Thanks for reading! I agree — gender dysphoria is extremely complex, and there are conceptual conundrums that result from perceiving it in terms of genitals-identity dissonance. You raise an interesting point about whether SRS would even happen in a society that didn’t put so much emphasis on genitalia… this is where I turn to philosophy, and why I locate gender-sex as a semiotic phenomenon (i.e., gender “stands for” sex, where sex refers to both genitals and the act itself). There are so many cultural phenomena that conflate sex and gender that it does indeed seem that gender is conceptually based in a signification of the genitals. I think gender reveal parties, for example, should be renamed to “infant genital reveal parties”, and that instead of blue-boy and pink-girl paraphernalia there should be tiny baby penises or vaginas as decorations on balloons, napkins, clothing, etc. It is indeed perverse to consider how much weight we give to genitals, and when you couple this with the fact that in the US we cannot see genitals on TV but we can see acts of extreme violence, then we get into the absurdity of American culture’s relationship to sex and gender. We care so much about genitals, but are also ashamed about how much we care about them because of our puritanical ideological roots, and so our society can be thought of as a fig leaf that tries to cover up the scandal of how much we unconsciously yearn to see each other’s crotches. We’d be better off if we just admitted this, but we don’t, and instead we target trans people for disrupting the ultimately illusory and nevertheless compulsory connection between sex and gender.

I wrote another piece on here called “On Acting Like a Dick and Phallic Embodiment” that is about how masculinity can be thought of as an imitation of the (erect) penis — you might appreciate it if you have an interest in the genital-gender connection.