Given certain beliefs that I hold, people often assume I'm a transmed; and to some degree, they are correct. But to call myself a transmedicalist point-blank, without elaborating on this school of thought and how it aligns with my own ideas/experiences would be disingenuous.

First and foremost, the definition of transmedicalism is often misconstrued. At its basest layer, transmedicalism posits that the trans experience is precipitated by—and therefore predicated upon—the presence of gender dysphoria.

Dysphoria varies from person to person and exists within a broad gradient of experiences. There are also different components of gender dysphoria. They are most commonly referred to as: mental, social, and sex.

The former two are primarily concerned with things like self-image, social status, cultural roles/expectations, aesthetic choices, methods of identification such as pronouns and gendered terms, etc. Mental and social dysphoria intersect with many different phenomena of psychological and sociocultural natures: it is the internal made external and the external made internal; it is multi-faceted and multi-dimensional; it is revealed in the interactions between the individual self and others.

Sex dysphoria, on the other hand, is one-dimensional and fixed upon an individual's physical body and how well it matches their self-concept. The most concise definition would be:

• long-term, persistent, and pervasive discomfort with the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics associated with your AGAB, matched by the inverse feelings toward the sex characteristics associated with the opposite of your AGAB
• the desire to physically transition through surgery and/or HRT in order to address this dissonance between identity and physical sex by modifying primary and/or secondary sex characteristics

According to transmedicalism, trans people, by definition, exhibit all three components of gender dysphoria (mental, social, and sex) to a clinically significant degree.

This definition is an important ontological distinction from other methods of articulating the trans experience, which tend to only include mental and social dysphoria. Examples of such criteria are: the presence of gender euphoria (i.e., a trans man's joy at being perceived as a man) without corresponding gender dysphoria (i.e., a trans man's discomfort at being perceived as a woman), gender nonconformity, non-normative gender presentations/roles/interests, etc. Within the purview of transmedicalism, these phenomena are not qualifying enough on their own without sex dysphoria.

Under transmedicalism, dysphoria exists in totality, and each component manifests in relation to each other; to that end, mental and social dysphoria are the result of a misaligned physical sex, and physical transition is its natural conclusion.

Everything else—the time of dysphoria onset, whether or not sex reassignment surgery is required to be "fully" trans, the inclusion of nonbinary people in the trans community or lack thereof, the severity of dysphoria, etc—is determined by personal opinion, subjective experience, and community consensus, which is outside the scope of transmedicalism's founding thesis.

This is just a loose illustration of the foundational tenets behind transmedicalism. In short: to be trans is to be gender dysphoric. That is, if you believe being trans = having gender dysphoria, congratulations, you are also a transmed.

Transmedicalism, or at least how I engage with the philosophy, is not so much about denying the gendered experiences of others, but rather reconfiguring definitions, labels, and gendered qualia to reflect are more specific and accurate schematic of non-normative gender identities, wherein emphasis is rightly returned to the delineation of sex-based dysphoria.

To learn more about my views on transmedicalism, you can continue reading this essay on my blog:

• insert link here once I'm done writing it lol