I know it’s hard for people who aren’t trans to understand what gender dysphoria is like. I thought this analogy, by Dr Emmy Zje, is pretty good.

Imagine that you’re sitting with a bunch of people and you’re all drinking water. Their water is spring water, but yours is salt water – and you don’t know this, so you don’t understand how they can drink their water so easily when yours makes you want to choke. So you try to do what they do, and you drink, and you drink, and you keep drinking until you nearly die from dehydration.

As another Twitter user, Rachel de Spoons, points out, the analogy works particularly well because different people experience different levels of dysphoria. As she writes: “everyone has different concentrations of salt. Some can’t manage a sip and for others it’s just tainted enough that they last decades.”

The original tweet has gone viral, so Emmy has asked people who like it to consider donating to #transcrowdfund to help a trans person achieve their transition goals.