Need better strategies.

I am starting this post with the aim to open discussion with other trans people about healthy coping strategies for gender dysphoria of all kinds, and the difficulties that come with moving on from negative behavioural and psychological patterns as a means to deal with living in today's society as a trans person.

Gender dysphoria is a rarely discussed medical condition that can be truly debilitating and severely life limiting for trans people. There are mutiple forms of gender dysphoria and not all trans people experience every form, the severity and presentation varies and it is a highly individual phenonemon.

Regardless of what gender we are, whether it is binary or non-binary, gender dysphoria is the disconnect trans people experience between the gender we were assigned at birth and our authentic gender and selves.

Essentially, our brain is one thing and the body we were given is another. The most common form of managing gender dysphoria is gender transition so that they are in a better alignment with each other, and so others perceive and treat us as our authentic selves. Some trans people socially transition, some go on to also medically transition and the vast majority of us partake in some form of legal affirmation as well. What a trans person does in regards to their gender transition is individual and solely dependent on what we need to live authentic, healthy lives.

It is a very sad reality that trans people have the highest suicide and self-harm rates that there are within the entire human population, and many of us have experienced severe trauma and discrimination in our life. We endure a large degree of societal oppression and have many humanitarian issues as a result of the way the world, politics and the law views and treats us.

Gender dysphoria is a very difficult condition to live with, even in today's era where it is becoming more and more accepted and our healthcare is slowly becoming less difficult to access. Still, many of us remain to have hardship in accessing affirmative healthcare and support services to aid us in our journey.

Many of us, like myself, have comorbid mental illness that makes life even more difficult, and makes us more susceptible to developing negative maladaptive coping mechanisms in order to be able to partake in functions that trigger our gender dysphoria. These negative maladaptive coping mechanisms are difficult to break out of in a world that denies you the capacity to live as your authentic self and openly express yourself.

There are times when gender dysphoria can be so consuming that a trans person becomes suicidal or resorts to substance abuse. I am no longer ashamed to admit that I have had many, many hospitalisations throughout my life because of suicidality related to my gender dysphoria. My experience in hospital only served to worsen the problem, unfortunately, and eventually I had to come to accept that I had no choice but to allow myself to partake in gender transition for the sake of my life and welfare.

It was a very bitter pill to swallow, accepting that I have no choice but to rely on health professionals for the rest of my life, that I have to take hormones for the rest of my life and that I can't function properly without various other means of gender transition. Testosterone saved my life and I will be forever grateful for what it has allowed me over the past almost 6 years.

But no aspect of gender transition is perfect and it is not a solution for all of what ails me. Much of a trans person's journey is one we have to engage in ourselves psychologically and behaviourally in order to adapt to life and lead a healthy life as much as is possible.

Part of it is having to come to terms with what we cannot change about our physical selves without allowing that to inhibit us from changing what can be changed. There is so much evolution involved in gender transition.

Right now, I am at a stage where I am not able to continue my gender transition for financial reasons. For the past few years I have not been able to cope with that bitter reality and my gender dysphoria has gotten the better of me in a very negative manner. I am stuck in my life and have stopped being able to take proper care of my hygiene and physical health because they are a huge source of physical gender dysphoria for me.

I already struggled with those things quite severely, but for those past few years I have been almost non-functional in such areas of life and have developed negative maladaptive, self-defeating coping mechanisms in order to continue surviving in this body. I have become apathetic and careless towards what I am physically and the physical changes I have acquired from testosterone are overwritten by what has not changed and cannot change, either at all or unless I get surgery that I can't afford at the moment.

My depression has become very severe and has also destroyed my life along with my gender dysphoria. I often think to myself that I have no real reason to live if I can't continue transitioning, because that is all that has kept me alive besides the survival mechanisms I developed from my complex trauma.

I have faced discrimination and abuse as well as harassment as an adult. They had such a severe impact on mr that I cannot leave my own unit without worrying that it will happen again. I fear that people will find out I am a transman and that they will abuse me like so many people I should have been able to trust did. I have developed the belief that I deserve this and that I deserve to be punished, and I view my body as a defective screw up to the point it makes me physically ill to look at my reflection.

I am ashamed that I have this medical condition and that people used it as an excuse and justification to abuse me so much that I learnt to abuse myself in order to live in this body, which I know is wrong but I cannot help it.

During this time my eating disorder became much more prevalent and it is now a daily part of my life that I have almost no control over. Professionals do not want to help me because they don't want to have a trans patient. I have been called worthless, a burden and a waste of resources because of a condition I never asked for and comorbid illness I never asked for.

I need some help and guidance from fellow trans people who have more healthy coping strategies than I do, because the few I have are not enough at this point and I don't want to die not even having had the chance to become my authentic self.

I do use the healthy strategies I have when I have to do activities that trigger my gender dysphoria but they obviously don't take it away. I'm having a hard time of it being able to accept that and deal with it.

Thank you for your time and help. I hope this at least proves that you are not alone in this horrible condition.