There is a common misconception that all trans people experience gender dysphoria. Some people go further and promote the false belief that gender dysphoria is intrinsic to being transgender, a perspective sometimes referred to as “transmedicalism”.
What Is Transmedicalism?
Transmedicalism brings together unusual allies. Some proponents are within the transphobic gender critical movement; they see it as a useful tool in their quest to erase transgender people and their identities. There’s also a minority within the transgender community itself who believe that only people with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and a complete medical transition are truly trans.
Claiming that gender dysphoria is intrinsic to being transgender is a perspective that effectively erases the identity of a huge swathe of the transgender community, including non-binary people. It’s also counter to the American Psychiatric Association (APA), National Health Service (NHS), other public entities, and specialist definitions of transgender.
Gender Dysphoria Is Not Inherent to Trans Identity
Many trans people know and understand that their gender identity doesn’t match their sex assigned at birth yet they don’t experience dysphoria. Not every trans man, trans woman, or non-binary person experiences emotional pain, discomfort, or other negative feelings deriving from the body in which they live. Further, not everybody needs to take any steps to medically transition in order to express their gender identity and live as themselves.
Dangers of Suggesting Dysphoria Is Intrinsic to Trans Experience
Making gender dysphoria inherent to trans identity, experience, and indeed definitive to it, leads to a series of clearly untrue and indeed perverse conclusions.
It Conflates Trans Identity With Suffering
For example, it makes suffering intrinsic to the trans identity and experience. This is not only demonstrably untrue. Upon even a moment’s reflection, one can see that it’s a cruel framework to force someone into. It falsely implies that a person’s gender identity is emergent from or dependent on trauma.
Trans people don’t need to be uncomfortable and suffering to “qualify” as who they are. It also makes their access to healthcare contingent on showing a satisfactory level of suffering.
It Allows Doctors to Gatekeep and Tell Trans People Who They Are
Binding transgender identity to gender dysphoria denies bodily autonomy and applies gatekeeping criteria to a person’s gender identity.
Essentially, it drags us back to a world where people claim that they can tell others who they are and what gender they experience. It undermines self-knowledge, with gatekeepers who require gender dysphoria as a “qualification” for being trans controlling and defining other people’s gender identity and selfhood.
Why does society see it as okay for doctors and other gatekeepers to have this kind of power? This is in fact a component of transphobia and trans erasure. It’s also a dangerous precedent for society to set.
How Transmedicalism Leads to Institutional Erasure
Unfortunately, this false definition – binding trans identity to having gender dysphoria – has had profound consequences for many trans people.
Trans people, those who experience gender dysphoria and those who don’t, have a right to access gender-affirming support. They shouldn’t have to defend who they are, especially not according to arbitrary and unfounded criteria that requires them to “show suffering” in order to receive care.
At GenderGP we believe that you are who you say you are – we are not the gatekeepers of your identity and experience. Instead, we are here to help you explore your identity and how you best want to express it, living as yourself without judgment or artificial obstacles.