But the use of dysphoria to describe trans people is, more importantly, insubstantial. In the first place it reflects an incredibly recent shift in nomenclature. The OED can catch us up quickly: the term dysphoria didn’t emerge in English until the mid-nineteenth century. It’s first usage, in 1842, was to describe an emotional state of “dissatisfaction, restlessness, and suffering.” Anthropologists and sociologists developed this emotional description by studying “primitive societies” and “deviants,” with one 1933 study describing “a condition of dysphoria” as “when people feel shamed” for socially stigmatized behavior. In the mid twentieth century it continued to describe states of feelings like guilt, shame, and general emotional distress caused by one’s social environment.
This is why gender dysphoria is not actually a trans term. It merely specifies the arena in which dysphoria is concentrated: I experience emotional distress like fear, guilt, or shame, not because I am trans, but because my gender is treated as abnormal, illegible, dangerous, or undesired by the social world in which I live. This might manifest phenomenologically in my flesh, for instance, when I think my shoulders too broad, or my breasts too small, but it is because I fear how I will be treated when others assign and surveil my gendered body. I fear the penalties of my culture for my disobeyant form.
There is, in other words, no idiopathic medical issue, which is not surprising to us because cisgender is a fictional story our culture tells itself. Dysphoria describes a social situation of transphobia where transphobia—as in, animus towards and danger manifested towards trans people for their very existence—is the result of a social world where cisgender is granted immense power as the “normal,” default category of human experience.
But the use of dysphoria to describe trans people is, more importantly, insubstantial. In the first place it reflects an incredibly recent shift in nomenclature. The OED can catch us up quickly: the term dysphoria didn’t emerge in English until the mid-nineteenth century. It’s first usage, in 1842, was to describe an emotional state of “dissatisfaction, restlessness, and suffering.” Anthropologists and sociologists developed this emotional description by studying “primitive societies” and “deviants,” with one 1933 study describing “a condition of dysphoria” as “when people feel shamed” for socially stigmatized behavior. In the mid twentieth century it continued to describe states of feelings like guilt, shame, and general emotional distress caused by one’s social environment.
This is why gender dysphoria is not actually a trans term. It merely specifies the arena in which dysphoria is concentrated: I experience emotional distress like fear, guilt, or shame, not because I am trans, but because my gender is treated as abnormal, illegible, dangerous, or undesired by the social world in which I live. This might manifest phenomenologically in my flesh, for instance, when I think my shoulders too broad, or my breasts too small, but it is because I fear how I will be treated when others assign and surveil my gendered body. I fear the penalties of my culture for my disobeyant form.
There is, in other words, no idiopathic medical issue, which is not surprising to us because cisgender is a fictional story our culture tells itself. Dysphoria describes a social situation of transphobia where transphobia—as in, animus towards and danger manifested towards trans people for their very existence—is the result of a social world where cisgender is granted immense power as the “normal,” default category of human experience.
whoooops, guess I was one of the ones whose theme got blown away when a bunch of people got booted into in password reset jail… oh well, it was due for a revamp anyway
and as much as I enjoy tinkering with my blog layout, I have never felt the need to actively shill for whichever theme I was butchering in the “Edit HTML” window at any particular time…
…but I do kind of want to give a shoutout to @april ‘s Vision theme for being
1. a de-crufted version of everything that’s good about the default Optica theme and the Tumblr dashboard view in general, with just enough sensible additions (sidebar, visible post dates, etc) to make it humane 2. much semantic, very HTML5, wow, this shit is readable as hell and doesn’t do anything with thickets of nested <div>s that can’t be accomplished with <section>s and <article>s and <aside>s 3. flexible and customizable in the EXACT ways needed to make it, incredibly, the only theme I haven’t had to butcher in “Edit HTML” at all to make it do what I want. and ONLY in those ways. no gazillion fiddly configs.
photosets still followed by a huge empty space in Firefox because of an issue scaling them down to fit the post width? or just want to give them more room on screens that’ll fit them? post width is a CSS variable! you can override it with custom styling in the advanced options!
wanna insert an analytics script, or offload some informational links out of the blog description but keep them on every page? there is one (1) designated widget space in the sidebar where you can enter any HTML you want.
you do not have to learn a Widget System. you do not have to curse and wonder what kind of Martian would need the option to put the searchbar in the page footer. you just slap some basic HTML down and piggyback off the existing styles and CSS variables to make it look like it belongs there. I made a featured-tag cloud with just a <h1>, a <nav>, a bunch of bare links, and no wrappers whatsoever. it’s EXACTLY what it needs to be and no more.
can’t promise I won’t eventually end up fucking with the theme HTML itself, because I like to fuck with things and I want timestamps next to my post dates, dammit, but the whole experience of setting this thing up was pretty remarkable.
Thank you for such a heartwarming review! Vision was always meant to be a more sane, clean, and user-styleable alternative to Optica - I’m glad it hits those marks in more eyes than my own.
personally I don’t think if you’re a kid you should be using your real name on the internet. very easy for people to find out too much about you. instead you should spend years using a different made-up name that becomes part of your persona to an arguably even greater degree than your actual name and then when you grow up and find out you’re trans you have a ready-made name to switch to even if it’s probably like Leaf or something
in average
are photos
are videos
are texts
are gifs
are audio