Your euphoria is showing, diva: why regurgitating platitudes has repeatedly failed to provide transsexuals with security in society
“10 easy ways to cultivate Trans joy in 2025”, aka, how I managed to pop a euphoria boner whilst not challenging the crumbling of society and rising horrors everywhere I look.
I’ve made no secret of my dislike of the phrase “trans joy”, similarly the concept of “gender euphoria” has evaded me my whole life. Repeated attempts to cut off the parts of my body that make me sad continue to only provide me a lessening of my perpetual cycles of body dysmorphia, rather than a euphoric moment of “AHA! I SEE IT! I AM NOW, A GIRL!”. But why do I mock it? And how can my own personal politics on this be written out in a way that doesn’t make another 19 year old try to scream at me for being transphobic?
My own experience of transition, in the physical sense, began back in 2013 when I started hormone replacement therapy (HRT) at the ripe old age of 18. This came after a year of psychological and psychosexual assessments at the hands of doctors who thought “assessment” meant, sexual harassment and badgering a young person to open up about their non-existent sex life. And what followed was 3 years of 1-2mg doses of estrogen delivered by a doctor who fetishised the growth of my breasts, and lauded his ability to refer me for my sex change surgery over me like a parent might that new eyeshadow palette you asked for for christmas.
After being spat out of the Nuffield Hospital in Brighton on the 28th of June 2016, dickless and still bleeding at 21 years of age, my transition healthcare experience in the United Kingdom came to an end and the doctor who had overseen my transition declared me a woman, with a letter to my GP stating I was “similar to a woman who has had a total hysterectomy”. I was complete, no longer a transsexual, now ready to be a normal woman in society with my fully functioning vagina (lol).
This is not to say that, at times during my 3 year long transgendering I did not sometimes experience joy, I was a student at a crappy university who would spend nights drinking in shitty bars with my friends and planning house parties and performing gigs, my life was full of joy. But, that joy was just joy, not “trans joy”.
I have recently returned to the medical world and undergone surgery on my face, one of those newfangled “gender affirming care” things, where a doctor insisted I was not trans because my breasts were real and a nurse couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that my name was Carly, ‘but, is Carly your real name?!’. After a night in hospital (and thankfully much less blood), I got to spend a week in Paris surrounded by my best friends recovering from surgery, visiting the Palace of Versailles, watching Amanda Lear perform a play in french (none of us spoke french but it was still iconic) and eating my body weight in croissants, I realised that my ‘gender affirming care’ experience was much less trans joy, as it was simply… joy.
All of this is to say that, elevating or denigrating the emotions felt by trans people to be “unique”, for joy that a lowly tranny feels to only be “trans joy”, implies that we are only capable of joy under specific circumstances. That sitting in a circle talking about our lives and childhoods after a night drinking cocktails in the 16th arrondissement and belly laughing about silly moments in our life cannot possibly fill our hearts with joy in the same way that a cheap plastic skirt with thigh high socks made by an underpaid worker and delivered to you next day for free, possibly could.
‘Trans joy’ ignores the fact that ‘trans’ is not something that pervades every single aspect of a transsexuals life, but instead, is just one small aspect of who we are. For me, that is I view it with the same level of relevance to my life as my time spent working as a prostitute and dominatrix, or the fact that I have a severely in depth knowledge of, and passion for,roller coasters. I am a marketer, I am a cat mom, I am a theme park fan, I am a former prostitute, I am a girlfriend, and I am a transsexual. All of these things have the capacity to deliver to me, joy, (yes even the life changing friendships and bonds I made during my 6 years working in sex work), but none of them define me.
My gender has never been affirmed more than when my history of transsexualism is viewed as irrelevant. My joy has never been more prevalent than when my friends gave me space to exist without patronising me with conversations about identity, and instead just took me for how I presented myself to them, as a person with varied and wonderful experiences, that provide me with a colourful and vibrant view of the world.
Prioritising trans joy or gender euphoria as a mobilising call, does a massive disservice to the fact that the things that provide the grounds for joy to grow are at first: housing, education, medication, and access to resources. Contemporary movements around this have taken concepts with clear meanings and watered them down to the point where “sex change surgery” is now “gender affirming care”, paving the way for “you cannot change your sex” to be responded to with “yes but I am valid”.
