Keywords

Key Points

  • ‘Euphorias’ are conditions of feeling happy and comfortable within uncomfortable contexts—bearing difficulties well.

  • Euphorias are increasingly used in metaphoric and material descriptions of positive identity and/or bodily experiences for marginal sex, gender, or sexuality diverse groups.

  • If considered critically, euphorias may counter overreliance on deficit models for LGBTIQ+ people’s research, services, and lives.

  • Euphorias are not validated like, and have complex relationships to, ‘dysphorias’.

  • Euphoria research lacks larger cohorts; lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersex people; youth; and institutional contexts.

Introduction

I have wondered if cisgender people might experience it, too. As being cisgender is the norm, my initial suspicions were that it was a uniquely trans experience, because normalcy brings with it an innate mundanity. However, I think gender euphoria is just the act of being seen—by yourself or by someone else. When you are transgender, that feeling is often very elusive which means that the experience of it feels almost spiritual; the clouds part and for a moment everything feels right (Fury, Queer Non-Binary Writer). [1]

‘Euphorias’ suggest ‘pleasure’ within, and related to, ‘difficult’ conditions. This book offers a broad umbrella conceptualisation of euphoria as pluralistic (there being ‘euphorias’); expressing positive experiences of sex, gender and sexuality identities or embodiments problematised by ‘illness’ constructions and discriminatory contexts. As an LGBTIQ+ researcher, absorbing steady streams of suicidality data unsettled and (re)framed my lenses on LGBTIQ+ experience well beyond ‘work’ hours. Positive psychologies promised relief merely by denying my community’s difficulties; I sought alternate framings. Foregrounding euphorias—acknowledging difficulties without exclusively centring them—offers healthier nuanced positions for LGBTIQ+ researchers, LGBTIQ+ people broadly and community (re)framings combatting our disordering and victimising political misuses. This chapter argues that exploring ‘euphorias’ across larger data on marginal sub-groups within shared contexts is necessary to understanding key types and typicalities. It firstly defines euphorias, secondly reviews euphoria research, and finally problematises simplistic dysphoria and euphoria lenses before providing chapter outlines.

Background to ‘Euphoria’

What Are Euphorias?

Several fields of knowledge define euphorias as comprising (1) positive feelings, (2) within negative conditions of stimulation. ‘Euphorias’ described:

  • Medicines’ effectiveness on patients in circa 1680s+ medical Latin [2].

  • Bearing sickness or discomfort well in circa 1720s+ medical Greek eu ‘well’ + pherein ‘to carry/bear’ [2].

  • Joyous emotion and/or physical highs surrounded by lows in 1800s+ alienism, psychiatry and psychogeriatrics stimulated by internal mental illnesses like bipolar disorder, mania and dementia [3], external sources like drugs or media [4]; and/or denial of negative conditions or contexts [5].

  • Substance-related or addictive disorder symptoms in 1980s+ Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR) [6] lists of stimulant use disorder’s associated features (p. 636) and stimulant intoxication’s clinically significant problematic behavioural or psychological changes (p. 640) and diagnostic features (p. 641).

  • Spending, capital and asset value highs surrounded by market slumps or falls in 1990s+ economic and housing literatures [7], suggesting denial of unhealthy markets.

In these discourses, euphorias are mentioned for the negative conditions they indicate and thus, barely discussed. Euphorias are more focal in gender euphoria literature.

What Are Gender Euphorias?

‘Gender Euphorias’—though poorly established in theoretical or empirical research literature [8, 9]— can in practice be used especially by transgender and gender diverse (TGD) people to describe metaphoric or somatic positive feelings and excitement about oneself, one’s body, and/or one’s gender identity or gender [1, 10, 11]. Euphorias are sometimes discussed in relation to ‘dysphorias’—feelings of distress around incongruences between one’s experienced or expressed gender, and assigned gender [12]. Euphorias are largely unexamined and under-theorised compared to dysphoria, though there has been some basic data collection to support the notion [8, 9]. This book proposes that there may be a plurality of different euphorias, encompassing different types and experiences. It takes up the proposition within the opening quote wherein TGD writer Fury asserted euphorias have wider applications beyond TGD use—potentially encompassing cisgender and other experiences. That lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer (LGBTIQ+) people find euphorias about LGBTQ+ identity applicable in the grey literature [11] begs further examination. Emphases for LGBTIQ+ people’s euphoric occurrence, types, frequencies, and change-trends were research gaps demanding investigations, starting with existing research literature.

