Notes And Reflections On Trans Joy And Euphoria

On trans joy, gender euphoria, the politics of feeling good, and what actually arms us.

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Batman and the Joker…alright so stay with me. They are seen as opposites but that’s not the point.

The point is supposed to be that you need the darkness to make the light mean something, the chaos to justify the order, the villain to give the hero a reason to exist. I have always thought this was wrong in an interesting way. What they actually are is the same. They both live in Gotham. They both operate by the logic of Gotham. Gotham stays exactly what it is, which is a hellhole, while two men with unresolved feelings about their parents claim opposing sides of the same city and call it a moral position.

The Joker makes a mess, Batman cleans it up, the mess comes back, and the people who live there keep being poor and afraid while these two work out whatever they need to work out in an elaborate and expensive way.

I am a feminist blogger writing about gender euphoria on Substack and I just opened with Batman, which should tell you how long I have been sitting with this particular problem and how badly I wasn’t bullied enough in school

I. The call

My friend and I were on the phone on a Tuesday, and she mentioned she’d posted a selfie. I pulled it up while we were still talking. She looked good, which she would, and the caption was something about trans joy, surviving as its own form of resistance. I said something dry about it, in the way you do with people you like enough to kid, and she laughed, and we kept talking about something else. When I got off the phone, I went and sat somewhere outside and couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Not from the outside. Not already knowing what I thought. Just sitting there trying to work out what exactly I’d been clowning on, and whether I’d been right to say it, and whether those were even the same question, which I’m not sure they are. Because here’s the thing: my friend wasn’t performing. She knows what’s going on politically the same as I do. She isn’t confused about the legislation or the waiting lists or the way the orgs function or any of it. She was having a good day and she posted a selfie, and the caption said what captions like that say, and I made a face about it from my kitchen while we were still on the phone, silently, in a way I couldn’t entirely defend when I tried to sit with it afterward.

The joke was about the language, specifically. Trans joy is resistance is the kind of sentence that means several things and pins down none of them, and that particular formulation has been living in my head ever since. What is the joy, specifically? What is it resisting, specifically? Who is doing the resisting, and by what means? The sentence doesn’t answer any of those. It sits there feeling like it does, which isn’t the same. I know the difference between a sentence that lands and a sentence that implies a landing and doesn’t, and that one is in the second category. So that’s what the joke was about.

But I didn’t know, sitting outside after, whether what bothered me was the slogan or the thing behind the slogan, and I still don’t know if those are separable. I’ve been going around on this long enough that I figured I should write it down, even if what I end up with is less a conclusion and more an honest account of where I’m stuck.

II. I have had the feeling

the suspicion is easy to confuse with the uglier thing, the move where someone decides that other people feeling good is a political problem that needs to be corrected. I’ve had the feeling. I’ve had it badly. There are moments in transition that go through you in a way that nothing else quite does, where the gap between who you are and how you’re being seen narrows in a way you’ve been waiting years for, and the specific texture of that closing is unlike anything I know how to compare it to. It isn’t happiness exactly, or not only happiness. It’s more like something resolving that’s been unresolved for so long you stopped noticing the tension.

I know what the word euphoria is reaching for because I’ve lived inside it. So when I poke at the politics of joy, it isn’t because I’m someone who’s never felt it. It’s because I’ve felt it, and I’m still not sure what it means or what it does, whether meaning and doing are even the right categories to put it in, and whether the certainty other people have about it is something they earned or something they needed and so they built it. I keep waiting for the argument that closes the question, and it hasn’t come.

What I do know is that the feeling doesn’t last or accumulate the way the framing implies it should. It isn’t a state you achieve and then live inside. It’s episodic. It’s subject to the same material conditions as everything else about your life. You can feel extraordinary about yourself on a Tuesday and be the most miserable you’ve ever been by the following Thursday because your insurance is fighting your prescription, and the waiting list for what you need is still eighteen months, and the person you thought was going to be in your life turns out to have been performing that intention in ways you’re only now catching up to. The feeling is real. The feeling doesn’t hold the rest of it off. That’s the thing I could never quite get the framing to account for.

And I think this is where I start having an actual problem with how the conversation goes, not with my friend’s selfie specifically, but with the broader language around it. The feeling is real, and it’s also finite, and it exists in a material life that has conditions, and those conditions don’t change because you felt good. A woman can have genuine gender euphoria every morning she wakes up and still be in a precarious housing situation, still be one job loss away from losing her medical access, still be the kind of person the state is designing legislation against. The euphoria doesn’t touch any of that. It exists alongside it, which is something, but existing alongside a set of conditions isn’t the same as addressing them.

