#physical dysphoria
My shoulders are too wide by almost exactly an inch on either side, and it’s measurably worsening my quality of life.
That’s not just my self-loathing telling me that. That’s not just what I say to myself when I look in the mirror and decide for some reason that my proportions are ugly. That’s not just what I say to myself when I see how a women’s shirt fits over them - off-the-rack clothes, after all, are made so that one size fits none.
No. The reasons I say my shoulders are too wide are far more basic than that.
Routinely, when I try to walk past something fairly closely, my shoulder ends up clipping it. The amount of overlap is usually a little under an inch.
About once every other month, I wake up with an awful pain in my neck and shoulder that I can only attribute to having done something absolutely horrid to those areas while sleeping. I have no idea what those movements are, because I’m asleep at the time, but it can happen in either shoulder, and no arrangement of pillows seems to sufficiently prevent it.
My hand-eye coordination is totally shot. I can’t pick up objects without actually being able to see my hands. When I try to pick something up with my eyes closed, my hands have a systematic and reproducible error of a few degrees - the exact amount they’d be off if my shoulders were wider than my brain expected by about that much.
In the most literal sense, my brain and my body do not agree on one of the most fundamental proportions of my body. No amount of body positivity or self-love will ever fix that. I highly doubt there’s a way to rewire my brain into accepting my body as it is, either - and if there were, I’m not sure it’d be a good idea.
Nor is there a satisfactory physical fix: clavicle shortening surgery exists, but even if I could afford the multiple tens of thousands of dollars it would cost, I can’t help but imagine the horrible back pain it would cause if it left my shoulders perpetually scrunched forward. A satisfactory physical fix would have had to have required my body to grow the right way the first time, and that ship has already sailed.
So I’m stuck like this, stuck with a body and a brain pitted against each other, both refusing to yield, with me stuck in the middle. Even if mirrors were a total non-concept – even if beauty standards didn’t exist, and neither I nor other people cared what I looked like – I would still experience this problem.
In a lot of ways, I’m lucky! This is about as severe as my brain-body map’s incongruence with my actual body gets. (I also have serious voice dysphoria that makes it - without exaggeration - physically painful to use my voice for extended periods of time; but in a way, even that is not as bad as this.) A lot of other trans people, especially those with serious height dysphoria, probably have this a lot worse.
But if there’s anything I wish cis people could take away from this, it’s this: when trans people say forcing trans kids through natal puberty is disfiguring and cruel, believe us. We know. We have every reason to know. A lot of us are going through completely unnecessary suffering.
