What are the Dangers of Overcompensating with Your Biological Sex?
Dr. Z talks about overcompensation and how when you tend to overcompensate, it costs two very big issues that tremendously affect you moving forward.
When we're dealing with gender dysphoria—feeling incredibly incongruent with our biological sex—that pain tends to fluctuate. Sometimes you wake up feeling less dysphoric, sometimes incredibly dysphoric. Gender dysphoria waves in frequency and duration. As human beings, you tend to find ways to deal with that internal pain and struggle.
One of the ways you find that helps deal with gender dysphoria is overcompensating. Overcompensation is incredibly common, especially in people who haven't accepted their gender identity yet or who haven't come out yet.
What is overcompensation? Instead of going over to the binary you want to achieve (the gender you identify with), because it's too painful, too overbearing, maybe you're not ready yet—you go to the extreme in the other direction. You overcompensate and over-engage in gender expression, gender presentation, and gender activities that relate to your biological sex, your assigned gender at birth, the part of you that you feel most incongruent with.
Watch to find out why overcompensation is dangerous (leads to over-identification, normalizes pain, tells yourself you don't need to transition) and how it holds you back from living authentically.
