knowing that he felt something was inherently wrong with the way I wanted to be caused a hurt to settle deep in my chest.

It’s been harmful for me to think of any part of me as ‘wrong’, for simply existing as it is. There is no singular right way to exist as a living being. So as long as my body is safe and healthy and alive, I can try to be happy in my own skin.

I feared that if I ever missed a day of keeping up these outward-facing appearances, my identity as female would fall away with it.

I started to feel more at peace with my body being what it was, even if I didn’t necessarily trust the world around me to view it as a validly female body.

My friends were very supportive; my co-workers didn’t use my pronouns but did put my new name on my name tag; my family refused all of it and still chastised me for ‘trying to look like a boy’. But what mattered most to me is that I felt so much more comfortable in my own skin now that I had a better idea of who I was.

Gender euphoria is being called by my preferred name and pronouns and knowing that I’m actually seen as genderless.

Euphoria is when I look in the mirror and I don’t see a girl or a boy, I just see me smiling back.

It’s hard to care about how you look when you don’t feel a connection to your own body.

Social media, as we all know, can be a toxic wasteland, but it can also be the provider of a silver lining on a very dark day.

just more proof that a found family is as good, if not better, than a birth family.

In the end, I learned that for me gender euphoria isn’t an ocean of good feelings. It’s the little waves appearing against the horizon before crashing into nothingness. It shouldn’t be mourned, however temporary it is.

To me, changing my appearance was a method of finding a form of embodiment that suited me best, of self-decoration that might be a magic charm that would allow me to feel at home in my body.

Tattoos on skin have the convenient and highly pragmatic ability to dissuade curiosity about the body beneath. They help you exist as a person whose body is interesting for reasons other than gender divergence.

To feel safe in a lover’s arms is to feel the touch of the Goddess – or God, if you’re into that sort of thing.

but we should reclaim sexuality as a site of power for ourselves, not only in all its luridness but also, perhaps especially, in its ridiculousness.