@katebraestrup got a lot of love a while back on her post, “Thoughts From a Former Dysphoric”. My impression upon reading it was she was describing gender nonconformity, not dysphoria. Our dear Kate was a tomboy, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that. Dysphoria ought to mean deep discomfort, though, not just being a little different. The red tribe has an interest in both downplaying and, well, up playing “gender dysphoria”. Describing tomboyishness as “dysphoria” both downplays and up plays the condition: First, tomboyishness is not so bad, not really all that dysphoric, so what are people complaining about? Second, if every tomboy becomes convinced she’s “gender dysphoric” then oh my sweet Jesus on rollerskates, what is this world coming to?!! Before you know it, there’ll be fire and brimstone coming down from the skies; rivers and seas boiling; forty years of darkness; earthquakes, volcanoes; the dead rising from the grave; human sacrifice; dogs and cats living together – mass hysteria!

What about those who aren’t just tomboys, or their male equivalent, but truly unhappy in their birth sex, perhaps with good reason? Even then, even though their discomfort is real, they may find copping into gender conformity a more sensible solution than, as @henryracette put it, copping out of it.

I can use myself as an example. I have a slight but pervasive connective tissue abnormality. The closest thing to “treatment” for it is being born male if you have to have it: testosterone-fueled muscle mass ameliorates it, while the vagaries of female hormones worsen it. So as soon as puberty hit, I found being female uncomfortable — really uncomfortable. At the time, I didn’t know I had the connective-tissue abnormality. All I knew was that, apparently, being a woman Hurt me with a capital H. Physically, mentally, even spiritually. My “woman’s body” disgusted me and just felt… wrong. Besides discomfort, I also had to manage, while still young and skinny, unsightliness that’s typically associated with the elderly and obese. 

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Being seen as sightly is a pretty big deal for women. Not all women desire to be paragons of sightliness, of course, but conforming to norms regarding feminine appearance can make a woman’s life much easier. Appearing to have a certain shape, or unblemished skin, or other signs of beauty, even when you don’t, is a feminine art. Most girls learn something of it, but some of us, if we want to “pass” as “normal women”, especially when we’re young, have a lot more to learn and hide than others do.

One way to hide unsightliness is simply to cover it up. A life lived in a full-length housecoat would conceal a multitude of sins, but gals who wear clothing any frumpier than it needs to tend to be looked down on, too. For someone like me, passing as a “normal” young American woman, therefore, meant not only much artful concealing but also artful revealing, when possible, to prove that I wasn’t dowdy.

I cannot stress enough how much of this was an act, an artifice. I wasn’t naturally interested in clothes, or boys. Though not exactly a tomboy (I was outdoorsy but not fond of most sports), I was a nerd, and I would have happily given even fewer f…igs for personal adornment than I did if it weren’t clear that such adornment aided in making my otherwise-marginalized self socially acceptable. I might have been a loner when other gals went to even the bathroom in groups. I might have been in pain when my cohorts were in the peak health of youth. But by golly, if I tried hard enough, I could at least look pretty feminine. Womanhood might not have felt right to me, but putting on a feminine appearance at least helped me conceal from others how wrong it felt to me.

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One rule for putting others at ease is to be at ease yourself. For some of us, that’s never gonna happen. We can’t fulfill others’ expectations that we’ll put them at ease with our own ease, so we compensate by fulfilling their other expectations. Some of these expectations might be gender norms, even shallow ones, like ones about appearance.

I admit I can frump it up pretty hard during pregnancy, but otherwise, if you see me at a meetup, you’ll usually see me dressed to the nines. Travel isn’t always easy on me, and I might be tired and sore, but at least I can wear a pretty outfit and smile. It’s one way to make up for all the other normal stuff I’m not so good at, whether it’s normality that applies to both sexes, or only to women.

I “cop into” gender conformity not because gender conformity expresses the “real me”, whatever that is, but because by conforming in the ways that I can, I buy a little more leeway for the ways in which I won’t or simply can’t conform.

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Conservatives: when someone tells you gender is a performance, don’t roll your eyes. It very much is. It’s especially obvious for women that artifice is involved. This performance is related to biology, yes, but it’s not rigidly dependent on it. It’s dependent very much on social expectations. That might be uncomfortable to admit, because what if folks want those social expectations to change?

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could fend off changing social expectations by declaring our preferred expectations “natural”? Why yes, yes it would. And sometimes it’s reasonable to argue that some expectations are more “natural” than others. Nonetheless, @henryracette can’t describe “The Gender Non-Conformity Cop-Out” unless there’s also a gender conformity cop-in, a set of choices people can make about performing their gender in order to negotiate social expectations.