Pursuing Gender Euphoria: A Model of Gender Dysphoria as a Social Process

Using data from a series of semi-structured interviews with gender-diverse participants, we propose reframing the phenomenon of gender dysphoria as part of a larger social process rooted in the pursuit of gender euphoria. Our findings suggest that gender dysphoria is the result of a social process of negotiating access to gender-euphoric desires across the macro, interactional, and individual levels. Those desires were confronted at each level of social interaction with what we term lenses of impossibility, which comprise cisnormative institutional barriers, cisheteronormative family values, and individual transnormative expectations. These lenses of impossibility foreclosed gender-euphoric desires. The resulting experience was dysphoric distress, described as feelings of invisibility at the macro level, interactional misrecognition as a personal failure, and individual embodied tightness. When trying to solve this distress, participants were faced with transnormative material realities such as disaffirming interactions with medical personnel, interactional peer pressure to pursue transition, and individual agency or normativity when engaging with gender-affirming medical interventions. We call this the social process of gender dysphoria.