Do we solve dysphoria with Botox, or belonging?

Dysphoria is not a new friend, they’re someone I’ve known for most of my life, but they showed themselves in different shapes. Let me explain.

Since coming out to myself, I’ve experienced the paradigm of being trans as a kind of alternating current. Either, like today, I’m fully convinced of my own feminine sexiness and walking the corridors of my work with confidence, or I’m flat-footed, wondering who is around the corner and how ridiculous they think I am.

I’m sure a lot of people are still wondering why the person they knew from two or three jobs ago is wearing their hair long and slipping on women’s flats, and honestly, I’m as much in the dark as they are. It’s not something that I saw myself as wanting. The initial thought was, “wouldn’t it be amazing to go through a whole weekend as a woman?”, and it wasn’t until experiencing the apparently illicit electricity from that thought that I thought anything bigger might be going on.

In my first summer after coming out, I was asked by a friend, “if you could change your entire appearance once, permanently, and nobody would make a comment on it, would you do it?” and the answer was an unqualified “yes”. It was like I was playing a massive open-world RPG, and I was being allowed to change my avatar.

The thing I’ve realised as I’ve “evolved” my appearance to match how I feel inside is, though, that there are some things that are harder to change than others. I can change the shape of my face subtly. I can train my voice by speaking in a higher register of my natural speaking timbre. I can even get boobs. But I can’t change my height, and my weight is something that I can only change gradually (Ozempic is too expensive for someone already using Botox, and I don’t like the idea of a disappearing appetite).

Even so, I’m often given the chance to wake up to just how much progress I’ve made - and it’s progress in my head, not progress I’ve paid for. Superficial purchases won’t solve my dysphoria. They’ll just feed it, by giving me the illusion that dysphoria is something I can take on by feeding it, that if I buy stuff, whether it’s a new pair of shoes or something injected into my face, people will like me more. They won’t. I might like myself temporarily, but it’ll wear off sooner or later. A bit like my Botox recently.

If you’ve read this far down, you’re probably wondering how to fight off dysphoria. It’s a daily struggle. If you’re on an “up” moment, you might find you feel as though you’re floating on a cloud of self-recognition, then on a “down” moment you might feel, as I did last week, utterly ridiculous and like all your problems would go away if you detransitioned. Neither statement is likely to be true.

The only solution is to treat, as Rudyard Kipling once said, “triumph and disaster… just the same”. A bad date, or a gang of teenagers laughing at you walking through a bus terminal, these don’t need to be moments that define you, any more than your greatest moments as a trans person are going to ensure your future is rosy without any other thought.

Working on ourselves is a daily push, but we’re worth that effort. That’s one reason why we did all this. Maybe we need to remind ourselves how, once, there was a scared person, wondering what everyone would think, and now we’re so much further down the line.