Euphorias: The Joy of Being Yourself in Your Body, Gender and Sexuality
Tiffany Jones, 2023
For decades, research has studied LGBTQ+ people through pain: bullying, diagnoses, dysphoria. Tiffany Jones asked a different question and surveyed more than two and a half thousand people: when do they feel good in their body, gender and sexuality? The result is a map of euphorias, from a name said correctly to a love of your body that can be learned.
Who it is for
For anyone who wants to understand where the joy of being yourself in your body and your identity comes from: for LGBTQ+ people, their loved ones, teachers and everyone who wants to support others.
Paying too much attention to the rain keeps you from seeing the rainbow.
When the clouds part for a moment
A non-binary author writing under the name Fury describes a feeling that for a long time had no place in science. Gender euphoria, in Fury's words, is simply being seen: by another person, or by yourself when you look at yourself. Transgender people rarely get this feeling, so it feels almost like a revelation. The clouds part, and for a moment everything feels right.
Tiffany Jones, a professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, has spent many years studying how LGBTQ+ people live in schools and in medicine. Almost everything she has read and collected has been about pain: bullying, discrimination, diagnoses and thoughts of suicide. Positive psychology promised relief, but, in Jones's view, only at the price of denying these difficulties. She needed a different view: to acknowledge the difficulties without making them the only subject.
So this book came about. It rests on two large surveys: 2,407 LGBTQ+ students, teachers and parents from Australian schools, and 272 people with intersex variations, that is, with innate differences in sex characteristics. They were not asked what hurts. They were asked when they felt good in their identity or in their body.
Next you will see what these good experiences are like, which Jones calls euphorias, and where they come from: from a name said correctly, from your people nearby, from a place where you do not need to hide, and from a body you stop seeing as a mistake. The book is about LGBTQ+ people and people with intersex variations, but its question is wider: what helps a person feel at home in their own body.
The Oscars tuxedo and the science that saw only pain
In 2022 the actor Elliot Page arrived at the Oscars ceremony in a tuxedo and called the moment pure joy. In transgender communities there is a word for such moments, “euphoria”, and YouTube and TikTok picked it up. In science, however, it has barely taken root.
Research for decades looked at something else. The central concept became dysphoria: the painful feeling of a mismatch between who a person feels themselves to be and the sex assigned to them at birth. Through dysphoria a transgender person gained access to medical care. That is why, as Jones writes, people began to feel they had to exaggerate their suffering so that they would be heard.
But dysphoria does not explain everything. Not all transgender people experience it, and some experience it rarely and in passing. Non-binary people often do not recognise themselves in the scales used to measure it. Similar feelings also occur in people whose gender matches their sex at birth: for some girls they are tied to their breasts, for some men to the pressure of male stereotypes in friendship. And many find relief in simple things: self-acceptance, another name, pronouns, clothes.
A small study, in which 47 people described their own euphoria, gave it a precise definition: a joyful sense of being right in one's gender or body. Participants called such moments small shining breakthroughs. Jones suggests speaking of euphorias in the plural. This is not one state but a whole family of good experiences, each with its own sources.
Jones does not idealise joy either. She draws on the researcher Sara Ahmed, who showed that happiness often serves as a reward for obedience. Loved ones say: don't wear that, don't date that person, you'll be bullied, we just want you to be happy. Such care can keep a person from their own life. That is why euphoria in this book does not cancel out difficulties and is not obliged to “cure” dysphoria. It is simply one more way of seeing a person, besides a diagnosis.
About the author
Tiffany Jones is a professor at the School of Education at Macquarie University in Sydney. She researches the experiences of LGBTQ+ people and people with intersex variations in schools and medicine. The original book was published by Springer (Palgrave Macmillan) as open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence. Here it is retold with cuts and changes.
All books by this author: Tiffany Jones
Terms from the book
- euphoria
- Page
- asexuality
- non-binary: Describes a person whose gender does not fit into the division into men and women only.
- Fury: A non-binary queer author whose words about gender euphoria open the book. Fury's text appeared in the Australian publication Star Observer in 2019.
- LGBTQ+: An abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. The plus means these words do not exhaust the diversity. When the book also speaks of intersex people, Jones writes LGBTIQ+.
- intersex: A general name for people born with atypical sex characteristics: differences in chromosomes, hormones, sensitivity to hormones or anatomy. There are more than forty such variations.
- dysphoria: A painful experience caused by a mismatch between the gender a person feels and expresses and the one assigned to them at birth. The term is used in medicine, including in the American manual of mental disorders, the DSM.
- transgender: Describes a person whose gender does not match the sex assigned to them at birth.
- pronouns: Here, the words used to refer to a person in the third person: he, she or they. Asking to be called by one's chosen pronouns is a frequent theme in participants' stories.
- Ahmed: Sara Ahmed, a British-Australian researcher of culture and emotion, author of The Promise of Happiness (2010). Jones builds on her idea that happiness in society often serves as a reward for conforming to the norm.
- Dervin: Pseudonym of a fifteen-year-old participant in the LGBTQ+ You survey, a transgender boy from a religious school in the state of Victoria.
- Chloe: Pseudonym of a sixteen-year-old participant in the LGBTQ+ You survey, whose story opens the chapter about teenagers.
- Giovanni: Pseudonym of a sixteen-year-old bisexual non-binary participant in the LGBTQ+ You survey from a state school in South Australia.
- Wear it Purple: An Australian day in August when people wear purple clothes or things in support of the right of LGBTIQ+ people not to face discrimination, especially in schools.
- Jaren: Pseudonym of a non-binary teacher from New South Wales, a participant in the LGBTQ+ You survey.
- queer: A general word for people whose sexuality or gender does not match the majority's norm. Many use it as a name for themselves.
- Cain: Pseudonym of a fourteen-year-old bisexual non-binary participant in the LGBTQ+ You survey.
- homophobia: Dislike, fear or prejudice towards gay people. Internal homophobia is such prejudice absorbed by an LGBTQ+ person and directed at themselves.
- Pina: Pseudonym of a participant in the LGBTQ+ You survey, the mother of a primary school pupil in Queensland.
- Gaston: Pseudonym of a participant in the LGBTQ+ You survey, the transgender father of a primary school pupil in New South Wales.
- Ania: Pseudonym of a teacher from Sydney, a participant in the LGBTQ+ You survey.
- Leilani: Pseudonym of a primary school teacher from New South Wales, a participant in the LGBTQ+ You survey.
- Lily: Pseudonym of a participant in the intersex survey who was born without a vagina (Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome).
- Fernanda: Pseudonym of a twenty-five-year-old participant in the intersex survey with partial androgen insensitivity.
- Edwina: Pseudonym of a twenty-seven-year-old participant in the intersex survey who, as Lily did, was born without a vagina.
- Chris: Pseudonym of a forty-four-year-old participant in the intersex survey with the chromosome set 47,XXY.
All terms
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