On May 23, I received a text from someone close to me. It was a link to a news article about transgender youth, and they wanted my thoughts on it. I obliged. And then I received their real question:
“With the studies I have read that support this theory, I have wondered if what you experienced through your parents’ divorce caused you mental health issues that weren’t fully addressed and that is what caused your gender dysphoria.”
I have not stopped thinking about this since. Not because I think it might be right, but rather because I have been hit with versions of this claim many times. The ubiquity of this idea makes it one of the most noxious wells drawn on by the discourse around transgender people.
The argument goes as follows.
It is better to be cisgender and straight (hereafter called cishet) than not.
Not being cishet is often caused by a disturbance that can be remedied.
Therefore, we ought to remedy disturbances that make people be other than cishet when possible.
Two possible objections to this characterization of the argument:
We’re talking about gender dysphoria, and that isn’t equivalent to being transgender. True, but it is beyond obvious that when people who support this argument talk about eliminating gender dysphoria, they are talking about basically eliminating the category of transgender people. In the conversation the above quote is from, the entirety of my transgender identity was repeatedly collapsed into gender dysphoria despite my attempts to say otherwise. It’s pretty clear what people mean. Adopting progressive terminology doesn’t make it progressive.
This collapses “it’s better because it’s bad to be not cishet” and “it’s better because people are mean to people who are not cishet.” Yeah, because they’re almost the same point, and the latter is an extremely dysfunctional way of handling discrimination. As I’ve talked about before, if your response to oppression is to eliminate the oppressed, you are still siding with the oppressors.
Now, I obviously reject premise 1. Not only do I simply, strongly disagree that it is better to be cishet than not, I think it is a thoroughly messed up way to do social justice. But the more interesting part, in my opinion, is premise 2.
There are a lot of people who think it’s possible to “interrupt” the apparent course of gender development and make cishet people not, or vice versa. Ignoring for a moment that it is always presented as “trauma makes someone not cishet and mental wellness makes someone cishet,” and never the inverse, this is never given solid scientific footing. The list of troubles which are purported to give rise to an identity which deviates from the cishet mold are innumerable. In Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate, the author recounted how his periodic hair loss (!) was blamed for him being gay. As mentioned above, it was suggested to me that, somehow, my parents’ divorce might have made me transgender. The list of problems which can supposedly cause people to not be cishet also include bullying, discrimination, abuse, eating disorders, anxiety, being seen as ugly, being seen as pretty, poor gender role models, good gender role models, and autism.
With such an extensive list, much of which has a barely tangential relationship to gender, if any at all, this viewpoint becomes pure pseudoscience. It accepts no reproof, because if one potential source is ruled out, there is always another to blame it on. In this mindset, if you had a masculine father and a feminine mother, then it is an overly exuberant rebelliousness which sparked your transgender identity; if you had a feminine father and a masculine mother, then it is the gender confusion that they introduced which sparked your transgender identity. There is no winning. Even if you are quite mentally well-off, with a rich childhood, a good relationship with your parents, and a strong sense of self, the digging will continue until a trauma is invented, because there is no actual, evidence-based point where one can conclude that you just aren’t cishet.
Unsurprisingly, this methodology is not good for mental health. Affirming what activists and survivors of conversion therapy have known for decades, a recent study has linked conversion therapy to suicide risk. And yet, this lethal mythology of a reliable, scientific way to interrupt the apparent course of gender development in a socially desirable direction persists, even among those who would otherwise appear to be allies.
So, instead of leading people to commit suicide, I suggest we simply mind our own business and let people be as queer as they want. I think it’s worth a shot.