God yes I 100% meant dysmorphia, a slip of the tongue! Thank you for clarifying, pinning this! X

@@leenanorms Glad to be of use!

This might be a strange question, but do you think the two can be interrelated for some? I'm not trans and don't want to claim at all the difficulty that trans people specifically experience. But as a cis person, I often feel my body, partially through dislike of its size/proportions/masculine features doesn't reflect how I feel as a person. Like it fails to express what I feel internally I should look like. I've seen some interesting stuff on gender-affirming surgeries being performed on cis people and I think there's an interesting conversation to have there about the unrealistic expectations of femininity and masculinity we expect from women and men respectectively (and the damage that might cause internally) versus the need to affirm one's own identity through their physical expression, and the pain when these two don't line up, even when one's sex at birth and gender identity technically line up. I hope that makes sense and doesn't sound offensive, just wondering how others feel about this.

This is some of the best worded feedback I've read in a while!! Thanks for sharing your knowledge :D

@@owlsandrainbownerds I'm going to lay out some thoughts, they aren't going to be my perspective on it set in stone, but just an exploration of those ideas. None of this is me giving my view on your situation. I'm just putting some thoughts out there and you can decide for yourself if any of it applies to yours. I'll start with the cis side of things with an example. Intersex stuff aside for a moment. I think on the cis side of things it is a form of dysmorphia more than perhaps dysphoria. More an insecurity in society's recognition of certain female bodies as being 'feminine enough' for example with, smaller chests, certain jaw lines, some hip-waist ratios; those cis femme bodies are still just as valid as a natural representation of a what a femme body looks like as someone with a bigger chest. It's no inherantly less of a female body, it's just one example of what a female body can look like. We see beauty standards differ wildly across the world, and watch them rapidly change throughout the decades. "Does my bum look big in this?" means something the direct opposite now than it did in the 90s and 00s in relation to meeting a current beauty standard. Eurocentrism, colonialism etc. also play a part in 'what female body looks like'. Anything that is deemed not beautiful under the current specifications is un-feminine in that period of time. Now, as for biological sex as a whole: it really is a spectrum. Chromosomes, hormones, primary and secondary sex characteristics etc. etc. Though for those not falling under what can be identified as intersex, the questions are around: What were you assigned at birth? Do you think you would rather not be what you were assigned? Or do you identify with what was assigned to you at birth, but are dissatisfied by being arbitrarily critical of your body not fulfilling expectation created by not meeting an idea of what is feminine? This is not to say that gender dysphoria is not shaped by cultural ideas and representations of expression of gender- but it is how it is shaped, not created. It makes me think about a conversation I had with a close friend of mine as he was having to go back into the closet. He hasn't had any medical transition work done, but he presented himself as the young man that he is and had been until he felt his circumstances ment he had to go back and tell his family that he was mistaken and that it 'was just a phase' to protect himself. As he was talking to me he was very deeply distressed about this. He was even questioning whether he was ever really trans at all. I talked it through with him because he needed to know for himself who he was. He needed to separate the situation and his vunerablility of being out in that situation with who he is. So I asked him "If you were completely alone on a desert island, and you could be there- just you- would you be a boy?" and he surprised himself I think because he got kind of angry. "Don't ask me that! Because of course I would be!" He was upset because he was trans, and he couldn't escape the body and social dysphoria, and he couldn't escape feeling out of place, unsafe, not able to be open and always expect safety and acceptance in being out. He wanted so badly in for it to be easy. For him to have been 'wrong' about being trans. That he wasn't and that he could just be a girl and forget about it and not feel like he did anymore. He wanted to be wrong, but he wasn't. So the idea that 'maybe he was wrong all along' upset him because he wasn't; if he was he could be ok. It would all be so much safer and easier. He was being confronted by the fact that he could not escape it and that denial didn't change the way he was. If he found he wasn't trans it would have been a relief. But in that time when he desperately wanted it to all go away and he being in denial didn't make it better, he felt terrible. Body gender dysphoria is not something that really goes away for most trans people after transitioning. It's in a much more bearable degree and they have good days and bad days, but it isn't something that disappears entirely for most people I think. But they feel so much more themselves. Perhaps the matter of gender dysphoria in cis people vs. Trans people is the difference between "this shouldn't have been my body, because this isn't my body" which is not *created* by any cultural idea or perception. If he was born on that desert island alone, he would still have gender dysphoria. If a cis person struggles with the perception of their body as being 'enough' in comparison with an arbitrary inadequacy that is more the illness of dysmorphia, not gender dysphoria. No amount of loving and accepting your body for what it is will make a dysphoric trans person free from dysphoria. Being told and having good representation of all kinds of bodies of all sexes can help his people feel secure in their body's reflection of their gender. Again though, biological sex is a vast spectrum; but not all ideas of masculine or feminine features are actually charateristics of the opposite side, and are generally just genetic traits that can occur on many parts of that spectrum and are how each person's body is uniquely represented in natural variety on the same spot of the spectrum. Even if you were to sit on the same spot on the biological sex spectrum as someone else, your genetics' way of expressing those characteristics are going to vary from human to human, yet are both equally valid representations of what a body of that spot on the biological sex spectrum can be. That's a conversation to be had with the trans and intersex community; but I don't think it fair to conflate the experiences of gender dysphoria with cis people with those that are not. I think they are different categories in a way. This isn't necessarily an examination of whether somebody should or shouldn't make changes as a cis person, it's just examining a different in the root of it, and whether perhaps the change being a medical one might not be for the right reasons, as the dysmorphic aspect of it needs to be the change- addressing that and understanding where the root of those feelings lie to be able to make the best informed decision on how to make that change mental and/or physical. I hope this is the kind of exploration of ideas you were wondering about. This is just my current thoughts on my own exploration of the idea so far as an agender person- it's not the full extent of it but it's what came to mind right now. There are going to be spelling and grammar errors and ways of formatting and wording that, as this isn't a proper essay I don't have the energy at almost one in the morning to give a shit about lol This info-dump was brought to you by ADHD medication wearing off. Please drink some water, that was a lot! Edit because I missed half a sentence somewhere. Edit because woops I hyperfocused on fixing the typos, BUT I'M STEPPING AWAY NOW. NO MORE. DON'T. NEED. PERFECTION. IT. DOESN'T. EXIST. NOR. WAS. IT. MY GOAL.

