If you don’t experience gender dysphoria you have no idea what kind of emotional havoc it can cause. What you see in the mirror can be distorted by your mood that day. Some days I think I look very womanly, even without makeup. Other days I can be dolled up like a damn princess and still see that guy looking back at me. It’s a frustrating thing to go through, especially when you’ve got friends and family trying to encourage you by telling you how good you look. It’s great that they see it, but what matters is if you do.
Well, I think I found a little trick to help. My birthday was a few days ago and I decided I wanted to do something I’d never done before: color my hair. I did it for a couple of reasons: first to just do something fun and new and second to cover up the ever-increasing number of gray hairs I was seeing…
I went with a bright red and instantly fell in love with the new look. It was hot!
Changing anything drastically has a tendency freshen things up. It can alter your mood, outlook, thinking…anything! However, I soon noticed a positive aspect of the change I wasn’t expecting: it helped my dysphoria. The more I thought about it the more sense it made. Unlike the effects of HRT, coloring your hair is an instant and dramatic change. Depending on how drastically different your chosen color is from your natural one, it can make you look like a completely different person, and that was the key. By skewing my reflection so much so fast, I was able to look at myself like a brand new human being. This new person in the mirror, I’d never met her before. I’d never grown up as her. She’d never had to live as a boy. She wasn’t familiar, and because of that, I didn’t notice her masculine features as much.
I think “gender dysphoria is probably related to the amount of amygdala that is available to devote to generating bad feelings about things. Some examples:
You were just chased home by a diverse mob of ex-cons who were screaming to each other as they chased you about how they didn’t realize how much they missed forcing other men into sodomy in the joint until just this moment. You get in the front door of your vault, and get it locked and bolted just in time to escape, and after a few minutes milling about outside, the mob leaves to look for other victims. You rest in front of the mirror in your hallway, look at yourself and can’t believe how nice it is to still have your entire face in one piece, before you break out laughing at how ridiculous life has become. In this case your amygdala has a lot on it’s plate, so there is not much left over to worry about the fact your jawline could be a little sharper.
Or, you come home from the office Christmas Party, enter the bathroom, catching a glance at your face in the mirror, where you notice your nose is just a little askew and has a weird looking bump in it, and it makes you look funny. You wish you could do something about it. Here, your amygdala doesn’t have much going on, and when you notice some piece of minutia your amygdala has the time and energy to dwell on it for a bit.
Or, you get up off the sunbed on the flydeck of your 180 foot motor yacht in the Bahamas, where everything is perfect, and think about how all of your friends have cleft chins, which gives them a rugged, attractive appearance, and you do not. You make a call to your plastic surgeon, and arrange a procedure. Here, your amygdala is so used to perfection everywhere that it flags anything even remotely bothersome, and constantly drives a strong urge to fix it, since it has nothing better to do.
Add in a personality that is conditioned to be depressed about whatever it lays eyes on, and you can see how a young, normal looking black Michael Jackson, who literally had no threats and unlimited wealth, ended up looking like a white human cartoon character.
My guess is there is something in many, if not most of these transgenders that wants the “pretty-boy” look, like Gavin Newsom, and which recoils at the amygdala-triggering produced by ruggedness. But what really sets them off is that their amygdala is so unoccupied by real problems and other things, that the moment it catches their reflection, it freaks out over any rugged, amygdala-triggering aspect. Eventually they conclude it is the masculine part that is the problem. Sadly, often after eradicating the masculine part, the dissatisfaction remains, and eventually spirals into depression and suicide. That is because the problem was never their face or their gender.
Notice also how this guy says his mood triggers the dissatisfaction. When his amygdala is triggerable (I will bet during a refractory period after extreme dopamine exposure, like a chocolate binge, or buying spree, or even drug withdrawal), and he looks in the mirror, his amygdala focuses him on things like his chin or his jawline. But when he is in a good mood, he can’t see the same things. The amygdala makes our reality and it makes how we perceive it. And it is the environment that makes our amygdala. Get high on binge-watching Avatar, and then return to earth and go look at yourself in the mirror, and you will not like what you see.
(A funny story – a friend who spent a summer as a rampant coke-fiend was relating tales to me. I asked him, “What was coke like?” He said, “When you are high you can look at yourself in the mirror for hours, marveling at how awesome you look. Then you come down, go in the bathroom the next morning, and it is so depressing, because you look disgusting.”)
So what cures this trasngender’s problems, at least temporarily? A sudden change which is so glaring it absorbs his amygdala when he sees it. He dyes his hair bright red. Now when he looks at his reflection, his amygdala is completely absorbed by the massive change in his hair color, and it blinds his amygdala to everything else, even when his mood is down.
I really find it amazing that the human brain is so designed for harshness, that if stripped of all harshness it will begin to spontaneously self-trigger, until it actually drives a man to cut off his own manhood, and try to look like a woman. I find it even more amazing that the key to happiness and balance in such a case is the Apocalypse.
Thankfully we just happen to have one coming. Get ready to be really, really happy.
In fairness, Bruce Jenner was probably using some type of designer steroid in the Olympics. Then Kris likely poisoned him. Those people are satanists, after all.