Sex, Gender & Sexuality Euphoria Research

Have Sex, Gender, or Sexuality Euphorias Been Studied?

Research on marginal sex, gender, and sexuality groups’ euphorias is minimal. Studies are mostly recent to the last few years, largely from the West (United States, Canada, and Australia) and focussed on practices stimulating gender euphoria mainly within transgender and gender diverse (TGD) populations [8, 9, 13,14,15]. Firstly, individual trans people have discussed their experiences and frameworks for achieving positive gender experiences including euphoria such as Benestad—a medical doctor, a family therapist, and a sexologist [13]. Benestad discussed how their gender therapy does not aim at changing the clients’ perception of self, but at changing perceptions surrounding the client through strengthening their self-confidence, educating their networks, and assisting in moving from unsatisfying to satisfying lives. The optimal endpoint does not have to lie within the gender majorities or binaries, but aims at congruence between the individual’s sense of gendered or non-gendered self, and external perception of it, towards positive gendered belonging which can include elements of euphoria. In another solo reflective study, Lester—a creative drag artist and painter, explored how disruption of socially constructed gender codes in drag and painting provide opportunities for positive experiences of self [14].

Secondly, small group studies examine euphoria definitions and sources. For example, McKinney used in-depth semi-structured interviews with 13 TGD participants, to explore the ways participants both engaged with and contested hegemonic understandings of transgender embodiment at the individual, interactional, and macro levels of society [15]. McKinney argued the conceptualisation of gender dysphoria as an illness creates a trans-normative medical model that places the burden on the individual—rooted in the idealisation of medical affirmations as corrections towards legitimate, valid gender identity in binary gender models. In McKinney’s recursive dysphoria model, reframing it beyond individual models, distress results from gender euphoric desires being filtered through cis-normative cultural lenses at multiple levels. Without options for socio-cultural redress, only the linear journey from one cisgender category to the other was given to participants as a material solution to this socio-cultural dysphoria and their reactions to trans-normative frameworks often relied on gender euphoric idealised self-imaginings. A focus on euphoria instead of the dysphoria, McKinney posits, shifted participants’ focus away from pathology and towards dignity.

To better understand how trans community members and others in the LGBTQ community conceptualise the term ‘gender euphoria’, its relationship to dysphoria and sources, one team of researchers administered an online qualitative survey to 47 participants of transgender, cisgender, and non-binary participants who used the term [9]. Participants answered open-ended questions about how they would define and source euphoric experiences. Five themes emerged, with gender euphorias described as:

  1. 1.

    joyful feelings of rightness in gender/sex (‘shiny breakthroughs’),

  2. 2.

    external, internal, and/or social experiences,

  3. 3.

    originating in and circulating in online and in-person gender/sex minority communities,

  4. 4.

    oppositional to dysphorias in nature, and

  5. 5.

    in complex relationships to dysphorias.

Claims of euphorias’ potentially complex relationships to dysphorias or negativities broaden McKinney’s ideas, applying them also to LGBQ+ groups.

Finally mid-sized studies included a US study of 281 transfeminine adults using an online questionnaire noted associations with both euphoria and dysphoria for hair removal [8], the most common medical affirmation for transfeminine people. Satisfaction with one’s current state of hair removal was negatively correlated with situational body image dysphoria, depression symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and negative affect, and positively correlated with positive affect. Therefore, the researchers asserted that hair removal was associated with both decreased distress and increased positive affect—an element of euphoria. There is in the existing research, then, constructions of euphorias further to the five elements already noted above, including euphorias’ potential relationships to:

  1. 6.

    medicalisation/disordering of identity and change,

  2. 7.

    material/embodied expressions of identity and change (including but not limited to dress, beautification, or commodities),

  3. 8.

    difficult mental health around identity and its change,

  4. 9.

    fantasy, imagination, and idealisation, and

  5. 10.

    problematising socio-cultural contexts of various kinds.

These are not parameters and indeed, there are currently no validated criteria defining euphorias; these are instead possibilities to be alert to in euphorias’ explorations. Euphorias then potentially have some oppositional factors to dysphorias as the literature suggests—being potentially experienced around congruence (Beischel’s ‘rightness’) with one’s identity rather than incongruence, or enjoyment of one’s characteristics rather than significant distress. Further, the significant social impairment seen around dysphorias [6] implies euphorias around LGBTIQ+ identities or bodies may (in opposition) lead to increased social functioning. Overall, research has only considered the individual-centred experiences of adults, and privileged TGD foci. There have been no studies on youth euphorias or shared institutions—like the schools that most LGBTIQ+ people spend some time in.

