[GoneGirl]

Gender identity is one's subjective sense of one's own sex. Like pain, it is unambiguously felt but one is unable to prove or display it to others. If gender identity does not match one's physical gender, the individual is termed Gender Dysphoric.

This statement by Dr. Carl Bushong is not altogether correct, imho. It implies that I will be GD until I'm satisfied that my physical body is sufficiently aligned with my gender identity. But my GD was relieved, for all intents and purposes, by sex hormone rebalancing (HRT) months ago. I no longer feel the constant anxiety and tension, and the need to defuse it. Also, having come out to important people in my life, lately, another source of apprehension concerning my trans nature has largely been put to rest. But despite my new found peace of mind, I still want to alter my physical body to match my gender identity. That desire is driven by the demands of our society on what constitutes acceptable behavior for men and women. Those behaviors are often tied to physical differences between men and women, but arbitrarily, I'd say.

I tend to accept the view of Dr. Anne Vitale. Gender dysphoria stems from being deprived of a means to express one's innate gender freely in a society that is invested in the binary gender-sex model, and insists that gender expression conform to rules governing one's birth gender. There's no inherent requirement that one be dysphoric because of a gender-sex mismatch, is there?

In a world where freedom of gender expression is allowed, treating GD becomes simply a matter of shifting one hormonal balance to satisfy the needs of the cross-gendered brain.

Clara

Both have things Partly right, but IMHO neither have the full picture.

From my own experience, Vitale's theory is accurate if being deprived of a means to express one true identity includes distress over one's internal-external gender mismatch. I can say that if I have any GD left it's for that reason. But, I have hopes of being able to correct that, and he closer I get to passably presenting as a woman, the better I feel. I'm sure that's the case for most transwomen.

Clara