In the Face of Transphobia, Choosing to Live Is Resistance

On minority stress and the psychological impact of watching society slowly turn on you — and deciding not to give up despite (in spite of?) it all

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

Trigger warning: discussion of suicide, mental illness

I’ve always been mentally ill to one extent or another. Some of my earliest memories are of a deep sense of anxiety, loneliness and hopelessness. I was always a great kid to have at parties.

It was probably the undiagnosed autism and unmedicated ADHD when I was young which ensured I would develop into an adult with depression, social anxiety, and a side of CPTSD.

In my late 20s, I started to get a hold on my mental illness with meds and a lot of self-exploration. But there was still some missing piece of the puzzle.

Finally understanding that I’m transgender was that missing piece. Being able to transition has made a huge difference to my mental wellbeing.

I no longer have to pretend to be male and live as a shell of a human being. I get to be myself.

Gender dysphoria is the social and physical distress I experience due to a mismatch between my gender assigned at birth and my felt gender identity. Though not entirely gone, transition has improved my dysphoria dramatically.

Then there’s the effect of replacing testosterone with wonderful oestrogen.

With testosterone no longer running the show I’ve found my emotions much easier to manage. It no longer feels like someone else’s emotions are being imposed on me: these are my feelings.

And as a bonus side-effect, it turns out that oestrogen is pretty good for my ADHD.

A lot of the issues associated with ADHD are thought to relate to a dopamine deficiency, and some research suggests oestrogen has all sorts of positive effects on dopamine and dopamine receptors in the brain.

Who knew?

(The small number of researchers who actually bothered to study the relationship between ADHD and menstrual cycles in cis women, that’s who.)

So all in all, social and medical transition have been great for me — life-changing in more ways than one.

But this is also where a new problem starts, a problem that has a profound impact on my life and my mental health.

That problem is transphobia.

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Have you ever heard of minority stress? It’s the psychological distress that minority groups such as trans people experience due to social stigma.

It can lead to all sorts of problems, like feelings of loneliness, anxiety, and, unsurprisingly, depression.

I swapped depression caused by gender dysphoria for depression caused by minority stress.

I live in the UK, and we have been in the grip of a transgender moral panic for quite a few years now. And somehow it just seems to get worse and worse.

This is largely due to a small movement of ideologically anti-trans ‘feminists’ calling themselves ‘gender critical’; usually white, (always cisgender) middle to upper-class women wielding their social and political influence (and bank balances, in the case of one litigious billionaire children’s author) to wage an anti-trans ‘culture war’.

UN Women has called this movement “anti-rights” and highlighted its links to a burgeoning global anti-gender and anti-feminist movement.

But no matter, the UK establishment, from the government to the judiciary and the media, is increasingly on board with this movement (some are actively part of it).

For some, I think this is partly because it allows them to give the impression that they care about women’s rights without actually having to do anything to improve the rights of women.

All they have to do is attack trans people. People like me.

There’s about 260,000 of us in a population of 67,000,0000 — about 0.5%. We have little power to resist this socially and politically privileged and well-funded movement (not that we don’t try). An easy target.

This panic has meant limits to trans people’s rights and the removal of vital, evidence-based healthcare for trans youth.

There’s a looming threat of the same happening to healthcare for trans adults: the Levy Review, worryingly influenced by anti-trans ideology, is currently assessing adult gender-identity services.

It has also led to a constant — often daily — negative coverage of trans people and trans women in particular, which portrays us as a threat to women and children.

All of this has led to a rise in anti-trans hate crimes and a negative change in public attitudes towards trans rights, as well as a mental health crisis among trans people.

I think it’s probably difficult to understand how this feels if you’re not in the position that most trans people are in (though there are plenty of other minority groups who will recognise the feeling, if not the specifics).

I’ll try to explain.

Imagine you’ve struggled with this feeling that something is ‘not quite right’ for years — your entire life, actually.

You can’t pinpoint what this ‘something’ is. No one else seems to have this problem or describes the same feelings you have. You feel very confused, hopeless and alone.

And then imagine that one day everything suddenly starts falling into place. You discover that there is a name for this ‘thing’, and that there are other people like you, a whole community of you.

Even better, there are things you can do to make yourself feel better. Finally, you have answers, solutions.

You feel less alone, less confused. You start to feel hopeful again, for the first time in as long as you care to remember.

And so you do those things, it’s not easy — anything worth doing isn’t easy, as the saying goes — but immediately you start to feel ‘right’ for the first time in your life.

But then you realise that, for some inexplicable reason, there’s a whole group of people who are angry at your mere existence. Your happiness is abhorrent to them.

You aren’t doing anything wrong, you’re not hurting anyone — in fact, your relationships with those around you have never been better, and you’re finally getting back to work and being a ‘useful’ member of society again.

So these people that hate you, inexplicably, just make things up. They say you’re hurting people, that you’re dangerous.

From the outside, their inexplicable hatred becomes somewhat more explicable (is that a word? I don’t care actually, you know what I mean).

But they’re just a small minority, you ignore them.

But then they start to pop up in the media, and politics. Their influence becomes much stronger and people start to believe what they’re saying about you even though it’s all lies with no proof.

Their hatred starts to spread like wildfire.

The newspapers and talking heads say you’re a danger now, too, based on cynical over-generalisations and outright lies. One person like you did something bad, so you must be bad, too.

Then even the government starts to say these things about you. They try to make laws to hurt you, even though just a few years ago they agreed you needed more rights, not less.

By now even nice, ‘normal’ people are saying these horrible things about you. They claim these are ‘reasonable concerns’, and if you try to correct them they say you’re hurting their free speech and call you totalitarian. For defending yourself.

You read stories about people like you being attacked, murdered, or taking their own lives out of despair — you start to understand the latter.

You’ve done nothing wrong except dare to be happy. But their hatred matters more than your happiness.

You start to wonder who you can trust.

You feel, once again, that it’s not okay to be your true self.

You start to hide who you are, if you’re fortunate enough to be able to do so — many of us wear our transness visibly and can’t hide.

You feel the inertia of depression returning.

You’re too anxious or tired to leave the house, to see friends or family.

You feel all hope start to fade away again.

What do you do?

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That’s where I’m at now. What do I do?

This wave of hatred seems to get bigger and bigger and every time it crashes down it causes more damage than before. All the while I can feel myself sink deeper into depression, slowly losing the will to fight as the next wave washes over me.

And that’s exactly what they want: for us to just to give up, to disappear.

They want a genocide of trans people, and that’s not an exaggeration: they talk of wanting to “reduce” the number of trans people and dream of the day “when trans is over” — meaning when people like me no longer exist.

Sometimes I wonder if I should just give them what they want. The depression seems to agree. I don’t have the will to fight anymore.

Or do I?

I’m so, so tired.

It’s hard to find a positive. But people want to read a story with a happy ending, don’t they?

Well here’s my happy ending, I guess: an act of resistance. Albeit one so small it can be measured in milligrams.

The difference between 50mg and 100mg, to be exact.

50mg is the minimum dose of my antidepressant medication, it’s what I take now. I was on 200mg a day, for a very long time. Social and medical transition helped me get it down. I hoped to stop taking them entirely one day. Never mind.

In a sense, it feels like a defeat, an admission that they got to me. The darkly appropriate individualisation of a social problem befitting our hopelessly antisocial neoliberal era.

But in another sense, it’s a victory. This decision tells me that I do want to keep living. That I do have some hope for a better future for trans people like me and the ability to fight, even if it takes a chemical crutch (no shame in it).

It shows that the transphobes haven’t got what they want, yet.

When they want you dead, existing is a form of resistance in itself.