How Prevalent is Social Gender Dysphoria?--Sasha Responds

Added: 2026-05-21

[00:00:00]Hello and welcome to another Sasha responds video where I respond to questions and comments that you guys leave for me here on YouTube and these are selected by my producer. So I'm going to look at today's question or comment and give you guys my initial thoughts, reactions, and talk about it.

[00:00:16]So today's question comes [music] from one party rule r o u l e very clever.

[00:00:24]Okay, this is a long one. So it says, do we know how prevalent GD gender dysphoria is in the general population?

[00:00:32]When I try to find out, it seems like people only research acute GD the kind that sends people to their GP for HRT their general practitioner for hormone replacement therapy. I've long suspected that milder forms of GD are not all that uncommon.

[00:00:51]I'm referring to GD that is more diffuse and probably entirely a result of culture. Maybe I'm overestimating its prevalence because I have had it and sometimes still experience social dysphoria social gender dysphoria.

[00:01:06]>> [snorts] >> It's not so much about the body although it can end up affecting your relationship with your body.

[00:01:12]It's not that you feel like you shouldn't be your sex or that your brain is different than the rest of your body that your brain sex is different from the rest of your body or that you want to be perceived as the opposite sex.

[00:01:25]It's more a sense of resistance/aversion/unease/cringe at some of the ways your sex is portrayed, represented, stereotyped, and contextualized and the thought that these concepts might be projected onto you in some way.

[00:01:43]Oh my gosh, I really like this question but it's not over. There's more.

[00:01:48]I've had this since I was a child but I was always very clear that the problem was culture and concepts not my body. I feel like this type of GD is very common in both males and females, and people do all kinds of things to alleviate it, like dissociating from or attacking people who exemplify the hated stereotype, for instance, or taking up interests or presenting yourself in a way that very obviously contrasts you with the hated stereotype. But, I can't get a sense of how common this truly is.

[00:02:24]One Pretty Rule, that is a great question. I love this question. I think it's fascinating. My first question is, how old are you? I would love to know if you end up seeing this video, and you don't mind sharing, tell tell us how old you are, because I'm sure I'm almost positive that most people who have that type of dysphoria these days are now identifying into a different category. But, I'll get to that. So, we're talking here not about like my literal anatomy is wrong, but I have an aversion to being associated with the stereotypes and norms based on the sex that I have.

[00:03:06]So, um it's very interesting, because actually I feel a little bit torn. I guess I'm not sure where I stand on this, though part of me really agrees with you, and then part of me is not so sure. And I'll tell you kind of the differences.

[00:03:22]I agree that culture can be too restrictive at times. And, you know, questioning culture for many people, you know, when we start examining, like, why is my birth sex associated with this or that stereotype?

[00:03:39]Can I like break that down? Can I deconstruct that? Can I piece it together in a different way? Can I think differently from that? That can be very freeing, and in fact, kind of analyzing these norms is what has created so much progress for us in lots of different ways over decades. You know, like every time there's a sort of civil rights movement, it's because people have taken the time and the bravery to question norms and say, "Hey, it doesn't have to be this way." So, in a way, I think you're right. But, what's really strange is that you would expect, if it is culture, you would expect that the places that have the most restrictive gender norms, for example, would show the highest prevalence of gender dysphoria, whether it's the acute kind or maybe this mild kind that you're talking about. But, we don't actually see that. This is what's strange. This is why I feel conflicted.

[00:04:42]In, you know, I can speak a bit about my own culture. Like, I was born and raised here in the West. I was born in Canada.

[00:04:49]I was raised in the US, but my family originally is Egyptian. And so, you know, when I talk to my parents about things when they were young, and I have friends in Egypt now, and I talk about the culture, my impression, and I think any of you who come from, you know, different backgrounds or from another country, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.

[00:05:10]In places like the Middle East, where gender norms are much more rigid, like I just spent a lot of time in the Middle East this year, we don't see people kind of bucking gender norms in the way that we think. And, you know, in the question, I think you said you see people kind of adopting um interests that on purpose buck that stereotype. You don't really see that so much in cultures that have the most restrictive gender norms. It might be because challenging those norms is so heavily policed and restricted that people wouldn't even dare, but there's something interesting about how when a culture starts to open up and question these norms, how that can really accelerate people's um aversion to those norms. And I think it's also because >> [clears throat] >> the more flexibility we see in a culture, the more we notice those little examples that are inflexible. Whereas if you have a very inflexible culture, even the smallest little deviation against the norm feels like a big victory, you know? So, you know, we see for example, in Saudi Arabia, they're finally letting women drive, like after basically the rest of the world has done that. And so, the progress is slow, but like that seems like a huge gender norm violation or break or freedom, of course. Um but like here we'd be like, "What do you What's the big deal? Like we've all been driving forever." So, that's interesting, right? So, like the It depends on the context. It's It's a silly analogy, but I often think like if you have a jarful of blue marbles and there's one red marble in there, you're really going to notice that one red marble. But if your jar is a mix of blue and red marbles, maybe, I don't know, you wouldn't notice it. I don't know if that makes sense to you guys. That's kind of the weird place my brain goes.