Sex and gender, separated through concepts such as gender identity or “sex is between your legs, and gender is in your head” have left a whole community of male women and female men, forced to face accusations of trespass in the UK if we dare to piss in the wrong bathroom, even if the ‘right bathroom’ is the one for people with different genitals and bodies to us. Trans women are still trans women even after our transition is complete, and the prioritising of emotions felt by a certain subgroup of trans people in the first few years of their trans life ignores the fact that after you have completed your transition and you’re kicked out into the world, the life that we get to inhabit is fucking shit.
There is so much joy to be found, even by us miserable old trannies, but it is not just this vapid ‘trans joy’, it’s not just ‘acceptance’ when we come out to coworkers, it’s grown internally and in our communities of friends after our housing, medication, therapy, employment opportunities, education, and social integration is not being ripped apart whilst advocates and activists chant about trans joy and gender euphoria whilst clutching their Blåhaj.
Tr4nbie
I think the criticism of trans discourse/terminology not reflecting the lived experience and needs of many trans people is a valid (lol) and a welcome one. It seems to me this is part of a wider liberal co-opting of social justice movements which steer them away from material interests to vaguely 'affirming' different identity groups. That said I don't necessarily see a problem with blahaj or Amazon skirts. It's not for me but I don't see how the existence of that subculture really effects me.
Equally I think that without acknowledging the existence of the anti trans movement you're left with a lopsided account for why we're dealing with bathroom bans and the like. The implication is that transphobia is powered by activists using the wrong language, or recently out trans people being cringe online. In my view saying “sex reassignment” rather than “gender affirming care” would have done little to placate those dead set against our existence one way or the other.
This is a super important conversation. It’s difficult to discuss because of all the transmedicalist accusations and inability for so many to listen when it means any sort of division of “the community,” or an inability to understand what it means when someone says “fuck trans joy.” So many fail to realize is that we’ve all been further marginalized by the focus on transgender rhetoric and not leaving space for transsexual conversations. I see myself as both transgender and transsexual — but the transgender part is merely a circumstance of my environment and nurture having forced my gender to develop unnaturally into a pseudo-masculine creature. And that was easy to fix — I let go of the expectations put on me, let my hair grow, changed my wardrobe and started wearing makeup. Amongst a few other things. But overall, it was a transition I was able to make in an incredibly short amount of time, and I perform my gender extremely well. The transsexual part is what brings me daily distress, and that’s because so many things about my body still aren’t right. My hormones still aren’t where they should be — I’m always fatigued and my head still isn’t as clear as I imagine it should be if I had enough estrogen in my system. I wasn’t capped at 1-2mg/day for years, but my providers have been reticent to adjust my dosage because “your body is feminizing just fine.” BUT WHAT ABOUT MY MENTAL HEALTH?! I’m seeking surgery — I have dates for FFS & sexual reassignment, and hopefully those will lower some of the dysphoria I face on a daily basis. But no matter what I do, no matter how right I get with myself, this world will always see me as something I am not — a man who plays the part of a woman. They will always assign us the trans adjective before the woman adjective, even though hierarchically it should be the other way around. And that will always trigger both my gender and sexual dysphoria. Gender because why am I not accepted when I do feminine gender better than most cis women?? And sexual because my body wasn’t built right in the womb, and no matter how I change it, people still want to claim it’s a male body. We talk so much about the “gender spectrum” but what about the sexual spectrum?? To claim that sex is immutable and only exists on one extreme or another disregards the existence of intersex people and sexual transition at the same time. Ugh, it’s all so frustrating. I don’t even know where I’m going with this, or if there is a point I’m trying to make other than it doesn’t matter what we do or how we act, society doesn’t want to see us as anything but strange, radical creatures who claim to be something we are not. They fail to recognize that their own sex and gender is something that they can (and do) modify, and that we are all fundamentally the same. They can’t face the reality of human existence, and we pay the price for their ignorance.