My dysphoria seems to have no rhyme or reason to it and it's quite frustrating
Hi all! This is a new account but I've been a lurker for a long time.
I've been out to some people, including myself, as non-binary for about a year now, but I've known I wasn't cis for a long time - I spent most of my university life desperately wishing I was a woman, or at least not a man, and watching I Saw The TV Glow when it first came out literally kept me up for the entire night. It took getting a gender therapist for me to unpack my feelings, and saying "I'm non-binary" and having my friends use they instead of he for me still gives me a thrill of euphoria.
Since this realisation, I've been trying to deal with what I now realise is my own dysphoria, with varying degrees of success. What I'm finding difficult is finding the reasons behind why the bits of dysphoria I've got remain.
I don't care about clothes anymore, which used to give me so much gender envy. I still get incredibly nervous buying them, but I'm happy to go out in the skirts and dresses I already own, and I do some very nice make-up on myself. And I've come to terms with my permanent beard shadow by pretending I look like David Tennant - I'm slim and tall and I've got dark brown eyes, what else do you need?!
But the big one is my own biology, for want of a better term. I'm not on any HRT and I've not had any surgery, so I accept that my body is more or less the same as any other cis man's body. And that's fine, I think it's more what the implications of that biology mean that give me dysphoria.
I hate being shirtless because that feels so male. It feels like a man thing to have shorts/trousers but no top on. I used to avoid swimming wherever I could so I didn't have to take my top off. Pre-awareness, I went on holiday with some friends, and refused to go in the hot tub with everyone else because I wouldn't get shirtless, so awkwardly sat on a chair next to it in the drizzle.
In the same vein, and this is a little blue,>!but I can't bring myself to be physically intimate with anyone. That feels like using my body in a way that is exclusively male, with no way around it, no matter who my partner or their gender would be.!< I can navigate romance by refusing to be a "boyfriend", instead a "partner" or something else, but I don't know how to deal with that side of it at all.
AND YET, some things don't give me dysphoria at all. I've always been okay using male toilets, cos I always have, and I'm only in to leave two minutes later.
My therapist recommended looking at my body less as a male body and more as just my body, and in an effort to take that on board and become less afraid of my body, I've started using the communal showers at my gym instead of the cubicle. And it's been fine. I thought it was going to be worse than it was, but it was alright, and it's not given me dysphoria.
But that's what's confusing me! Why am I alright being in the buff in the showers with other people, but I'm also trying to figure out a swimsuit-trunk contraption to swim in because being shirtless feels awful to me?! I'm literally wearing more clothes! Even the fact I'm fine with that first one makes me feel bad, because I feel like I shouldn't be okay with it. I've spent my entire life not fitting right with other men, and here I am acting like I am one.
It's like my dysphoria is confused, I feel like I'm not a very good non-binary person. It's a description that lines up so well for me internally, but I don't feel like I line up with the rest of the community externally at all. I wish it made more sense to me.
Has anyone else had these feelings? Not necessarily this specific, but this kind of confusing dysphoria?