III. The word and the paperwork

The word is older than the conversation that now surrounds it. People in trans communities were using gender euphoria since at least the mid-1970s, and back then it pointed at something close to the opposite of how it gets used today. It named the people content living across both roles, the ones who didn’t want surgery, set against the transsexuals who were defined by dysphoria and wanted the body changed. It wasn’t the opposite of dysphoria the way it gets used now. It was almost a different kind of person in the taxonomy of that moment. The word had a specific technical meaning inside a specific community, and then the community changed, and the word changed with it, and fifty years later it means something else.

Somewhere in the last decade, the word turned over and became the warm inverse of the clinical term, the name for the good feeling that comes when your gender is seen and right, set against the bad feeling when it isn’t. The researchers arrived late and didn’t do much when they got there. A 2022 paper came back with a phrase about a “joyful feeling of rightness” and a small qualitative dataset, and not much theoretical grip on what they had found or what it implied. The term had been in common use for years by the time the academics showed up to study it.

Gender dysphoria is in the DSM. It went in under that name in 2013, replacing the older gender identity disorder, and it has a specific administrative function: it’s the credential that gets you care. A diagnosis of dysphoria is what unlocks the hormones and the surgeries across most of the systems that ration those things, because you don’t get them until your distress has been documented, written down, and signed by someone with the appropriate letters. The gatekeeping runs on suffering. The system needs your pain to be measurable and certifiable before it moves. Euphoria doesn’t move it. There’s no form for how you felt the day something clicked into place. No clinic is measuring your euphoria levels against a threshold for treatment. The joy is real, and the system has no administrative category for it. Even the paperwork agrees: the distress is load-bearing, the joy is surplus.

I sit with that for a while whenever I think about it, because it tells you something real about what the systems managing trans life are doing. They’re in the business of documented suffering. That’s the input they’re built to process. The good feeling exists outside their categories entirely, which is part of why the community built its own infrastructure for it: the posts, the milestones, the affirmations, all of it is partly filling the hole that the formal systems leave. You don’t get to bring your joy to the clinic, so you bring it somewhere else.

IV. The aesthetic

The way people talk about trans euphoria has developed its own grammar, and I want to describe it carefully because it isn’t one thing and my patience for the different versions of it is not uniform. There is the personal version, which is what my friend was doing. The organizational version is what the big orgs do with the same language. What the internet does with it is its own category. They’re related, but not identical, and treating them as the same thing, which I’m guilty of when I’m being lazy and irritable, is a mistake.

The aesthetic version is the hardest one to explain my discomfort with, because it isn’t obviously wrong and yet something in it does something to me that I have to sit with. If you’ve been on trans social media at any point in the last eight or nine years, you know the visual grammar I’m describing without me having to spell it out too precisely. The soft light. The milestone posts. The before photographs posted next to the after photographs. The specific language that circulates: egg, cracking, glow-up, finding yourself, becoming. The comments underneath are warm and follow a pattern. Someone posted a milestone and people showed up for it. That’s a nice thing, and I’m not going to tell you it’s not.

But there is a genre being enforced, and genres have requirements, and the requirements of this one are not neutral. The moments that get celebrated are specific moments. The moments that look like progress. The first pass, the new voice, the before and after, the month and year markers. The before-and-after format treats transition as a story with a particular shape, and the shape it prefers is upward. The posts that don’t follow the upward shape, the ones about the gap between where you are and where you thought you’d be by now, the ones about the people who were supposed to be there and are not, the ones about the day you woke up and didn’t feel euphoric and didn’t feel like yourself either and didn’t know what you were supposed to do with that, those posts exist but they don’t circulate the same way. They’re not the genre. They don’t get picked up in the media packages. The amplification system prefers the upward shape, and so the upward shape becomes what trans experience looks like from the outside, which then shapes what trans people feel licensed to present when they’re presenting themselves.

