Thank you for this question!
Our culture currently pushes trans people to seek surgeries, hormone replacement therapy, and other forms of medical intervention as a means of being seen as valid in our trans identities. If treatment of dysphoria wasn’t pushed upon us in order to be respected (both by cis and trans people), I think we’d see more trans people who choose to not go through invasive procedures. As nonbinary people increasingly speak up and hold space for themselves, we see less importance placed upon things like passing and seeking cis-assuming privilege. If society itself saw body parts as being inherently non-gendered, there would likely be a shift in many peoples gender dysphoria. However, gender dysphoria is as much based in society’s expectations as it is in simply feeling incongruence with one’s body.
In my own experience, I’ve met many trans women who wish to have bottom surgery and a roughly equal number who do not. As it becomes more culturally acceptable to be a woman with a penis, there will be more trans woman who elect not to undergo any form of bottom surgery. I’ve also met several trans women who had only mild bottom dysphoria but still went through with a vaginoplasty because it seemed like what they *had to do* to be seen as women. None of them regret their choice, but they acknowledge that if they’d been taught that a woman with a penis is valid, they may have opted to deal with the mild dysphoria rather than go through surgery.
That all said, there will ALWAYS be trans people who require medical treatment of their dysphoria. Many, many nonbinary people, for instance, still seek surgeries to change their bodies. I think that in and of itself is proof that dysphoria isn’t always socially influenced. You can intellectually understand that genitals, breast tissue, and fat distribution don’t equal gender, but if your own genitals, breast tissue, and fat distribution cause intense dysphoria, the only thing to fix that is to change what is causing the dysphoria. In my opinion, seeking to change secondary sex characteristics that don’t match our mind is pretty much the same as seeking to remove a cyst, lipoma, or other skin growth. There is a kind of dysphoria associated with something growing on our body that we don’t want to be there. I think gender dysphoria is similar to this. Even if a growth is benign and will cause us no harm to leave as-is, most people don’t want a softball-sized lipoma on their arm and will do whatever they can to hide it until it can be removed. (Yeah, I watch a lot of Dr. Pimple Popper)
What I think we are moving away from is the “born in the wrong body,” narrative. Rather, trans people are looking at their bodies in the mirror and saying, “adding this or removing that or altering this will make me feel more at home in the body I have.” As our conceptions of sex and gender evolve, the sense of “wrongness” that drives gender dysphoria changes to a neutral sense of incompleteness or incongruence, rather than maleness or femaleness being associated with the parts we wish to alter.
Increasingly, dysphoria is moving toward being seen as a non-gendered issue, and as that understanding percolates through the trans community and society at large, the medical procedures we seek will simply not be themselves gendered, but many of us will still seek them to achieve outer congruence with our inner feelings of how we should look. But there will always be a very large percentage of us who seek medical intervention to affirm our bodies, even if that affirmation is not to convince others that we are the gender with which we identify.
Binary conceptions of gender will always influence our society, and while we may acknowledge that body parts have no gender, most trans people will still wish to have a body that differs from the one they were born with. There is a social benefit to isolating the concepts of gender from secondary sex characteristics, but binary trans people are still going to be binary in the future. The human experience is majority binary, and no matter how much queer theory influences how we see our bodies, I don’t see dysphoria changing significantly in the future to adjust to social norms.
For many of us, being born with certain body parts or hormones is something that will need changed regardless of how open-minded society becomes about gender norms, nonbinary experiences, and secondary sex characteristics as they apply to gender.
