Gender Dysphoria - Cause and Effect

Gender Dysphoria

Jazmine Moore

Olympic College

Author's Note

This paper was prepared for English 102 taught by Professor Hovde.

Gender Dysphoria

What causes someone to become transgender? That’s a tough question to answer because there are so many answers to it. I think that to really understand what makes someone realize who they want to be, someone would have to have an open mind. Becoming transgender and starting a transformation that will alter the lives of the transgender person in question and the people around them is risky business, but it will pay off in the end. Although someone who is transgender has to overcome far too many harsh obstacles like discrimination, oppression, and hate crime, it is all worth it in the end because feeling a sense of pride and feeling like they finally belong would be better than a constant state of dysphoria, depressing, and longing. Being transgender may very well be just one more of the many life-choices people make but more important than the argument or what is considered a choice is dysphoria in its entirety.

Dysphoria is the state of being unhappy or simply dissatisfied with life. There are people out there—I actually know a few—who have claimed to feel like there was something more to life than what they wore offered. This doesn’t mean that they are ungrateful for what God gave them when he created them and it does not mean that it’s appropriate to damn them all to hell for it. For anyone who’s never experienced dysphoria themselves, I’d have to explain it as having an existential crisis but having one your entire life. There are things in this word that are incomprehensible to some people—like wanting to be a different gender than what you were born with, for instance—but then again, there are a lot of things in this world that we don’t need to comprehend. Sometimes things just exist and instead of asking why people have to die or something inevitable like that, we just have to ride out our long journey of life and try to make sense of it all. But when someone finds a solution to their problem, isn’t it a basic human right to let them solve their problem without being criticized for it?