Dysphoria before I knew it was dysphoria:

• 4 years old, I won a girl’s doll at a fair, the attendant wouldn’t let me have it, and they gave it to one of my sisters - I was devastated and felt it was unfair to deny me the doll because I was a boy - I wanted to play with the doll.
• 5 years old being told my family expected me to be born a girl and they were surprised when I was a boy, I thought it was a genuine mistake I had been born a boy, that I was somehow secretly meant to be a girl instead - that the universe made a mistake (and that maybe someday it would be corrected or work itself out).
• 5 - 10 years old, I was jealous of my sisters and felt excluded, I wanted to be included as a peer. Didn’t think about the gender relevance of this, just didn’t like the way being a boy alienated me.
• 10 - 15 years old, I was absolutely miserable having male friends, I felt huge relief when my family moved and I lost my friends, and made mostly female friends from then on, though that was frustrating, I didn’t want to be a “male friend”, I wished I could just be accepted as one of the girls
• 15 years old, dark hairs growing on my legs, despite feeling insecure about not being masculine enough (and desiring “normal” male development) and feeling unsafe being targeted for being too feminine, I secretly shaved my legs with a razor nobody knew I had access to
• 16 - 17 years old, I kept trying to find a way to take a selfie of me that felt OK, nothing worked. The things I tried to make it better were adding a cute leaf to my hair, using hair pins, etc. - feminizing intuitively seemed to be what helped, but it wasn’t enough. I hated pictures of me as long as I could remember, no photo of me ever looked right. I didn’t know why, I didn’t have the thought that it was related to gender.
• 19 years old, tried makeup but hated the way it felt like a contrast between a feminine expression on a male body, it made me feel so much worse every time I would see myself in the mirror after trying something feminine. Nonetheless, I was wearing skirts and women’s clothing, and going to stores to buy them. No idea how to explain it, I didn’t know what to think - I just thought skirts felt more comfortable and right. I even wore women’s jeans and pants, etc. They just fit better, I liked them and they were more comfortable.
• 20 - 30 years old, once or twice I tried makeup again. Makeup always made me feel worse, as my body finally masculinized in ways it hadn’t before (my puberty was slow to kick in and weak, I never developed body hair on a lot of my body and I couldn’t grow a beard until my 20s). The makeup clashed more and more with my increasingly male body. My shoulders became broad from manual labor jobs. My hands became calloused mitts. My voice masculinized more, I started growing a beard. I felt afraid and insecure in my masculinity, and in my 20s I started to really “pass” more as a genuine man, I learned how to dress and act more like a man. I hated it, but I always felt disconnected from my body and it was safer than being targeted as a feminine man, perceived of as gay. I liked that my beard hid my face. I wore dresses and skirts secretly at home, the only clothes that felt “right”, they just were comfortable. Didn’t make anything of it.

Once I realized I am probably trans (at which point I thought I had no dysphoria), the realization suddenly melted a lot of my coping mechanisms like extreme dissociation and just ignoring everything as much as possible.

I went to Sephora and took a private class in how to apply makeup (expensive, but was so helpful for me), having the right products and knowing how to apply makeup to feminize my face made it helpful for the first time.

I started to get laser hair removal, and afterwards my face would be so puffy and raw in a beard pattern, I would feel acutely suicidal from it. Makeup actually helped me regain some semblance of my face and reduced dysphoria somewhat.

Dysphoria is still hard for me to identify, esp. when it initiates with dissociation. During sex this is often the case, I didn’t realize I had bottom dysphoria until I realized I always dissociated during sex. Sometimes bottom dysphoria just feels like being really embarrassed about my genitals. Sometimes it means leaving my body and having a hard time being present. Sometimes it means suddenly feeling bad and breaking down crying.

My testes and scrotum have always felt more overtly dysphoric - like revolting alien appendages on my body. Orchi helped a lot, esp. when walking or wearing clothes, but the presence of a scrotum still makes me quite dysphoric.

I personally think one reason the dysphoria kicked in so hard after transitioning is that I went from feeling like society expected me to having these genitals to starting to feel like these were the “wrong” genitals, that I should have different genitals. So there are many sources and pressures that impact the severity and nature of the dysphoria. It’s complicated and hard for me to really understand.

I typically get laser on my face once every 5 weeks, and two weeks after an appointment the hair starts to fall out. I have a week or two where I feel much better, and then as the beard shadow comes back I increasingly feel worse about myself. That was a surprising aspect of dysphoria - even a subtle or small beard shadow has a lot of power over my mood and self-perception, and in ways I didn’t directly link except that it became a recurring pattern that was noticed.