Why do those on the religious and cultural right often describe transgender or gender-nonconforming identity as a mental illness? What is the relationship of “gender dysphoria” and trans or gender-nonconforming identity? Why would some who target trans and gender-nonconforming people claim that they are doing it because they care for them? And finally, how can we support trans and gender-nonconforming people and address the concrete effects of gender dysphoria? Dan takes on these issues in this week’s episode.
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AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
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Hello and welcome to the series, It's in the Code, part of the podcast Straight It's in the Code, part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College and your host for the series.
As always, I want to welcome all of you, say thank you so much for listening, for supporting us.
As we always note, Straight White American Jesus is an indie podcast.
We don't have any other support than you, so thank you for supporting us.
If you would consider being a patron and giving to us financially, we would appreciate that.
But regardless of financial giving or anything else, thank you for listening.
Thank you for supporting us.
And I should also say, I always want to hear from listeners.
You can reach me, Daniel Miller Swaj, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com, for feedback, ideas about the series, and things like that.
I have slowly been catching up on my emails.
Some of you will have heard from me.
After some traveling this summer, I'm way behind, but I'm trying to close the gap.
Please keep the emails coming, keep the topics coming.
I've had some people who've brought up some really interesting ideas, reflections on recent episodes, and those are what keep this going.
So thank you for that.
I want to dive in today then to a topic that's really, over the last couple of weeks, just really kind of set me off.
It's sort of taken root and I'm just pretty worked up about it.
So I think that's what I'm going to talk about today.
And it's an issue that I've addressed before, not quite as maybe directly or as in such a sort of unified way as I'm hoping to do today.
But if you've listened to this series, you'll have heard some of it.
If you've listened to Straight White American Jesus for a long time, you'll have heard some of it.
But maybe it's been a while.
And what I do know, as I hear from all of you, is that this is something that other people are picking up on and something that you're wrestling with as well.
And it's really about how to respond when we hear a certain line of reasoning that we're going to talk about today.
And what really sort of pushed me over the edge with this was not just hearing from you, but something I read in a social media post or came across.
So you're in for something of a rant.
I hope everybody can deal with that.
But here's the idea, right?
A while back I did an episode on what I called Christian health and safety, right?
And what I talked about was how the conservative American Christians that constantly target different kinds of vulnerable people Whether it's people of color, whether it's immigrants, whether it is gender minorities, whether it is sexual minorities, whatever it is, when they target these people, but they couch that targeting, they couch that discrimination, they couch that animosity in terms of concern for those people.
And one of the groups that I've talked about a lot, a group that You know, anybody who knows me and knows my history knows that it's a group close to my heart, is trans and gender non-conforming youth.
We've had this range of laws and policies aimed at trans youth in particular, all in the name of their protection.
Or, to go back a little bit further, bathroom bills and so forth, targeting particularly trans women, all in the name of what?
Protecting women and children, right?
This is something I talked about.
I invite you to go back, look that up if you're interested.
But what got my attention the last couple weeks, what I want to talk about here, is related to this theme.
And it's this claim.
It is the claim that people who are trans or gender non-conforming, people who experience their gender as something other than or different from what was assigned to them at birth, The idea that those people are mentally ill, that trans or gender non-conforming identity is a mental illness, right?
It's not a new argument, but I've heard it articulated in a specific way that has really got my attention the last couple weeks, and that's what I want to talk about, right?
And the immediate issue that got my attention, and it was in this context that I saw the social media posts, but again, I've heard similar things from some of you.
I've come across others who've encountered this.
And it was some of the ongoing backlash among, in particular, Christian and other cultural conservatives against Bud Light.
And everybody probably knows the background to this.
They had an ad campaign featuring Dylan Mulvaney, who identifies as trans.
And there was this backlash and the ad campaign was pulled and so forth.
It was part of the broader onslaught from the right on companies celebrating pride and things like this, companies like Target, Starbucks, and so forth.
So we all know the outrage that took shape on the right, the boycott of Bud Light and all of that sort of stuff, okay?
But here's what got my attention.
I came across posts, and again, others of you have passed along similar things to me, some from conversations you've had with people that kind of blew your mind, just didn't make any sense, others similar sorts of posts.
But it's this, it was a post where those on the right claim that in opposing initiatives like the Bud Light campaign, They're actually concerned for the welfare of trans and gender non-conforming people.
They would say, oh, it's nothing to do with animus, has nothing to do with hatred, has nothing to do with bigotry.
Nope, nope.
We oppose the Bud Light campaign because we're the ones who really care about trans and gender non-conforming individuals.
