A point I should have thought was obvious - but you can’t rely on these things - is that I’m not endorsing dysphoria as a good or better way to be, or saying that one should cultivate one’s dysphoria or learn to (pretend to) be dysphoric. The message here is not: dysphoria is the new black, the new ego-supplement. When I say that goth is a dysphoric subculture, I don’t mean we should all go goth because, hey, those guys are really good at being dysphoric. Nor should we all sit around wearing hair-shirts and watching the most brutal movies we can find, in order to discover our inner dysphorics. Really, honestly: fuck all that.

It’s as if readers of Oliver James’s Affluenza took away from it the message that the affluent should all try to be more miserable about their affluence, that the misery it generated was its redeeming feature. Or as if readers of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble concluded that the best way to undermine patriarchy was for us all to play at being transsexuals. (Oh…wait…)

Dysphoria is, to repeat my own words, a stance and a predicament, a stance taken in response to a predicament. It is an incapacity with respect to a norm, not a deliberate transgression of it. It is not something you choose; it is a difficulty you find yourself saddled with. If you happen not to have that particular difficulty, don’t worry: I for one won’t think you’re any less cool. The dysphoric are not the elect.