Had a hoodie sporting "Alaska grown" with the same origin story, lmao

hahahahaha

I love it 😂

Stonehenge is incredibly cool whether you've been or not. Still pretty neat historical site to exist, no matter how far away from you. I have been and I didn't get a t-shirt and I had forgotten how much I wanted one until this moment. My quest to find a second hand Stonehenge shirt commences...

I have been to Stonehenge and seen it a million times and I STILL get excited every time I drive past it. I fully support wearing the t-shirt even if you haven’t been. It’s awesome regardless!

Love this idea!

Ohh I second this

I love this

Oh my God I forgot about polyvore!

I tripped running to the comments section to see if anyone else got as excited as I did that Leena mentioned Rachel! 😂

@@helenwright413 Same! I was like, "I can't be the only one, right?!"

I would really recommend checking out Keara graves on KZfaq! Don't know if you know her but she is the living proof that the gender wardrobe norms can be 100% discarded. She might be an inspiration in that sense :)

Mood. As a fellow non-binary person I struggle a lot with what I'm socially allowed to wear. I've never been read as anyone other than a woman (it hurts) so dressing in "feminine" way, growing out my hair makes me feel like I'm unintentionally enabling people's misgendering. The easiest way I could explain it is I wanna be perceived as a dude with long hair would or as a guy dressing unconventionally, so I just cannot win

Ugh yes, I did this as well. Any photo from about 12-21 that I could find even the smallest flaw with I deleted. Now at 30, I wish I hadn't!

I was coming to the comments to say this too!

Way ahead of you, already planning 👀

@@leenanorms Yay, can't wait!

Yes it's a fine line but he treads it so well!