Educating my Dermatologist on Gender Dysphoria

When I first started seeing my therapist I told her that I didn’t have any gender dysphoria. It didn’t take me very long to follow that up with, so by the way, what exactly is gender dysphoria? She explained it simply as a disconnect between one’s birth gender and one’s perceived or mental gender. I again repeated, yeah, no, I don’t have that and don’t think I have ever felt that way. I think a good question that I could have asked at that time was, so how exactly does gender dysphoria manifest in most humans? My response would have changed for sure then and I would have said, well yeah, of course I have that, I’ve had those feelings my entire life. Why? Doesn’t everybody?

No sweetie, I’m sorry to have to be the one to inform you that no, most people don’t have those types of thoughts and feelings. That actually took me a very long time to understand. What is a long time? Try like over forty years. I mean, I started having feelings of dysphoria when I was just a small child, I just never had the language to explain what I was feeling. I took those feelings and I turned them inside and slowly started telling myself that I was just like everybody, that everybody had these feelings, and yet at the same time I knew that I was wrong. And I was wrong on so many levels, and most importantly I had no understanding of how gender dysphoria was slowly turning, twisting, and shaping my world.

About a year ago my gender dysphoria surrounding the genitals I had been born with was ravaging me on a minute by minute basis. I worked hard with my therapist in discussing my thoughts and feeling but I also needed more than that, I needed daily practical advice that I could use to help dampen down the feeling of worthless hopelessness. One of the first things that my therapist recommended was to decrease the amount of time that I viewed my genitals. This involved a variety of small things, like not looking in the mirror at myself naked, not looking down at my genitals while changing or washing, as well as making sure that I was covering my genitals with clothing as often as possible. That last piece made me change many of my routines like sleeping and showering naked. Yup, I stopped both of those. Sleeping was easy to change and to just wear some underwear to bed, easy, problem reduced. But showering with some sort of clothing on? Yeah that was weird for sure. I ended up having pairs of what I began to call shower underwear. They were pairs of underwear that I had specifically to wear in the shower. They weren’t special in any way except for that I only ever wore them in the shower and never out in the world.

The underwear was normal, I didn’t think me wearing it in the shower was, but it reduced my feelings of dysphoria. Which is what it slowly became all about for me. By that time I was no longer smoking and with the end of that habit, I had lost a huge emotional support crutch, and all I was trying to do was to stop wanting to kill myself. It wasn’t the suicide ideation that really messed me up though, it was the self hatred and anger towards the world at me having to take my next breath that did. Fortunately, like the Mormons I suddenly found myself blessed with magic underwear. The underwear that saved my life. Okay, maybe it is a bit dramatic sounding, but still my underwear became my armor. It kept me safe from many of my inner demons. It was a front line warrior in my battle against dysphoria. Which is why when my longtime dermatologist suddenly pulled open the band of my underwear and took a peak in my panties I was absolutely floored.

People asked me what I did and what I said and the reality is that in the moment I didn’t say or do anything. Nothing at all. Nope. I felt completely violated and yet I was totally dumbstruck. I had been standing in her office with a doctor’s office gown loosely covering my body having my yearly mole check completed. This was a dance we had been through many times together over the past few years, but when she first met me, I wasn’t me, I was pretending to be somebody else. And the somebody else had confidence. He had bravado. He didn’t mind standing totally naked in the middle of the office, strutting around, proudly showing off his naked body. He was also a very angry individual who was slowly and happily killing himself. But my dermatologist didn’t know any of this. She just knew the typical outsider viewpoint, ‘he was a he, and now I have to remember to properly call him a her, oh here is my chance, yay I didn’t mess up his pronouns.’ Okay, yes, I don’t know for a fact that is what happens in cis people’s brains, but I highly suspect it is something along those lines.

My dermatologist has been gracious and understanding throughout my transition, but it has been a learning process for her. Which is great, but it is also a struggle. Sure you need to have a student, someone who is willing to learn, but you also need to have a teacher, and not every trans person feels like living our lives being a walking, talking, transgender educator. Especially when in the deep throes of gender dysphoria bullshit. Which is where I found myself a year ago when she took a peek in my underwear. But this year, I had a choice, I could ignore the appointment and go find a new person to check my moles, or I could go and ignore what she did, or I could go educate her.

Any thoughts on what I did? Yes, I did nothing, haha, no, of course I chose to educate her. Things were very different this year though. Beginning and ending with, I have a vagina! So how did I feel standing in her office this year? Well I was naked under my gown again, which was a huge thing! Somewhere during my appointment, I brought up what she did last year and told her how I thought it was inappropriate and rude. Minimally she should have asked for permission to look in my underwear, but I took it a bit further and let her know how I was living at that point. How I had not seen down there in a year or two. How Jodie hadn’t seen down there either. How nobody was looking down there. Unless it was essential to my surgery. So yeah, I did have lots of genital electrolysis, but to do that took quite a bit of drugs and dissociation.

The point is, did my dermatologist know what it is to have gender dysphoria? No, she did not. But hopefully now she does know a bit more than she did and hopefully she won’t be that way with other patients. And that’s the real hope, make the world better. That’s what education is all about. That is what my transition has been all about, me being educated on who I really am. Now that I’m feeling a bit better, I’m looking forward again with a view towards educating and helping to make the world a little bit better in my own small ways.

Go be you!