These days, I almost exist entirely as my regular uncle self "Bob", since I don't dress up much. But Belle still lives rent free inside my head, reminding me of her presence in many different ways on a near daily basis. Which made me wonder...how would it feel as a "regular" guy, with no female alter-ego and no gender dysphoria? It is unfortunately, an entirely hypothetical question, since people with gender dysphoria will never get rid of it, and regular guys will never get to feel it.
We spend so much of our waking hours thinking about gender matters; in youth, we wondered why we wanted to literally be in the shoes of the opposite gender, struggled with feelings that such thoughts were deviant and weird, yet circling back to think about them again and again.
We deal with the fervour of wanting to dress as our female selves on a regular basis and obsess over creating opportunities where we can do so. This fervour is especially bad when there are long dry spells, but the withdrawal post dress-up isn't great either.
When we finally get to dress as our female selves, we fret about imperfections in our makeup and attire, overly magnifying all the masculine attributes we think will cause us to get clocked. We worry that our feminine-inclinations will be discovered by people we know and be branded by others as a pervert or a weirdo.
We deal with varying degrees of body dysmorphia, being concered about appearance related issues that plague women, like weight, height, skin, attractiveness...except our base template is male, so the gap between our current and preferred looks is usually even larger. There's always unhappiness with certain parts of the body and the envy that comes along with it. Do you know how damn annoying it is to see a pretty girl on the train and think "I wish my skin/features/hair was as good as hers. But that will never be possible. Oh well."
In the pursuit of validation of our female selves, we turn to social media. But use it actively for a year and you'll realise that it's a horrible source of validation, a wellspring where drinking from it only sates you momentarily, but makes you thirst for validation even more (via comments and likes), leaving you feel a bit hollow inside.
So much of our time, energy, effort and mental bandwidth is spent because of gender dysphoria, soothing it in one moment and fighting it in the next. Life without gender dysphoria would be so much easier I think. Much less guilt, fear, discontent and obsessing over gender stuff. Just need to be a regular guy doing regular bro stuff.
