In the late aughts , when the “trans tipping point” was still years away, and I was but a 20-year-old activist, “gender euphoria” seemed like a revolutionary concept.
I first heard the term in a “Trans 101” workshop put on by students at McGill University. The students defined it as the joyful feeling that arises when your gender expression (the way you present your gender to the world) aligns with your gender identity (your internal felt sense of gender). First formally defined in the 1970s by activist Ari Kane, the concept of gender euphoria became more broadly popularized decades later with the development of online trans communities.
Seeking gender euphoria on its own was a good enough reason to identify as trans or non-binary, the workshop facilitators said. Maybe you didn’t need to have a mental illness or feel “trapped in the wrong body.” Maybe you just wanted to feel that joy.
For 20-year-old me, the idea was groundbreaking. I’d spent most of my teens immersed in a queer youth culture that accepted that being trans was defined by gender dysphoria: A debilitating feeling of wrongness in one’s own skin, the sense of being disgusted by one’s own body.
Disrupting the “trapped in the wrong body” narrative felt daring. At the time, gaining access to gender affirming medical care such as hormones and surgery was still contingent upon being able to prove to healthcare professionals that your dysphoria was bad, and incurable, enough to require it. The “informed consent” model was not yet widely known in the medical community, so endorsing the idea that you didn’t “need” dysphoria to be trans was a risky thing to do.
Yet it was empowering and transformative as well. Perhaps this is why the idea took off. For a population so mired in stigma and body shame, the positive framing of gender euphoria allowed us to reclaim our dignity.
I’d spent nearly two decades being angry at my body, feeling ashamed. Then I heard about gender euphoria, and believe it or not, all that anger and shame melted away. I didn’t have to hate my body in order to want to change it. Being a trans woman didn’t have to mean living in a default state of “lesser than” other women. I quickly integrated this thinking into my clinical work as a trainee psychotherapist. I wrote an article about it. I believe trans Filipina activist Soss Rogando Sosot said it best in a 2010 lecture given at the University of the Philippines:
“I am a human being who is neither in a wrong body nor trapped in a wrong body but a human being who is expressing her beingness […] I am not in a wrong body. I am in this body just like how you are in your body. I am not trapped by my body. I am trapped by your beliefs.”
I still feel the fire of those words, the potential they hold to free us from the social rules so many of us have internalized. Today, however, I, alongside so many other trans cultural workers have begun to question the idea we spent so long promoting. As transphobic hatred and anti-trans legislation spread across the globe, I have to wonder: Was it all a mistake?
Lately, I am less concerned about the rules trans people have internalized in our minds and more concerned about the rules that transphobic lobbyists and politicians are busily turning into local and federal laws.
For example, the informed consent model of gender affirming care, which briefly enjoyed a moment of widespread expansion in many countries, is now under severe legal attack from the United States to the U.K.. Medical transition for youth has already been banned—and in some cases outright criminalized—in several jurisdictions.
There has always been pushback to the “euphoria” framework among trans advocates, some of whom criticize the idea for being far too focused on abstract, individual feelings and far too removed from material, day-to-day concerns and systemic issues such as anti-trans violence.
Last year, for example, trans historian Jules Gill-Peterson—one of today’s foremost scholars of trans history and gender transition—went on record in Them, asserting that “We don’t need any more disgusting ‘trans joy’ […] We don’t need any more ‘gender euphoria.’ Let’s just get rid of all that and spend our time delivering real things that matter to people, things like hormones and sex changes and surgeries.”
The critique is both challenging and bracing. Thinkers like Gill-Peterson push us to consider how framing trans identity and transition through the lens of “euphoria” puts the onus on individual trans people to feel positive feelings in order to change society (as though positive feelings were all that are needed to make such a change). All this, while simultaneously stealing focus from the ways society still fails to give trans people what we need to live. A key point here is that trans people need things like access to transition-related healthcare and protection from housing and employment discrimination, regardless of whether we feel euphoric or not.
There are other drawbacks to a trans liberation movement that is overly focused on “gender euphoria.” As Gill-Peterson, scholar Vivian Namaste, and others have pointed out, more recent trans activism has often been dominated by ideas about emotional validation and cultural representation at the cost of pursuing practical strategies to defend our legal rights .
Looking back on the past decade or two, it feels hard to disagree: Since the “tipping point” began, there are more trans celebrities and examples of “positive trans representation” in mainstream media than ever in history. Yet the state of trans legal rights has drastically declined and is steadily getting worse.
The problem is perhaps reflective of an even broader issue affecting human society today: Individualist, feelings-focused answers to systemic problems. Wellness and pop-psychotherapy culture flourish as answers to the collective problems of an ever looming economic recession, the cost-of-living crisis, environmental collapse and the total domination of politics by war-mongering oligarchs. As it turns out, good or even revolutionary feelings don’t necessarily translate into actual societal revolution, do they?
Maybe gender euphoria was always a flawed concept. Certainly it seems bound to fail as a standalone political strategy. And maybe, to be quite honest, there was something naïve and quintessentially Millennial about the way gender euphoria shaped the trans politics of the 2010s—something a bit too earnest and self-involved, so focused on the narrative of self-healing and self-affirmation that it missed something important about the realities of political change and practical life.
I can’t completely give up on it, though, maybe because I really do believe that even if gender euphoria isn’t enough on its own to liberate trans people, it might still have something to offer us. More broadly, I believe that the politics of healing, pleasure and joy have something to offer any social movement, if only because social movements have to feel life-giving for people to want to join and sustain them for any significant period of time. Besides, I also believe pleasure is a human right.
Yet, Perhaps the biggest problem with gender euphoria is when it becomes a requirement, something trans people have to perform rather than something we spontaneously feel as a result of being free. Whether trans people are forced to play the victim of gender dysphoria or the inspiring role model of gender euphoria, we’re having to play a part for the satisfaction of a transphobic world in order to survive. That’s dehumanizing,especially since survival is never guaranteed.
I have to believe that we can pursue freedom both within ourselves and in the material world—and indeed, I suspect that neither one is possible without the other. We can’t always live in euphoria, nor should we be expected to. But what’s the point of survival without the promise of something more?
I’m reminded here of the slogan “bread and roses,” associated with the women’s rights and labour rights movements, where the bread represents material needs such as food, shelter and safety, and the roses represent that which brings dignity to life, such access to education, culture, dignity and respect. Perhaps trans liberation must be both. We need and deserve our legal and material rights. We deserve the full range of human emotion and expression, including rage and despair and yes, euphoria too.
