Ways in Witch Overcompensating Feeds Into Your Self Doubts.
How does your overcompensating history contribute to doubts about whether you're transgender? Dr. Z explains.
This video is more relevant for people 30 and up—you need life experiences to accumulate overcompensatory history. (Younger people may have some history too.) Your overcompensating history is now causing and contributing to your doubts.
The type of history is incredibly binary—historically, culturally, and socially seen as the opposite end of gender spectrum. Why is overcompensatory function so binary? Sometimes to repress your true gender identity, you have to overcompensate to an extreme—engage in very extreme stereotypical activities belonging to a particular gender to stuff away gender identity.
Trans feminine overcompensatory history: Enlisted in military, air force, army; engaged in activities or careers stereotypically very masculine (construction work, bodybuilding).
Trans masculine overcompensatory history: In beauty pageant, awarded prom queen of high school, in ballet or stereotypically strong feminine activities, modeling career.
You accumulate this history to unconsciously convince yourself you really belong to the gender. Now you have a bank account of history sitting inside your psyche. You're older, living life, suddenly realizing you're suffering from gender dysphoria—the gender you were assigned at birth is incongruent to who you are, you don't feel comfortable.
Not only are you doubting whether your mind is making it up (wondering "am I going crazy?"), but if you have this very gender-specific overcompensatory history, it's feeding the doubts.
Watch to find out why trans feminine people tell themselves "I can't possibly be a woman because if I was a woman, there's no way I would have served in military, been in war, done bodybuilding," why trans masculine people tell themselves "how can I possibly be trans masculine/trans man if I was queen of my high school, in beauty pageant, had modeling career background," why that history isn't a measuring stick (it's telling you that's something you overcompensated for—you went to such extreme back then to repress it, stuff it down, not have thoughts/feelings of dysphoria), and why the REAL measuring stick is how you're feeling right now in relationship to your biological sex and secondary sexual characteristics.
