Talking about the female body

Bather stretched out on the beach, 1928, Picasso - which sprang to mind reading these accounts of the female body as too much, too shameful, always exposed

Why is it so embarrassing to be AFAB [female]?

The fact that I have periods, breasts, hips and two holes makes me wanna sit in the shower and cry for hours in shame. Why is it so fucking embarrassing to have these parts? Feels like i'm wearing a diaper or like I'm naked in public constantly. I can't physically penetrate someone so when I'm with men, I'm automatically assumed to be bottom. And I'm so much smaller. I hate it sm [so much]

The comments overflow with self-hatred and derogatory ways of speaking about the female body. (At least some of the metaphors are fresh?):

I KNOW! pre top/T/losing female fat distribution I felt so ridiculous doing EVERYTHING. I didn’t want to swim, ride my bike or skateboard cause I had these bags of sexualized ground beef taped welded to my chest and had silly little feminine hips. I didn’t wear sling bags, run around, god, so much stuff just cause like… I felt so stupid? Like, obviously I wanted to pass and everything, but I also just felt so fing silly doing anything just at my core. Almost like I was wearing the most ridiculous possible mascot outfit 24/7 that I could never take off and people didn’t know there was a real person inside. A fur suit that I was unwillingly born with and had to be surgically removed with a bunch of complicated trauma and my body will never be as it should. But hey my top surgery results were awesome and I pass as a 20/22-year-old man (I’m 26). I feel significantly less stupid just walking around at a baseline.

Seconding this. I try to relearn to feel the joy of dancing bc I couldn't stand the ✨️jiggle✨️ of my body moving. After my surgery (top, hysto) I honestly feel like a new person. But yeah, exercising, walking etc felt so embarassing and so wrong. I feel you

“Thinking about my body for too long makes me want to rip my skin off”

“Having those bodies parts just feels almost like a personal failure, even though I had no control over it.”

Trans-identified women often connect this sense of shame and disconnection to the horror of pregnancy and childbirth:

I can’t understand why afab people would ever want to subject themselves to that either tbh the thought alone is absolutely horrifying

(Elsewhere, a young woman writes, “[n]ow that I’m post op hysterectomy, I feel like I can be free to do anything I want without the fear of getting a period, cramps, or pregnancy.” The female body is an encumberance. The enlightened young woman discards whatever she can convince a surgeon to remove.)

These girls and young women describe feeling “even worse when you're around other [sic] men.” “I either feel infantilised or sexualised most of the time.”

Of course, these girls and women only feel this way because they’re really men, no other reasons:

“Nothing wrong with any of those things, it’s because it doesn’t align with who you actually are. I feel for some those things could be a lot more bearable if it didn’t affect how we are viewed socially.”

Or do they?

I mean, you're getting hit with the 1-2 punch of having dysphoria, and a world where people AFAB are second class citizens. Things that should not be shameful tend to feel that way when you are mistreated for them.

Does transition help? Do girls and young women who transition shed their insecurities and navigate the world with more confidence? Not necessarily! Impossible expectations for passing as male set trans-identified girls and women up to feel disappointment and shame:

I feel ridiculous wherever I go and when someone misgenders me it feels like the ridiculousness of who I am is being validated. I can’t stand it

Elsewhere, another young woman writes that she doesn’t feel like a “normal’ man” (which, of course, she isn’t):

I'm 2yrs 3 months on T and I have recently lost so much confidence in myself to the point where I have begun to accidentally misgender myself in my head.

I feel so inadequate as a man and worry that everyone knows I'm trans. Whenever I watch TV shows, I think how all the men are taller than me. Whenever I meet men around my height, I think how their hands and wrists are bigger than mine and their body shape different. When I meet new people, I feel really really sad and embarrassed about my appearance and often avoid talking to them or showing interest if I like them.

I feel like I can't participate in the world because I'm not 'normal'. Pre T, my clothes were very masculine but expressive and I didn't hate my height or wrists or hands. But now I dress very boring and mostly don't like my clothes, they're just the ones that make me feel the least dysphoric. Being trans is almost all I think about and I live in constant fear of being misgendered even though it hardly ever happens. It makes me so scared to leave the house.

I don't know what to do. I swear, the further I get into my transition, the more hopeless I feel. I pass. But I feel the most unattractive I have in my entire life.

Does this pass? Has anyone else experienced this? I didn't think I'd feel like this two years on T.

She insists she passes—as trans-identified people tend to do, whatever evidence to the contrary they immediately offer up—but it doesn’t matter. She’s obsessed with the many ways, large and small, that her female body deviates from the male body she longs for. She’s obsessed with being trans (“being trans is almost all I think about”). This obsession infects everything, from watching TV to “showing interest” in people she meets to leaving the house at all. She describes feeling like she “can’t participate in the world because I’m not ‘normal.’” She also observes that, before she began transitioning, she didn’t feel this way. She dressed more “expressive[ly].” She didn’t fixate on the circumference of her wrists. In fact, “the further I get into my transition, the more hopeless I feel.”

What, exactly, was transition meant to address? Contrary to the norm—where young people insist they have no regrets about transition, even while outlining extensive regrets—she doesn’t mention a single way in which her life has improved since she started thinking of herself as transgender and taking testosterone. She wonders whether she will ever feel differently—the way she was supposed to feel. In the comments, she describes the motivation behind transition as desire to “feel better, even if it doesn’t fix everything.” She seems to feel worse, with a set of new problems.

The young women who rush to reassure her mostly… don’t. She needs to separate “dysphoria” from “dysmorphia” (unclear how this will make her feel better, or whether any meaningful difference between the two exists). She needs to reframe her problems not as the specific challenges of a woman pretending to be a man but as the kind of frustrations every man faces (“every guy wants to be muscular, tall, handsome or just attractive”). A woman eight years into transition describes distress that “waxe[s] and wane[s]”:

It helps to remember we really don’t perceive ourselves the way we really are. Or at least, we perceive these things about us to matter much more than they do to someone with an outside perspective.

Sometimes I think dysphoria is just a real bitch, dude. Kind of like body dysmorphia, it isn’t always logical. That doesn’t make it any easier to live with, but it’s something I can tether myself to so I don’t spiral too hard. Feeling like you don’t perceive yourself accurately is terrifying in its own right, of course. It’s just hard. Try not to beat yourself up for it. Beating yourself up is never a fair fight. This shit is hard.

Words are on the verge of meaninglessness here. What does it mean to characterize the problem as one of failing to “perceive ourselves the way we really are”? Of not “perceiv[ing] yourself accurately” when you notice the femaleness of your body?

Others advise managing distress by planning for the next intervention (“Planning out phallo'[plasty] and looking at others results sometimes helps too,” one woman writes).

You can see why it’s so hard to stop, despite the disappointments. It’s hard to accept that the promises transition makes can never be kept.

Maybe, just maybe, the next step will finally deliver.