Treating Gender Dysphoria?

According to my psychiatrist it is possible. How is this possible in an adult who has had a steady gender identity for years?

Her comment makes me wonder about therapists psychopathologizing people. A lot of diagnoses seem to put blame on the client and are about fixing them so they conform to society and all it's rigid rules and expectations. What is wrong with being different and helping a person express their authentic self?

Note that I have found psychotherapy to be very helpful ONLY when it avoids blame.

Gender dysphoria is treated with gender affirming treatment.

It's definitely not about fixing you so you conform to society. It is about helping you express your authentic self.

What Is Gender-Affirming Care?

I'm not sure I understand your question: Is your psychiatrist asking you to engage in "conversion therapy"?

The Lies and Dangers of Efforts to Change Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity - Human Rights Campaign

If that's the case, that's unethical of him. Even if it can be legal in some countries, like mine.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Quietmind 2 I'm not sure I understand your question: Is your psychiatrist asking you to engage in "conversion therapy"?

I think she is trying to challenge me more than seek conversion. The last time we met she explored my gender identity to understand where my feelings come from.

I'm 44 years old and can make my own decisions. There is no way she is going to convert me.

I'm curious to know if there are reasons for identifying with a gender that doesn't match biological sex. For me it feels ingrained, that I was born this way. I knew it in childhood. Maybe it has to do with being autistic. What are some other possibilities?

My parents didnt make being a girl feel very rewarding. My brother got everything, i got nothing sort of situation. Plus my mother and father role-switched - my mother was the tough guy, uninvolved, whereas my dad took care of me when i had a cold (though thats about the only time!). Plus it very much felt like my brother was the pretty one and i was the smart one! No way was i gonna come out "straight".

My parents were typical. I did a lot of things with my dad when I was a child since my brother was born 15 months after I was. He was interesting to me, maybe because I was (and still am) more interested in things than people. Whenever he repaired something I was always there watching, helping and asking tons of questions. His hobbies such as photography and fishing appealed to me. They made more sense probably because they didn't require a ton of socializing.

My brother and I were inseparable when we were children. We did everything together. I wanted to be a boy like him. Perhaps this shaped my gender identity.

Things, activities etc arent inherently gender-specific, except for actually making babies. You were allowed and encouraged to do stuff without regard to gender stereotypes. In spite of circumstances like my mother working since i was two years old - very gender non-conforming in our extended family and neighborhood - i was still constricted to gender stereotypes.

So very much "do as i say, not as i do." And you know how that works out!

Lots and lots of people with gender diversity are autistic. I don’t think anyone knows why. But it’s definitely a thing.

Largest study to date confirms overlap between autism and gender diversity | Spectrum | Autism Research News

I did not know this.

I wonder how much of it has to do with the way people with ASD think?

There definitely seems to a biological component to gender identity (at least for me). I cannot fully explain this to myself and anyone else. Maybe it is how I think, that I am drawn to things a lot more than people. Maybe it has to do with androgen exposure while in utero. My personality traits, interests and cognitive style seem to have contributed to me gender identity. I just feel male in a female body and the stress it is causing me is getting worse with age.

I have no history of CSA or any other major trauma history that could possibly explain this. I'm sexually attracted to women, but I don't think my gender identity has anything to do with shame around that. It was present long before puberty.

I doubt I will ever know why I feel this way.

There was a transgender person on YouTube, several years ago now, who used to say: "If you're trans, you're trans. It never goes away." I'm 74 years old now. And I've been struggling with this as far back into my childhood as I can remember. Of course, way back then, the words transgender, transsexual, & gender dysphoria hadn't even been invented yet that I know of. If they had been, or when they finally were, I never heard of any of them until a dozen or so years ago.

You asked about possible causes for gender dysphoria, other than autism. I can only talk about my own personal situation since I'm not all that well versed in the research that has been done on GD. In my own case, I've waffled back-&-forth between believing I was transgender from birth to concluding my gender dysphoria was simply one aspect of an unrecognized and untreated broader mental illness that also included depression and generalized anxiety. But, of course, the reality is I'll never know. It's sort-of a "chicken-&-egg" kind of question. (I think I could also make a good case for complex PTSD. But the reality is my gender dysphoria related feelings far preceded the cPTSD-related experiences I had.)

Most transgender people I've had contact with (primarily on-line) I think accept the idea that being transgender (and thus experiencing gender dysphoria) is the result of processes that occur in utero. I don't know if I buy that entirely, at least in my case. But I don't know... I suppose it's possible. It seems to be the accepted theory at present. Under any circumstances, it's all academic in my case at this point. My best wishes to you, though, in figuring out your own gender dysphoria.

Yeah if you're trans you're trans. You just know. I remember shopping in the boys department when I was 6 and throwing a fit whenever my mom even suggested I wear a dress. I played with my brothers action figures and was scared of my sisters dolls. This was in the 90's and early 2000's

I knew this women about my age who faked being trans for attention. She was trans for like 2 weeks and was posting all these memes and stuff and getting annoyed that people werent taking her seriously. Then 2 weeks later she was back to being female. She had some personailty disorder. I called her out on it and she blocked me. Its very upsetting when people think being trans is a trend.

I respectfully disagree.

Some of us only know we're trans later in life. We might not have had the language to voice that even to ourselves...or was way too busy in survival mode / enduring abuse for a very long time to even begin to consider gender.

A good portion of my trans acquaintances and friends, and myself are like that. It's only recently that we can look back, because so much of our sense of self was non-existent or buried.

Gender psychiatrists in my part of the world often ask about abuse histories and other stuff just to rule out "identity confusion". Not that having an abuse history means people aren't trans, but we have to be able to articulate how we realised later in life, and the various signs as we grew up, and so on.

Of course, there's folks who know from a young age though.



or even known

Didgee if you’re in Canada, conversion therapy (attempting to make someone heterosexual or cisgender) was criminalized in Jan 2022.

So yeah, to echo QM2 the way to treat gender dysphoria is to help people feel okay in their bodies by affirming that who they know themselves to be is right and good and worthy. It also includes access to hormone therapy and surgery for people who need those things.

So if your T isn’t up to date about that, especially if it’s an issue you’re dealing with, you’re in the care of someone whose incompetence is flirting with illegal. You deserve better!

Wow. It JUST got criminalized? Wow.

Canada is way ahead of the U.S. on this.

Worldwide there are very few jurisdictions, let alone entire countries, where conversion therapy is completely banned.

Which countries have already banned conversion therapy? | Stonewall

Does any reasonable person embrace the restrictive and stereotyped notions of gender? It all sounds dangerously close to pathologising our natural impulse to dissent and to resist what patriarchy insists our biology should say about our personalities, preferences, and internal worlds. I believe that biological sex is a fact, but I don't think that we gain anything by entertaining ideas of gender. It makes everyone (women in particular) miserable.

But it makes (some) men so happy! My brother - a t!!! - told me there was something WRONG with me because i didnt want to take orders from my h!

After putting up with my parents' idiotic rules (enabled and enforced by my brother, btw), i had no need to accept another boss who could not see things as clearly as i do. Even tho if my vision were not correctable i would be legally blind.

I am a lesbian and hated wearing women's clothes as a little girl because they were so unfun to be in. You couldn't move in them well. I wear mostly men's clothes now because they are more comfortable to me. I didn't want to be a man nor do I believe I am in the wrong body. So I am not sure the clothes thing is the best tell.

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