Can You Trust Your Mind When it Comes to Gender Dysphoria and Should You?
Dr. Z answers whether you can ever trust your mind that you're really trans, especially when making big decisions like surgery. The answer? You absolutely cannot trust your mind. Here's why and what to trust instead.
Why you can't trust your mind: Your mind is not there to be trusted. Minds change perspectives, opinions, worldviews constantly, daily on small and big scales. Changes happen from new information, aha moments, and hormones. The mind isn't there for trust—it's there to analyze patterns within your experiences.
The laboratory approach: Think of your mind like a science lab. In high school science, you never trusted first results—you replicated experiments again and again, found outliers, looked for patterns, averages, consistency, demonstrating the same thing. Your mind does the same—it looks at your life experiences and lines up patterns to reach a conclusion. That conclusion becomes true, but it's not reached immediately.
What to trust: Experiences replicated again and again. Look back at childhood incongruency manifesting across your lifespan and domains. Take small steps toward addressing gender—if you feel better, confidence up, anxiety down, depression down, those replicated results tell you something's working.
Watch to find out why trusting experiences beats trusting your mind every time.