Problematising Dysphoria, Disorder & Discrimination Emphases

This book’s foregrounding of euphorias does not deny or denounce dysphorias or discriminations as important theoretical concepts which the lead author contributed towards [16,17,18,19]. Rather, it allows us to deepen understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality, questioning and providing alternatives to the over-reliance on negative framings of LGBTIQ+ people. Dysphorias are often used in defining TGD people [20]. Whilst they can overlap with TGD people’s euphorias [9, 13], they are privileged above them. ‘Dysphoria’ came to greater prominence in the far shorter time of its use than ‘euphoria’. It was firstly privileged in psycho-medical definitions of TGD people where it was initially most often used for justifying medical gender transition supports [21], replacing the more pathologizing term ‘gender identity disorder’ [6]. Debates around this replacement emphasised dysphoria’s medical uses for TGD people and people with intersex variations without requiring their disordering as individuals or groups [22, 23]. Dysphorias are secondly central in much research framing of TGD people’s [24, 25] or people with intersex variations’ [26] experiences, their policy and services and even gender literature [16, 18, 27]. Thus, TGD people can feel required to overplay dysphoria in particular psycho-medical or social settings; its lack can be a key barrier to services especially for non-binary people [17, 28].

Dysphorias’ centralities for TGD people are questionable. First, dysphorias are experienced by other people. Some cisgender girls and self-identified butch lesbians report dysphorias about their breasts or being considered ‘girly’ [29]; some cisgender women feel dysphorias over inabilities to respond sexually in line with gender-based expectations [12]; and some cisgender males feel distress around masculine stereotypes in their friendships [30]. Second, gender dysphoria is not experienced by all TGD people, suggesting affirming emotion or experiences may matter more for some gender identity epiphanies [28]. Third, some TGD people only experience dysphorias in lesser degrees or frequencies, intermittently or in passing [17, 31]. Transmasculine and particularly non-binary/agender individuals find dysphoria scales inadequate for their experiences [17, 28]. Further, in socio-cultural and familial groups where stigma towards gender nonconformity is weaker or non-existent, and gender roles less prescriptive, dysphorias may be decreased. Fourth, the assumption that gender dysphorias require medical programmes of transition [21] can be problematic. Some TGD people’s dysphorias are partially or entirely overcome through personal perspectives (self-acceptance) or social changes like pronoun use, legal changes around names or gender documentation, or physical practices like chest-binding, attire and genitalia prostheses [17, 25, 31]. Systems-focussed studies have also shown that for some TGD people dysphorias can be relieved through relational, socio-cultural, and service-based systemic structural efforts at respecting their identities and language use; education, awareness-raising and inclusion; and other efforts [16]. Around 4% of TGD people who do experience dysphorias, report nothing can alleviate them [16]. Finally, international media and political networks sometimes promote widely contested models of dysphorias as rapidly absorbed by TGD youth from social trends or school-based ‘gender ideology/anti-gender’ indoctrination; within broader anti-LGBTIQ+ political campaigns [32, 33]. So whilst dysphorias have some importance for some TGD identity, affirmation processes, and service access pathways, they offer only a much-vexed portion of complex pictures. Advocacy bodies, governments in Portugal and Malta, and various researchers have promoted ‘informed consent’ models of affirmation access, relying on individuals’ sustained genuine desire for aid, towards overcoming perceived centralities for dysphorias within gender affirmation, being TGD or intersex and supporting healthcare autonomies [18, 34]. Considering euphorias, happiness and comfort could better inform developing models for LGBTIQ+ people’s identifications, decision-making, and support provision pathways.

Why (Re)consider Euphorias Now?

The Eruption of LGBTIQ+ Euphorias Outside of Research Demands Critical Thought

‘Euphoria’ as a concept is coming of age, becoming less peripheral in the thinking of everyday LGBTIQ+ people. The term ‘euphoria’ has a history of use within TGD communities, feminist and lesbian/LGBTIQ+ communities, and an observably increasing currency and spread in online and ‘real world’ gatherings. It was for example used in past journals like Urania (run by suffragettes and a transgender lawyer and scholar, 1916–1940); which took as its mission debunking notions of sex. It has recently been revived by online and artistic TGD communities (especially on YouTube and TikTok), writers and playwrights, and the HBO series ‘Euphoria’ exploring various LGBTQ+ youth characters’ emotional highs in vexed contexts around queer love, gender diversity and addiction [1, 10]. Actor Elliot Page declared his Euphoria or pure ‘trans joy’ over his 2022 Oscars’ tux [35].