[00:07:02]Um okay, so I want to just talk about what I see as the more the more broad pattern here, cuz as you guys might notice, especially maybe in these Sasha responds videos, I think gender is a great kind of microcosm of what's going on in our cultures and psychologies more broadly.

[00:07:26]And I think it's really interesting to examine these questions and then zoom out and be like, "Okay, well what else is happening on a bigger scale?"

[00:07:36]Um I think it really frustrates people, some people, to be misjudged and to be misunderstood. So, this person is saying, "I've had this experience for a long time. I hate being associated with these like less desirable kind of stereotypes with my sex. And so, maybe I have pushed against that. I have explicitly tried to prove to people or demonstrate to people that I'm not like that." And I think this stems from it can be really awful and annoying when we know who we are and other people misattribute things to us that are not us. That's very annoying and it's very frustrating. And you know, again, take it outside of the realm of gender. All you I guess I'll give like a couple of examples. Let's say a person in their 20s kind of got into a weird period of their life. They associated with people who didn't have their bench best interests at heart and they ended up committing a crime or something.

[00:08:41]And they served some time, they went to prison or whatever for a short period of time and got out and they they totally changed their life around for the better. The fact that they have a criminal record is going to follow them around for the rest of their life.

[00:08:57]Employers, you know, dating potential partners, all of these people in their life who discover this may attribute characteristics to this person that might be so far from who they are now. And that's unfortunate and I can only imagine how devastating that would feel. And at the same time, you know, you take almost an opposite example. If somebody is a police officer some people will attribute them to being like on a power trip or being biased or all these things. Maybe they're not at all. Maybe that's not at all the reason that they went into law enforcement. So, the point is that we as individual people whether we intend to or not our attributes, our history, our characteristics, our biological sex, our appearance, they are there in the world visible to others and others are going to view those characteristics and make snap judgments about us.

[00:09:57]We can't escape that. There's nothing you can do to escape that.

[00:10:02]Now, I know some people might say, well, you can change your appearance or you can choose thoughtfully who to disclose information to. Of course, there's some degree of control we have, but at the end of the day, if you're going to be a human being out in the world or even on the internet, people are going to look at you and make assumptions and those assumptions may be dead wrong.

[00:10:23]What are we going to do about that? You know, I think this is almost [clears throat] an existential question that we all have to deal with.

[00:10:33]And it's frustrating and it's annoying because our lives, the way we live our lives, may be one particular way that we feel good about, we feel proud of, but then in a moment somebody who doesn't even know us can make a snap judgment that's totally wrong and really feels icky. Like, I know that feeling, everybody knows that feeling. We all know that feeling and it's really annoying.

[00:10:57]But, I think the reason I am so interested in psychology and how some aspects of Eastern philosophy have woven their way into certain kind of therapeutic approaches and modalities is that we can't control others. We can only control how we make sense of those experiences and whether or not we work really hard to remold ourselves to try to elicit certain responses from others.

[00:11:32]And I love, you know, thinking about kind of disidentification.

[00:11:38]Like, if I wasn't so hung up on whether I'm female or whether I'm male, and what that means to others, and what that implies about me, let's strip that down. I mean, this is a kind of a practice in in Eastern philosophy that's been woven into some therapeutic approaches of like disidentification. Okay, well, let's take that away. I'm just a human.

[00:12:00]Does that give me more freedom in how I think about myself? And like, it doesn't matter if another person sees me and thinks, you know, for example, like, oh, that woman probably is a a shopaholic that can't lift more than 10 lb. That might be an assumption that some people might make if they just see me, right?

[00:12:20]But, I need to choose how I think about myself and whether or not the opinions of others matter. Now, we're social creatures. We can't fully get away with this, and it's pretty ingrained in us to care what others think to some degree. But, we also have an incredible wealth of knowledge and different philosophical traditions and ways that we can think about these existential crises of being human. And so, I just would really encourage people to to ask, like, is it my responsibility to try and mold the perception of other people with my behavior and how I'm trying to prove myself this or that kind of person?

