Re: Gender dysphoria as a psychological thing versus a biological thing. As was mentioned, there are biological markers of gender dysphoria. It's not especially well understood, yet - it's only relatively recently that medical science even began to acknowledge transgender identity as a legitimate state of being, let alone actively studying it - but there are studies that point towards aspects of brain activity and neurochemistry that are consistent between cis and trans people of the same gender, even if their reproductive organs are different.
Some stuff about me, since we're on the subject: I'm not one of the people who just always knew, in some way, that they were transgender. Even when I could tell my interests didn't quite match up with the gender I was given, as a child, I didn't see anything strange or inherently wrong with my body. It just was. So when puberty started, and I suddenly started getting intense stress migraines, prolonged bouts of depression, and chronic exhaustion, it was pretty baffling. Dysphoria is a hard thing to describe. For me, it felt like my body had stopped being mine, that I had stopped being me; my consciousness was a ghost, inhabiting the walking corpse of some poor kid whom I started to pity and resent in equal measure. I wasn't sure "I" even existed, or if I was just the delusion of this bizarre alien creature I was tethered to, and I would one day just dissipate into the ether, replaced by some other imaginary entity dreamed up by whoever it was this body actually belonged to. That was an odd few years.
Point is, what changed all that was hormone therapy. It wasn't an identity thing - I wasn't even sure I had an identity, at that point - but as soon as I started blocking the hormones my body was naturally producing, that's when I started feeling human again. That's when I realised how fucking insane I had gotten. It seems like such a small thing, to be able to look at your own hand and recognise it as yours, but even now, I can't help but marvel at the feeling.
My own gender is more or less a work in progress. I still don't feel all that strongly about it, so whatever, I figure I'll just make however many little changes I feel like making, and see where I end up. Maybe I'll even settle back into the gender I was raised as! Who knows! It's a mystery. My biological sex, though? Total mess. It was exactly, precisely, exquisitely wrong. As a dry, clinical, scientific matter, seperate from issues of culture and psychology and identity, my own body biologically fucked itself in the head, and required medical correction as a basic matter of survival.
So like, I might not have a terribly scientific basis for it, but from my (unreliable, unstable) sample size of 1, there is very much a biological component to gender dysphoria. It's also part of why I really dislike the practise of describing people as "biologically male" or "biologically female", because even from a medical perspective, the human body can be a total clusterfuck when it comes to sex and gender.