We target companies like Target and Starbucks because we're the ones who really, really care about trans and gender non-conforming people.
That's the claim.
Now, maybe you've heard this line of reasoning.
Maybe you haven't.
But if you're like me and you track at all with the opposition to trans and gender nonconforming and other queer communities by people on the right, you hear this and you're like, what in the world are they talking about?
How can they possibly make this claim?
And here's how it goes, right?
This is how the reasoning that they deploy goes.
This is sort of laying out the code at play here, okay?
They say, well, you know, trans identity, it's a mental illness.
It's called gender dysphoria.
And companies like Target and Bud Light, when they feature trans people or market to trans people, Or allow access to public accommodations and so forth.
They are actually exploiting trans people, which means they're exploiting people who are mentally ill with these initiatives.
And instead of exploiting these people, we should be helping these individuals to overcome this mental illness, which means that we, the social and religious conservatives, we're the ones who really care about these people because we're the only ones who are willing to step up and try to help them by confronting them with the depth of their malady.
We're the ones who take the fact that they are mentally ill serious and refuse to be part of their exploitation by broader corporate secular culture.
That's the line of reasoning.
Now, let me be really, really clear and say it is 100% unadulterated bullshit.
And we'll get into why I say that it's bullshit in a few minutes.
What I want to point out now is, though, there are certainly people on the right who know that it's BS.
They know that it's bogus.
They know that it's nonsense.
They think there are also people who are well-meaning.
And this line has enough of a ring of plausibility.
When we're talking about mental health, who doesn't care about mental health?
We're talking about something called gender dysphoria, and that is a real mental health designation, right?
It has enough of a ring of plausibility that it sounds convincing to them, especially if they are not comfortable with, or they are unfamiliar with, or they don't know, or don't know that they know.
Any trans or gender non-conforming people, and they want this to be true.
Maybe they are conservative Christians.
Maybe they go to a church that preaches against Target, that preaches against Pride, that preaches against public accommodations, and they want to believe that this is not hatred, that this is not bigotry, this is not just divinely sanctioned discrimination, but that there's care behind this, there's love behind this.
So when they hear this from people that they consider authorities, whether they're media influencers, whether they're people posting on social media, whether it's their pastors, whether it's political leaders, whoever it is, they grab onto it.
We talk socially, on certainly the left and increasingly on the right, we talk about the need to take mental health seriously.
We're increasingly aware of the seriousness of issues like depression and anxiety, so why not transgender identity?
So there are those who I think are acting in good faith and are well-intentioned but ill-informed, for whom this sounds plausible and maybe even desirable.
They want this to be true because of the people in their lives, the churches they're part of, and so forth.
I think it's also a challenge because, and this is where I've heard from people, I've heard from people, I've had conversations with people who hear this line of reasoning and they just think that this can't be right, but they don't know how to respond to it.
Right?
Because again, gender dysphoria is a mental health diagnosis.
And so when somebody comes along and says, well, you know what?
When you affirm these people, you think you're doing something good for them, but you're really damaging them because you're feeding into their mental illness.
They know that can't be right.
It doesn't feel right.
Something has to be off with it, but they don't know what it is.
And they don't know how to respond to it.
And I've had these conversations.
And so that's what we're going to talk about here, right?
So that's the code.
The code is the reason we oppose these things is not because we're bigots or we want to discriminate or we have animus toward these people.
It's because actually we're the only ones who really care about them.
And so we're trying to get them to recognize, I guess, that they shouldn't be trans anymore, that being transgender is a malady or whatever.
Okay?
That's the code.
Let's crack it.
Let's debunk it.
Let's decode it.
Because again, the long and short of it is, and I want to make sure everybody hears this, it's complete and utter BS.
Right?
It may have the ring of plausibility to people who don't know any better, aren't familiar with mental health diagnoses and so forth, but it's BS.
And I want to explain why.
That's what we're going to do for the rest of our time here.
And you can take this to Uncle Ron at the Summer Cookout, or you can email it to your mom's pastor, or whatever, the response to this line of reasoning.
And again, I've talked about some of this stuff, the stuff that's going to come in different contexts, but I want to hit it again because, as I say, the last couple weeks have really hit home with me, and I know that it has hit home with some of you as well, okay?
So let's tackle the big thing first, right?
And I'm going to get technical here for a few minutes.
I hope that's all right with folks because it's important stuff, okay?
Gender dysphoria is a mental health designation in the current edition, which is the fifth edition, of this big fat book called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders.
Everybody just calls it the DSM.
