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The parallel conversations in trans and disability circles about the role of diagnostic categories MUST BE thought together. Though all people (trans and disabled included) deserve access to affirming healthcare, the medicalization of our bodies is NOT done in our interest.
Whether we’re talking about diagnoses, like gender dysphoria and autism spectrum disorder, or outdated categories, like transsexualism and asperger’s syndrome, medical models were invented to pathologize nonconformance & subjugate trans & disabled people to medical authority.
The medical industrial complex is not benevolent. It does not care about you. The categories, such as transgender and autistic, that today allow you to build community are always in constant tension with their genealogical histories of pathology.
This is Laurie Haynes, a psychologist who testified in MO last week that the ban on gender-affirming care should include adults.
She is also a member of the NARTH Institute, the most vocal advocacy organization for conversion therapy in the world.
This is a BIG deal. 🧵
She is also a member of the NARTH Institute, the most vocal advocacy organization for conversion therapy in the world.
This is a BIG deal. 🧵
I address the history of conversion efforts and NARTH in particular at great length in #QueerSilence, but it’s worth emphasizing here that conversion therapy has *always* instrumentalized ideas about children in order to discipline adults.
Typically by speculating on the effects of child trauma on sexual/gender development, conversion therapists often invoke the specter of children in order to diagnose adults as mentally ill—a kind of mentally ill that is circuitously cited to justify withholding care from kids.
