I’m a bit tired as I write this so don’t mind the poor construction.

I came out to my parents six years ago but only started HRT around eight months ago. Why is this? Well, they didn’t take me seriously and felt they had no incentive to. I was a kid, the pandemic was on their minds, and they took the easy way out that they found when doing the barest of research-- they sat me down, brought up “socially transitioning”, and waved me away with the vaguest of answers if I asked for any real help.

When I finally couldn’t take it anymore and stopped leaving bed in the morning, the next few months went on somewhat like this: in the mornings I’d lie unresponsive or feign sick, I went to school only three days of the week on average, then two, then eventually none. At this dead end, one morning I broke down crying and begged my mother to let me transition. They then proceeded to push back on this idea for around another month and a half.

Nearing the end of that month and a half, when I used “dysphoria” in an escalating discussion late at night, my mother asked what the word meant. I couldn’t believe it. Through all the research she claimed to have done about how to “deal with” the situation, she’d never come across it. The entire time, she never came across (or to some degree ignored) the concept of why I needed to transition, and so it never registered to her as a need. It seemed completely lost on her that I was horribly uncomfortable and it wasn’t some whim.

My parents certainly did choose blindness when it came down to it, but I’m aware they asked the search engine a few questions (which they didn’t bother to ask me). Enough questions that they found themselves a cop-out. Shouldn’t that have been enough questions for them to register the word “dysphoria” too?

My experience of the trans youth I’m apparently supposed to share something with has mainly been “nonbinary” people who “detransitioned” the next year. I’d be looked at strangely if I was too honest. When I first discovered pooner art online and saw people in the mainstream community calling it transphobic in top results, I finally gave up on attempting to understand. It looked grotesque when I was a beginning lurker, but it was even then a comfort, because it was the first time I’d found an expression of dysphoria I could relate to. I’ve never liked anybody who was offended by expression.

What I’m coming to is that the misery and self-disgust of transness shouldn’t be a taboo in the discussion of transness. And maybe that makes the discussion itself miserable, but “euphoria” being pushed in place of the word “relief” removes reality from it. The softening of terms having to do with sex, hormones, or surgery coming from the crowd so vocal about “trans pride” is one of the most contradictory of the many contradictory popular thoughts spread within it. There are bigger fish to fry than semantics, but those bigger fish to fry are access to hormones and surgery, the things their semantics diminish the importance of.

A word is just as easily a weapon and this isn’t the time to carry dull blades. I’m worried about what all this means for us. Thank you for your time.