If you've ever been to a counselor or a therapist and talked with them, if you have people in your lives who are familiar with that language, if you yourself are a counselor or therapist, you know what the DSM is.
You'll have heard of the DSM, okay?
And what the DSM is, it's the diagnostic reference that's used by licensed counselors and therapists and others for the diagnosis of mental health disorders, okay?
But here's the key.
Okay?
And I want everyone to listen carefully.
Okay?
Gender dysphoria is not the same thing as identifying with a different gender than what you were assigned at birth.
Gender dysphoria is not the same thing as transgender identity, as being genderqueer or genderfluid, of being gender non-conforming in some way.
It is not the same thing.
Which means A gender identity that diverges from your assigned gender, right?
In other words, when you're born and they take a look between your legs, they look at the genitalia and they say, it's a boy or it's a girl, right?
Experiencing a gender identity that diverges from that assignment, that assigned gender, is not a mental health disorder according to the DSM.
Okay?
I'm going to go even further than that and say this, that on the contrary, Recognition and acceptance of people in their experienced gender is the remedy to gender dysphoria.
In other words, affirming trans identity, affirming gender non-conforming identity, affirming people who are genderqueer, genderfluid, agendered, affirming people in whatever gender they feel to be the gender they embody.
That is not, in some way, reaffirming gender dysphoria.
It is the remedy to it.
That's what we're going to talk about for the next couple minutes here, because it may sound strange.
What do I mean by that?
How can it be so different from what people on the right are saying?
Well, let's talk about this.
And those who are really interested, email me about this.
I'd love to talk further.
I actually talk about this in the first chapter of my book, Queer Democracy.
But you don't have to go out and buy my book.
I'm happy to sort of pass along the information.
But this is how it works.
The DSM defines gender dysphoria this way, okay?
And this is me.
I'm quoting directly from the DSM.
Gender dysphoria is, again, and I quote, "...a marked incongruence between one's experienced-slash-expressed gender and assigned gender of at least six months' duration." It's the end of the quote, and then it goes on and specifies some accompanying behaviors and experiences that should be present if somebody's going to have this diagnosis, okay?
So it's the marked incongruence, the sort of gap that opens up between one's experienced gender and their assigned gender.
But here's the issue.
The DSM is also explicit that this does not mean that transgender identity is a mental illness.
I'm not making it up.
It says it in the DSM.
It says it on page 451.
If somebody wants to go look it up, it says that the psychological distress, this incongruence that opens up, is the clinical issue, quote, not gender identity itself.
In other words, what it's saying is the mental health issue is not gender identity.
It's not gender nonconformity.
It's not trans identity.
It's not being genderqueer or genderfluid or agender.
It is not any of that.
It is the distress that comes from the experienced gap between one's experienced gender and one's assigned gender at birth.
And what does that mean?
Well, the DSM tells us that too, and it says that that distress comes in the form of things like increased risk for suicidal ideation.
Suicide attempts.
Suicide, anxiety, impulse control issues, and depression.
The distress that comes in that gap between one's assigned gender and one's experience or expression of gender, it plays out in these ways, and that is what gender dysphoria is.
That is the clinical issue that needs to be addressed.
What needs to be addressed is the suicidal ideation, the suicide attempts, anxiety, impulse control issues, depression.
That is the target of mental health care.
And here's the key.
Here's the kicker.
This is where the decoding really, really kicks in.
And I hope everybody's sticking with me because I know some of this stuff's technical.
And kind of nuanced and fine-grained, and I know most people don't have a copy of DSM-5 sitting on their shelf, right?
But I do invite you to go to a library, pull it off their shelf, take a look at it.
If the issue for mental health is dealing with that anxiety and that depression and impulse control and suicidality and so forth, how do we do that?
Guess what?
It's not by forcing people to abide to their assigned gender.
That's what people on the right want.
What they're trying to do is say, well, I don't care if you feel like you should have a female gender.
I don't care if you feel like your gender changes over time.
I don't care if you feel like you don't have a fixed gender.
You need to live by the gender that you were assigned at birth.
Is it by doing that?
Nope.
Is it by forcing them to accept what we think of as their quote-unquote real or biological identity, gender identity?
Nope.
It's just the opposite.
That distress, that anxiety and depression and suicidality and impulse control, gender dysphoria, it is remedied by resolving it in the direction of their expressed or experienced gender identity.
What does that mean?
It means that we resolve gender dysphoria by supporting and affirming people in their experienced gender.