The ‘live’ and public nature of discussions of ‘euphorias’, and their predominant location in identity-based online communities and alternative popular media outlets, suggests an urgent need for their more critical and careful treatment. Discussion of concepts that dominate identity-based online communities—especially for TGD people in contexts where political transphobias abound—can be driven by algorithms favouring repetitions, disinformation or misinformation and shock value; rather than research-based information [36, 37]. Political and socio-cultural views of homogenous identity-based groups can exaggerate or polarise the experiences of groups and individuals creating echo chambers foregrounding extreme experiences [38], rather than the statistically typical. There are significant research gaps on ‘typical’ euphorias typologies and change-trends. There is thus a need to both honour and moderate emerging LGBTIQ+ community-based discussions of euphorias with theory and evidence towards developing and complexifying conceptualisations using statistics on dominant trends and qualitative analyses foregrounding typicalities. Such information can carry implications for LGBTIQ+ communities’ treatment within commonly vexed mass institutional service contexts—education for LGBTQ+ people and health settings (around diagnoses) for people with intersex variations. It may also have implications for theorising happiness, building on current feminist and Queer accounts.

Feminist and Queer Suspicion of Mainstream Happiness

Feminist and Queer writings celebrate hard-won, repressed acts as heightened euphoric pleasures for marginalised (transgender, lesbian, female) identities. Jan Morris described undergoing gender affirmation as ‘a lost traveller finding the right road at last’ [39]. Audre Lorde described starvation from, and euphorically consuming, female lovers [40]. Fadwa Tuqan’s dancing, repressed by Sufi orders, became pleasurable ‘liberation’ [41]. Seminal writings however eye mainstream euphoric ideals of femininity promising liberation in advertising, propaganda, or everyday life with deep suspicion. These were denounced for hand-cuffing women to commercial, subjugating, or silencing ends. Betty Friedan for example described post-World War II women as beset with aggressively euphoric advertisements of feminine enjoyment of dishwashers, dryers, and vacuums endorsing their ‘separate domestic spheres’; (re)positioning women as without (and subordinate to) their husbands’ public working lives [42]. Whilst Friedan’s manifesto overlooked African American, lesbian, and working-class women’s necessity-based employments [43], it galvanised feminists against false counter-revolutionary gendered euphorias.

Building intersectionality into happiness critiques, Sara Ahmed and Oristelle Bonis’ ‘Feminist killjoys’ [44] posited that marginal people’s acts asserting their will to rights (around gender, race/ethnicity and sexuality discrimination) are negated as ‘killing joy’ to silence marginal groups’ cultural critiques. ‘Wilful killjoys’ are needed in socio-cultural critique and in improving critiques; joy killing work and its persistency (wilfulness) is crucial for diverse feminist and queer groups and the inclusivity of theory. For Ahmed, though emotions have psychological impacts, their cultural politics are key [45]. Some bodies/identities are allocated positive value above others through emotions in popular ideologies; some bodies associated with negative emotions become ‘othered’ outsiders [45]. Thus ‘the promise of happiness’ is a cultural construction in which pleasure is an implied or declared reward for inhabiting privileged bodies and performing idealised identities, relationships and life-scripts [46]. Happiness is most promised for positions atop white colonial, patriarchal, cis-heteronormative dyadic social hierarchies. Wilful black and LGBTIQ+ women become stereotyped as angry kill-joys and objects of fear; mainstream happiness demands compliant, silent subordination. Mainstreamed gendered, capitalist, and racialized euphoric ideals of key structures thus package acquiescence to traditional social hierarchies and inaction around inequities as ‘happiness’. Queer unhappiness is thus a ‘political gift’ (Ahmed, 2010, p. 88). Accepting the generation of others’ unhappiness and enragement allows queer people, women, and marginalised ethnic/racial groups to live in unendorsed identities and bodies, doing unsanctioned work: improving marginal lives.

