I am so sorry that you had that experience. I have encountered the same thing from time to time, but mostly with the transmedicalists. It sounds like the group that was critical of you may have included some who had not done full physical transition. If so, I find that particularly appalling. An attitude I have always had is not to question someone else’s experience of gender, except when it is clear that they may be searching for something that does not really describe them. These situations are rare but do exist. I am a believer that the best way to support the searching is to listen and only respond with general observations where a question is raised or advice is requested. It is not for me to tell them what they are; it is for them to figure it out and understand themselves better. I am merely a companion and occasional guide on the journey.
Gatekeeping is a major issue, but at times the attitude that anything goes can be as well. That is the reason behind many of the attacks by otherwise open minded cis normative people who are trying to understand, but view the community as being confused, or at least certain parts of it. That is part of the rationale behind the mocking comments we have seen based on the short story, I identify as an attack helicopter. The challenge is to find some common link between all of those who identify as trans and the many variations included in that description (including yourself as genderqueer). My belief is that there is a common biological basis for the experience of all the types of individuals in the trans community. This is what binds us together and gives us legitimacy as a group. If in fact we are different from the cis binary community, and this is merely a normal variation in human biology, there is no reason why we should not be recognized as legitimate members of humankind, rather than somehow being defective or possessing a pathology. This is what I am trying to push back against. None of us is defective. None of us needs to be fixed. We are perfect just the way we are. And this experience is different between our diverse members. The way you experience gender is not the way I do. And that is fine. We should be equally celebrated for our differences.
Where I get concerned is when portions of the community who are particularly vocal take positions that seem to be illogical and hard to defend. I agree with you that TERTAs exist. However, the point of my comment was not to dispute this idea; rather it was to discuss further the relatively recent idea that you can be trans without having any kind of gender dysphoria. I find this idea to be particularly troublesome. And it is not a position universally held by all within the psychological health community. The reason I think there is a certain group that is vocally defensive of this idea is that it represents people who have run into extreme gatekeeping and felt that they were misunderstood or even abused because they were told they did not suffer enough existential pain to be properly dysphoric and therefore trans. I can understand why they would object so militantly. The problem is that this seems to make the concept of being trans an entirely subjective and arbitrary decision based on whim (rather than innate) and thus open us to the charge that we are just mentally disturbed. A return to those days cannot be tolerated. We have come so far.
One person, who responded to my comment, correctly noted that maybe the disagreement I have with some of the more visible defenders of the non-dysphoric trans concept is that we are using the term in different fashions. The people who maintain this equate dysphoria with pain and suffering. I am using it in a more gentle and broader sense to mean that there is something within us that causes us to change something about ourselves to conform our lives to our identities. This may be something as simple as social transitioning without more or a more serious internal angst. Both are legitimate experiences, but the bottom line is that there is something we all share that make us dissatisfied with the way that we see ourselves and are viewed and treated by society. Maybe what we need is a better term than dysphoria. Maybe the commonality we all share is dissatisfaction with our lives in some respect because of our internal sense of identity which creates a need to change the way we are viewed and treated. And maybe that term is gender dissatisfaction.