Not by countering it, not by trying to correct it, not by trying to force them to be something by quote-unquote biological or natural, not by demanding that they live in a way that is consistent in our culture with their assigned gender, it means supporting them in their experienced gender.
It means, essentially, supporting them in their transition to their experienced or expressed gender identity.
It means, folks, that you cannot address gender dysphoria without supporting transgender and gender non-conforming people.
And in case you're listening and you say, well, that sounds really good, but you know, I've got these people in my life saying one thing, maybe I've even got some medical professionals saying that, I've got politicians, and Dan, you're just one guy saying this.
You're just a guy of the podcast.
It's not me saying it, right?
It isn't just my opinion.
The committee that developed the diagnosis for DSM-5, the prior edition of the DSM was DSM-4th edition, and these working groups and committees that go through the whole thing and revise it, and the working group that developed the diagnosis of gender dysphoria, was explicit about this, and here's what they said, word for word, right?
You can take this, jot it down, bank it, take it to Uncle Ron or whomever when the time comes.
They said, "By definition, full social transitioning and legal sex or gender reassignment makes the diagnostic criteria no longer applicable." In other words, if somebody is affirmed in their experienced gender, if they are able to transition whatever that means It's not surgical for everybody.
It's not medical for everybody.
It could just be social.
It could just be a matter of dress and mannerism and hair, whatever it is.
If they are allowed to transition and live their life in the gender that they feel most at home with, it resolves gender dysphoria.
The treatment for gender dysphoria is not the denial or the denigration or the attacking of trans or gender non-conforming identity.
It is the affirmation of it.
What does all that mean?
So we've got to wrap this up.
It means once again, and this is a theme, right?
If you've been listening to this series, you know this is a theme.
If you've listened to the podcast for very long, you know this is a theme.
It means that once again, those on the right who want to claim they're somehow helping the people they target are absolutely Orwellian in what they say.
It's double speak of the most classic kind.
They are doing exactly the opposite of what they say.
They are harming people.
They are leading people who struggle with anxiety, and depression, and impulse control, and suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts.
They are leading them to continue those things, and there are people whose lives will end because they are not affirmed in their expressed gender.
And because they will succumb to the gender dysphoria that disrupts their lives.
Those who really care about the trans and gender non-conforming community are obligated to affirm the rights of trans and gender non-conforming people to live out their experienced gender, to give them the resources to do so, excuse me, and that also means accepting them for who they are.
I said on Straight White American Jesus a couple weeks back or a few episodes back, we talked about some resources for people wanting to support the LGBTQ plus community, that one of the things we have to do is arm ourselves with information because many of us may be the only real resource that people in our lives have.
If you have people in your lives who are Fox News listeners, that's their thing.
If they've got pastors and churches preaching against transgender non-conforming people, if they live in states like Texas or Florida or Tennessee or Arkansas or any number of other places that are targeting transgender non-conforming people, that's all they hear?
You may be the only counterbalance to that.
You may be the only person in their life who can say, well actually, you know what?
Trans and gender non-conforming identity is not a mental health illness.
It's anxiety, it's these other things, and you actually remedy that by affirming people.
You may be the only person who can do that, and you have to do that.
Well-meaning people who fall prey to this right-wing doublespeak, they need to know the truth.
And the people who know it's BS, they need to be confronted with the truth.
They need to have us pushing back on the disinformation that they put forward.
Being trans, being gender non-conforming, being genderqueer, genderfluid, agender, it is not a mental illness.
I said in my book that gender dysphoria is not an individual malady, it's a social malady.
And the reason I said that is that if we lived in a society where people could simply be as they feel themselves to be, they could live out the gender expression that they feel they truly embody, and they didn't have to fight to transition, they didn't have to deal with standards of gender normativity, they didn't have to fight all that, they could just be And they had the resources to do that however they needed to do that.
There would be no experience of gender dysphoria.
It wouldn't be around anymore.
It's social acceptance that creates this mental illness.
I could say more about this.
I could talk about this forever, but I need to wrap this up.
Again, I invite comments on this.
If this is something we need to talk about more, let me know.
If there are things you think I'm missing, I'd love to hear it.
If this is something you hear about in churches, or from your parents, or your in-laws, or your friends who go to the church down the road, If this is something you hear about in, say, political campaign flyers or something, I'd love to hear it.
As I say, it's an issue that matters to me.
It's an issue that I believe should matter to all of us.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for supporting what we do.
Thank you for supporting me.
Thank you for the kind words and the patience with my slow responses and all of that.
Excuse me, as always, feel free to reach out, Daniel Miller Swaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com, and would love to hear from you.