Euphorias then should not be, and are not here, considered unproblematic. They can have harmful uses within commercial, patriarchal, racial, or other hierarchical structures. They are not perfect, fixed, or stable concepts. They do not necessarily ‘resolve’ dysphorias nor should they sit above (or excluding) those goals of the marginal killjoy, nor of necessary joy-killing work in socio-cultural critiques of discrimination (or discriminatory socio-cultural critiques). Euphorias do however provide different lenses for viewing the many complex possibilities around identities and bodies to consider for understandings, harms, and benefits. Accounts of positive experiences and feelings in LGBTIQ+ communities are under-represented [19, 31, 47]. They require careful, suspicious attention. Which LGBTIQ+ euphorias demand normative identities, existing hierarchical compliance, and complicity? Which defy mainstream happiness’s contracts, celebrating subversive identity manifestations or embodied enactments in Butlerian queer-troubling and norm-undoing counter-hierarchies [48, 49]? Can happiness, like unhappiness, do important psycho-social and cultural work? The commonalities for euphorias, how they change over time and change us, must be critically considered. If emotions are what move us [45], the direction of our movements matters.

Concluding Aims & Outline

Affirming yet critically driven sociological studies exploring euphoric experiences of people of diverse gender, sex and sexuality variations are needed, to overcome research gaps on a wider range of people’s potential euphorias. Quantitative data from larger cohorts and qualitative data analysed for typicality are necessary for deepening understanding of commonalities; countering online discussions’ extremist and inaccuracy tendencies; and exposing euphorias’ normalising and subversive potentials. Accordingly, this book aims to draw together data from strength-based studies, to ask:

  1. 1.

    How can we characterise typical euphoric (happy or comfortable) experiences of LGBTIQ+ people around some typical institutional engagements, and their influences?

  2. 2.

    How do these euphorias typically change over time, and what influences changes?

It specifically addresses research gaps on LGBQ+ identities, people with intersex variations, youth, and institutional settings. It includes first contributions on education and diagnosis-related euphorias. It considers these data alongside euphoria literatures and finally, this chapter’s broader questioning of euphorias’ Queer potentialities. Chapters cover:

  1. 1.

    Euphorias! This chapter reviewed euphoria literatures and considered how these relate to and offer new lenses compared to dysphoria. It argued it is timely and appropriate to (re)consider LGBTIQ+ peoples’ euphorias.

  2. 2.

    Why Be Euphorically Queer? Augmenting existing clinical, psychological, and individualist TGD euphoria frames, this chapter supplies a new broader ecological model of influences on euphorias to assist LGBTIQ+ research, therapy, and individual reflection. It adds culturally embedded Queer and feminist psycho-social accounts of affect and development. It argues for being euphorically queer towards energising responsiveness to LGBTIQ+ and other othered groups’ needs.

  3. 3.

    Education-based Euphorias! This chapter argues that more positive and affective framings of LGBTQ+ experiences are needed in education research. It draws on the 2021 LGBTQ+ You survey’s 2407 participants’ experiences of euphorias in Australian education spaces, exploring typical change-trends.

  4. 4.

    LGBTQ+ Youth Euphorias! LGBTQ+ youth points are often portrayed as victims of queer social trends, bullying or under-representation. This chapter considers 1968 LGBTQ+ students’ experiences of euphoria and their stop-start monumentality.

  5. 5.

    LGBTQ+ Professionals’ Euphorias! LGBTQ+ education staff can be fired legally by some Australian religious education institutions, and disclosure decisions are fraught in rural areas. This chapter investigates 229 LGBTQ+ professionals’ euphoric experiences of their identities, and their site-specific shifts.

  6. 6.

    LGBTQ+ Parents’ Euphorias! LGBTQ+ parents’ rights have been questioned in harmful media debates around relationship and education laws. This chapter explores the steadiness across 208 LGBTQ+ parents’ euphoric (in)experiences, showing some sit beyond external influences.

  7. 7.

    Intersex Euphorias! People with intersex variations are mostly framed within conservative psycho-medical studies which negate their bodies, identities, and health; or Critical Intersex Studies emphasising discriminatory contexts. This chapter investigates 272 survey participants’ euphorias around their intersex variations and how these changed post-diagnoses.

  8. 8.

    Setting Euphoria Agendas? Using the ecological model from Chap. 2, this chapter frames what was learned about euphorias for different groups, age-stages, contexts, and time periods, across the various studies in the book. It considers findings against existing research, applications for various stakeholders and euphoria research agendas.