I’ve noticed that when I used to see myself in pictures I’d hyper assess every little detail of it to check for passing. Now when I see myself in pictures I don’t do that anymore. Anybody else notice the same thing?
I’ve noticed that when I used to see myself in pictures I’d hyper assess every little detail of it to check for passing. Now when I see myself in pictures I don’t do that anymore. Anybody else notice the same thing?
I’m nearly 3 years in. Still not a huge fan of photos (that’s mainly because I’m bad at making myself smile, i.e. not dysphoria) but I remember around that time, for the first time in my life, being able to look in the mirror and not absolutely hate what I saw. It’s only gotten better from there!
Well, not having dysphoria when you look in the mirror is a major win.
A term like “dysphoria” is often amorphous, so I’ll try to clarify what I mean: when I look in the mirror I can’t see a woman or girl, even when other people claim to see a woman or a girl, and this makes me feel bad to varying degrees. I was so used to the way I looked that even though if you asked me I would say I don’t like the way I look, I wouldn’t have thought I hated it actively, I was just used to it.
Since realizing it’s not normal to never feel good at all about the way you look (in conjunction with a lot else, like a consistent and inexplicable preferences to cross-dress full time when at home), I realized I might be experiencing “dysphoria” and started to transition, and after between 3 - 5 months on hormones I could look at photos before transition and current photos after HRT and see that the post-transition photos were more “me” and also more feminine.
(TW: suicidal ideation)
Once I had this awareness that I might have dysphoria, it was like a floodgate opened, and seeing myself in the mirror went from a kind of accustomed indifference (like a background suffering I found easy to ignore) to a kind of crisis which made me feel suicidal and I would have to pragmatically avoid mirrors or looking or thinking about the way I looked.
I would say now I have less extreme dysphoria, and it seems like moustache and beard shadow are major triggers of feeling despair about the way I look, but there have been far more moments where I have felt good about the way I look as well.
Anyway, I can’t tell if my self perception will ever “click” into place and I won’t “undo” my gender when I look in the mirror (a bit like how my perception doesn’t seem to “undo” my gender when I see a fuzzy reflection of myself, e.g. in the microwave or my turned-off phone), but I have doubts that this will ever happen. I know it does for some people. I wonder if it would take FFS for me or not, but I worry even with FFS it will just be a small half-step closer, but not all the way. It seems like so many trans women I know about still feel this way about their face even after FFS, while others seem to report being able to just see themselves in the mirror and feel it’s entirely normal. It sounds like maybe you are in this latter case, someone who looks in the mirror and no longer experiences “dysphoria”?
I wouldn’t say I no longer experience dysphoria when looking in the mirror, on the contrary just a few weeks ago I experienced the worst episode I’ve had since transitioning (and I’m approaching three years). I would more say that, on many days, I’ll catch my reflection and my brain will read it as “woman” (even pretty!). Other days, especially depending on how I’m feeling about myself generally, I’ll fixate on what I perceive as the masculine aspect of my face (or mostly my body TBH). It’s not perfect, but I’ll take the wins when I can get them.
Like I said, I had that happen for the first time around about where you are. But it’s really only in the last year or so that it is consistent. I honestly would be quite surprised if you didn’t have something similar happen eventually. You’ll catch your reflection off guard sometime and your brain will register the gender before it realises its you and distorts it with dysphoria.