The other thing the aesthetic creates is a witnessing economy. There is a specific kind of behavior around euphoria content from people who aren’t trans, the accounts that share it with captions about being honored to witness, the spaces where people come to feel good about trans people feeling good, and I find this harder to talk about without sounding ungrateful, because the people doing it aren’t being malicious. But the effect of turning someone’s good feeling into content for someone else to consume and feel moved by is that the feeling stops being just a feeling and becomes a product, and products have requirements that feelings don’t. The product has to be legible. It has to be the kind of thing you can share with a caption that reflects well on the person sharing it. Joy that is complicated, or dark, or mixed, or located in parts of trans experience that don’t translate easily into shareable content, that joy is harder to fit into the economy and so it gets left out of it.

There’s also something about the before-and-after format that I’ve been turning over for a while. Before-and-after as a structure requires that you identify a before. That you treat a point in your own past as the wrong version, the one you were trying to get away from, and frame your current self as the arrival. The format has its own logic and its own emotional demands, and those demands are not neutral. For people whose relationship to their past is more complicated than that, for whom the pre-transition self was not a mistake to be escaped but a person who survived something and got here, the before-and-after doesn’t quite fit. And yet the before-and-after is the genre. The milestone post is the genre. If you’re going to participate in the public language of trans joy, you’re participating in a set of forms, and the forms have requirements you didn’t get to set.

I’m not sure what to do with my observation that I never participated in any of this publicly. The moments I’ve had, I sat with privately, and I’m working out whether that’s because I’m private about those things, or because the public version of them would require me to perform them in a genre I have mixed feelings about, or because the witnessing economy does something to me that I don’t want done. Probably some combination of all three. What I know is that the feeling and the public performance of the feeling are not the same thing, and conflating them is a mistake the culture around trans joy has been making for a while.

V. Two trans people get funded

What the good feeling becomes once it leaves the body is what I can’t stomach. There are two trans people who will reliably get money put behind them. One is in legible pain: the case study, the figure in the violence report, the person whose story ends badly enough to move a liberal donor to open their wallet. The other is thriving on cue, holding her transition up as proof that the whole thing works out, giving the same donor a version of events that ends well and makes them feel their money went somewhere good. Suffering for the sympathy budget, or shining for the brand budget. The first I’ve watched my whole life. The second is newer, and it speaks in the language of joy.

The documentary needs you smiling on a bright afternoon in its final four minutes so the audience can file out feeling like the arc bent the right way. The grant application, and I’ve read more of these than I wanted to, asks in writing for stories of trans resilience and trans joy. It does not ask for stories of trans people in the middle of something that hasn’t resolved. It does not have a line for the gray space. It wants the before and the after, the low and the high, the proof that there is a high. It will fund the footage where you’re fine. It has no budget for the footage where you’re coming apart, because that footage doesn’t move the donor in the right direction.

You know the June email. It comes from a national org with a development department. The subject line says trans joy is resistance. Inside, a photo of somebody laughing in good light, a donate button defaulted to thirty-five dollars, a paragraph about how, in a moment as dark as this one, our joy is the most radical thing we have left. My friend’s caption said something like that, in a different register, more honestly, because she was having a good day and not running a quarterly fundraise. Still, I didn’t know what to do with it in either form. If the joy is the resistance, then feeling right about yourself is a political act, which is a flattering way to describe a private experience, and nothing outside of it flinches.

The slogan does a specific thing. It lets you feel the good feeling has discharged a debt. You felt joy. That was the resisting. Nothing further is owed, please enjoy the rest of your month. It’s the most comfortable politics ever made, because it asks you to do exactly what you were going to do regardless, which is to want to feel okay. The wanting to feel okay gets reclassified as political struggle, and the political struggle therefore requires nothing from you that you were not already doing. The donate button is there to cover the operational costs of this arrangement.

Underneath that, there is the harder thing. Once joy is proof that transition works, the people who are not joyful become a problem. If your transition didn’t fix your life, if you came out the other side still broke and still as isolated as you went in, you’re off message. You’re the bad advertisement. The push to perform joy is an instruction to keep the rest of it to yourself, because the funding and the political ground depend on the smiling version staying inside the frame. I’ve felt that instruction land on me directly. Be grateful. Be radiant. Make yourself available as evidence that this was worth doing. Or, if you can’t manage that right now, be quiet about the ways in which you can’t.

The women who don’t have a shape the orgs can use are not abandoned, exactly. They just don’t get amplified. You find them in the parts of the community that don’t show up in the media packages or the grant applications, talking to each other in group chats and comment threads and DMs, and the texture of those conversations is different from the texture of the public language. More lateral. More interested in getting through the week than in demonstrating that getting through the week is resistance. Those conversations are where a lot of the mutual support happens, and they get no budget and no coverage because they are not producing content in the right genre.

