this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
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So I can only speak to my own experience and I'm still a baby trans woman, so I've only gotten a small part of the experience. It's hard to explain, but I literally have never felt better about myself in my entire life than I do right now, by such a wide margin it makes me believe I've probably never actually felt good about myself before at all, I was just experiencing various degrees and flavors of self loathing. Yet to most people almost nothing is different about me yet. It's profound and subtle and life changing. There was and is a lot of fear but that's more about other people than me. I would still transition if I was the last person on earth.
To add a counter example to emphasise your (and others') experiences: I am a cis woman who, after getting into learning about queer theory, concluded that it was irrational to be so attached to my assigned gender at birth, and that it would be more logical to use they/them pronouns. I tried this for a few weeks and found that it was deeply uncomfortable and I had to stop. In hindsight, I find it utterly hilarious that I basically tried to brute force my way out of being cisgender.
I'm also a scientist, and due to the fact that women in science still face a lot of misogynistic bullshit, I have sometimes wished that I were a man so that I wouldn't have to deal with that. At first, when I had those thoughts, I wondered if this might mean I was actually a trans man, and that I should consider whether that was a path I wanted to take ("we have the technology, we can rebuild him"_robocop_meme.jpeg). However, I found that imagining myself living as a man filled me with an unpleasant gnawing sensation, like an itchiness of the soul. I think this was effectively simulated gender dysphoria?
So yeah, cis people do exist, and I'm proof. I don't understand it, but I probably never will. Gender is weird, and I just have to acknowledge it as a fact of my reality. Part of why I'm sharing my experience here is because I've contributed to the cracking of at least three people realising they were trans. I was able to recognise the discomfort of simulated gender dysphoria because of the contrast against what I usually felt, but it can be much harder to notice if it's just a background discomfort that, for some people, is mostly tolerable.
And on a nicer note, being in community with trans people helped show me that cis people absolutely can experience gender euphoria. Queer community was a huge part of how I worked through all my internalised misogyny, and now I'm at a place where I can get angry at all the patriarchal bullshit women face while also feeling free to explore what it means for me to be a woman.