[00:13:03]And is that interfering with your authenticity, right? Another thing that I think is actually really important here to think about is that sometimes stereotypes exist because they are recognizable broad patterns within a category of people, right?

[00:13:25]I'm going to give a very silly example, but there's the stereotype that women are more emotional than men. I know this is old and I know probably a lot of you are like, "Ah, this is so stupid." Okay, but it's a stereotype that's existed for a long time. And actually, when I made the video about um kind of like breaking the gender binary and when people start examining and questioning gender norms, how that can create kind of a hyper-vigilance about gender and stereotypes and can create some gender dysphoria. I made a video about that. And one of the things I did in that video is just pulled up some examples from the internet of like, "What are masculine traits and what are feminine traits? Or what are women's traits and men's traits?" And of course, these things are stereotypes and they're norms, but they're you know, they're kind of silly, but they probably exist to some degree for a reason. And so, the point I'm trying to make here is we may notice that there's a stereotype about our sex. Let's talk about sex first.

[00:14:26]That we find aggravating, we don't think it applies all the time, we hate being associated with it, but there may be moments when that stereotype holds some truth.

[00:14:38]And what do we do with that fact? If there's a moment, I'll use myself as an example. And of course, notice, you know, we all change throughout a lifetime through our developmental process. So, who you are at 20 is different from who you are at 45, which is different from who you are later. But like, I was pretty emotional in my 20s. I was a little bit impulsive. I was a little bit um you know, at the whim of my emotions.

[00:15:06]And I feel quite differently now. I'm in my 40s and I've probably you know, evened out in some ways and I've learned to manage it, but I really hated that stereotype. And at the same time, it was really important for me to have a different relationship with that aspect of my personality so that I was not fighting against myself and instead learning to kind of acknowledge and be able to own up to things and be able to have a more honest relationship with myself. And I think this probably happens in a lot of different ways with a lot of different people. And I definitely think when it comes to gender dysphoria, I have certainly worked with individuals, let's say female people, AFAB people, who hate the fact that they, let's say, are more sensitive. And they may feel their emotions very strongly. And what I often call this is having, you know, strong feelers.

[00:16:05]And it in a way it's like, well, if you treat that as something negative that you're trying to push against, that's going to land on you a certain way, but if you say, you know, I am someone who can really sense the emotions of people around me, and I am strongly impacted by like seeing a sad scene in a film, or, you know, if I see an an a bird on the side of the road that got hit by a car, like I feel those things strongly. And rather than saying, "Oh my gosh, I hate being sensitive, or I wish I wasn't sensitive, or I'm going to act like so tough cuz I don't want to embrace those things about myself."

[00:16:44]What if we shifted the paradigm a little bit and said, you know, "This is a part of who I am, and actually, even though it can be challenging, there are probably gifts about this as well.

[00:16:55]You know, there are probably really special things that I can tap into, and that I can experience, and that I can notice, and that I can feel, and maybe even help other people because I have that ability myself." So, I think sometimes when it comes to stereotypes and bucking against them, if we think about integration and the fact that we all are whole human beings.

[00:17:19]And I'm sorry, I don't care who you are, nobody is 100% one way or 100% another.

[00:17:26]We all have elements, soft elements, hard elements, gentle elements, aggressive elements. We all hold those things within us. So, I would invite people to say, "Okay, if there's a stereotype I hate, is there also some of me in there? Like, am I reflected in that stereotype sometimes? And if so, what's so bad about it? And is it all bad? I mean, sometimes we have a way in in our culture of kind of mocking certain characteristics or certain features or certain certain traits, excuse me, but why? Are they really something to be mocked or is there something valuable in there, too? So, I'm [clears throat] just very aware that we tend to we really want to categorize things as good or bad and I think that all traits probably have good and bad elements within them and nothing is all one way or all the other. So, I don't know, it got me thinking about a lot of things. I really appreciate your question here. It was a really um really deep one. So, One Party Rule, thank you so much for writing. And for those of you watching, if you want me to respond to one of your comments or questions, please do continue leaving messages for me here in the YouTube channel and we're keeping one foot in reality and one in possibility. I will see you next time and if you want to keep watching Sasha responds videos, just click right here.

[00:18:53]This information is meant for educational purposes only >> [music] >> and not as a substitute for mental health services.

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