VI. What I cannot answer

That is the cheap half of what I think, and I know it’s cheap because criticizing a framing costs nothing and I’ve been doing it since I was seventeen years old, and it hasn’t built anything yet. The harder question is what the joy is for, and I mean that as a hole in my own thinking rather than a rhetorical trap, because I don’t know the answer and I’ve been trying to find it.

I read the world like a materialist. I want things to do work. I want a political position to move something concrete, to change who gets what and on whose terms. Held against that standard, the good feeling comes back with empty hands. It doesn’t move a wage. It doesn’t stall a bill in committee. It doesn’t change what happens to the woman who is not having a good day, who doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for one, whose safety is decided by people who will never know whether she was happy. A woman can wake up feeling completely right about herself and be in exactly the same material situation she was in the day before: the same insurance fight, the same waiting list, the same amount of money in the account, which has not updated because she felt good on a Tuesday.

And yet I keep running into the places where this framework doesn’t quite cover the ground. If the legislation is specifically designed to make you feel wrong about your own existence, feel like your claim to be what you are is not legitimate, then feeling right about yourself is at minimum a refusal of something real. It’s pushing back against something that is specifically trying to push you in the other direction. That is not nothing. I’m not going to tell you it’s nothing. It’s not sufficient, it’s not a program, it does not address the conditions, but it is a specific rejection of a specific thing that is being done to you.

The people writing the legislation understand this, which is one of the few ways you can tell they take trans people seriously despite everything else they’re doing. They’re not writing laws against trans people feeling bad about themselves. They’re writing laws that have the effect of making it harder to feel okay, and they’re doing it because a trans person who feels okay about herself is different from a trans person who does not. She takes up more room. She argues back. She doesn’t disappear when you want her to. The joy is politically threatening to a specific set of people, and the fact that it is threatening tells you it’s doing something, even if I can’t work out what it’s doing through the framework I have available.

There is also this: the materialist demand, that everything demonstrate its utility in moving wages or bodies, might be the right demand for evaluating strategy and the wrong demand for evaluating what makes a life livable. I use it on joy because I use it on everything, but I’m not sure I’ve established that it applies. It might be that some things are preconditions rather than components of political action, and the materialist test doesn’t have a good category for preconditions. A person who’s been made to feel wrong about her own existence for long enough has less capacity for anything, including the material political work I keep asking for. The restoration of that capacity is not nothing. Whether it’s resistance in the way the slogan means is a different question, but nothing is not the right word for it either.

So I’m stuck, and I think I’ll stay stuck, and I’m being honest about it here because I’ve read enough essays that perform the resolution they didn’t reach to not want to do the same thing.

VII. The same business, in black

Here is where I have to turn the knife around, because if I take the test I just used seriously, it comes back at me before it comes back at anyone else.

Look at what I sell. I write retrospectives. How we lost the war. How the movement got captured and the radical edge filed down until it ended the way these things always end. I write cold autopsies with named sources and verifiable citations, the argument laid out carefully enough that you can’t easily argue with the conclusion without looking like you haven’t done the reading. My register is controlled grief and measured fury. My readers come away feeling clear-eyed and a little grim, sharper about the shape of the defeat, and not one material condition has shifted. Not one dollar. Not one body out of harm’s way. Nothing that was going to happen to the girl decided not to happen because I wrote a good sentence about it.

I’ve been running the same business as the people I’m criticizing. Same product, opposite color. They sell the warm feeling. I sell the cold one. The conditions that decide whether the girl lives go on sitting exactly where they were while both of us cash whatever check we cash. Despair does not feed anyone. Pessimism does not stall a bill in committee. I’ve been charging at the door for a feeling, the specific feeling of not being fooled, and calling that feeling analysis, and the only real thing separating my work from the tote bag is the palette and the footnotes.

I haven’t been examining what I get from the cold register, and I should. There is a comfort in being the person who sees clearly. It’s its own kind of warmth, the warmth of having the right read on a situation, of being rigorous when other people are sentimental, of knowing whose hand is on what and being able to name it. That feeling of lucidity is pleasurable in the same way that euphoria is pleasurable: it doesn’t build anything, it exists in the moment of having it, it doesn’t make the conditions change, but it feels good to be inside it. I’ve been selling that feeling and calling it a political project, and they’ve been selling their feeling and calling it resistance, and I’m not sure the distance between those is as large as I’ve been assuming.

