"In the past 12 months, have you felt, unlike most women, that you have to work at being a woman?"
What do gender dysphoria questionnaires really measure?
How would you answer a question like this: "In the past 12 months, have you felt, unlike most women, that you have to work at being a woman?"
What about these questions, from the Utrecht Gender Dysphoria Scale?
Do you "love to live as a girl/woman" at the moment your wings get clipped and your body betrays you and a whole culture of objectification comes down on your head? Give me a fucking break.
What I needed to hear as a teenager was "It does suck! Women and girls get the short end of the stick, biologically. And our culture doesn't help! But that doesn't mean that there's something wrong with you. You're not alone in feeling this way."
It would have helped to connect with women—my peers and older women—who expressed a healthy contempt for our culture's impossible expectations of women and girls, and lived as freely as they could.
Questionnaires like this—which purport to measure ‘gender dysphoria’—put everything on the individual, on the child. Sure, you can reject what our culture pushes on women and girls—but only in a particular way: privatized, pathologized, medicalized.
Quite a few of these questions feel like they're measuring straight-forward self-loathing. That people can't see that, and react to it with medical intervention and -- I have to say it -- mutilation is sickening. I suspect that a lot of the trans- and non-binary ideology of today is nothing more than a way for people who hate themselves to try and escape.
Full text of questions here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5531373_The_Gender_IdentityGender_Dysphoria_Questionnaire_for_Adolescents_and_Adults in the appendix