That is uncomfortable to say. It destabilizes something I rely on about how I understand my own work. But I think it’s probably true, and I would rather it be true and said than true and not said, because I’ve written enough essays about other people doing exactly that not to be able to give myself a pass on it.

The self-criticism has a limit, though, and I want to be precise about where the limit is. There is a version of this conclusion that collapses into everything is equivalent, nothing matters, do what makes you feel okay. I don’t think that. A correct analysis of how the world works is better than an incorrect one, even if neither produces the outcome you want on its own. A map that shows you where the wall is has value, even if you can’t break through the wall by looking at the map. The analysis can identify real things that the slogan cannot, and that distinction matters even if both of them are falling short of the political work that needs doing. The problem is not that analysis is worthless. The problem is that analysis does not automatically become politics, and I’ve sometimes written as if it does.

VIII. Weapons

There is a line I keep coming back to, from a short piece by Gilles Deleuze about the dispersed, network-form control that manages contemporary life, worth reading if you have not. “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.” For a long time, I read it as a tone instruction. Put the feelings down and get to work. But I think it’s doing something more precise than that, and the something more precise is what I’ve been trying to find words for across this whole essay.

The quarrel I’ve been having with myself, joy against despair, optimism against pessimism, is a quarrel about which feeling is correct. Which is the right response to the situation we’re in? Which one has the appropriate politics built into it? Deleuze’s line does not answer that question. It dismisses it. Hope and fear are the same kind of thing, two ways of having a feeling about what is coming while staying still, two ways of being oriented toward the future rather than oriented toward what you can do right now. The line throws both of them out with the same motion and leaves you with a different question entirely. Not: how should I feel about this? But: what does this arm me with?

That is the only question I’ve found that survives contact with the actual world. Not: is this authentic? Not: is this sufficiently radical in its framing? Does it arm you? Does it give you something you can use against the thing that is trying to end you, or diminish you, or keep you manageable and small and contained in a version of yourself that takes up less room?

I put that question to the joy, and it stops being one undivided thing immediately. Some of it arms you. The euphoria that makes a woman stop apologizing for her own face, stop agreeing to the smaller life, stop accepting the version of herself that other people find more comfortable, that is a weapon, and the people writing the laws understand it as one. That is why so much of the legislation is architecturally designed to prevent the feeling from ever forming. It wants you to stay in doubt about whether you are what you are. The feeling of being correct about yourself is politically threatening to a specific set of people. That is real information. It means the feeling has some relation to power, even if I can’t work out exactly how.

And some of the joy disarms you. The joy that makes you feel you’ve done the resisting and you can rest now. The joy the org emails you so that you will feel something has been handled and you can stop asking what is being handled and by whom. The joy that is the end of the sentence rather than the beginning of one, that requires you to be grateful and radiant and available as evidence, that has genre requirements attached to it and punishes you quietly when you don’t meet them. Same word. Opposite function. I’ve been running around inside the distinction between those two things for this entire essay, and what I’ve found is that the distinction is real, even if I can’t state it as a clean rule. You feel it in the body when you are inside the armed kind, because it makes you want to do something, and you feel it in the body when you are inside the disarmed kind, because it makes you want to sit down.

Then I have to run the same check on my own despair, because that sorts out too, and I haven’t been doing that sorting. The pessimism that correctly identifies who is profiting from this situation, that burns off a comfortable lie and shows you whose hand is on the lever: that one is doing something. It gives you better information. It arms you with a more accurate map. The pessimism that is a mood, a register, a way of feeling like the serious one in the room while nothing in the room changes: throw that out with the hope, because it is the same product with worse aesthetics.

So I’m trying to quit grading the feeling. Which is, if I’m being straight about it, a harder project for me than any of the writing, because grading the feeling is the thing I’m best at and the thing I’ve been doing for long enough that it sometimes passes for a politics when it is just a habit. Whether the feeling comes in warm or comes in cold is not the question. What it makes possible, what it lets you refuse, what you can do from inside it that you could not do from outside it: that is the question. Find the weapon. Stop confusing it with the decoration, in either direction, and stop letting the mood, warm or cold, do the work that only a decision can do.

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