Imagine: Lifelong carsickness (being transgender, before transitioning)
Next in our series “Imagine.” At times it is hard for straight cisgender folks to understand the LGBTQ world, but on this blog we’re lifting up insights that make it easier. Today’s guest authors are Neca Allgood, an active Latter-day Saint, and her transgender son Grayson.
"I wish to urge upon the Saints . . . to understand men and women as they are, and not understand them as you are" (Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 8:37, April 6, 1860, emphasis added).
Grayson explains the distress/pain of gender dysphoria: “Have you ever gotten carsick? Carsickness, like many other forms of motion sickness, occurs when your inner ears and your eyes disagree about whether you’re moving. Gender dysphoria is like that. Awful, nauseating, headache-inducing wrongness from the disagreement of your mind and body. And you feel it every time you wear the wrong clothes, or are called by the wrong pronoun, or hear your own voice, or someone looks at you and sees something you aren’t; every time you look in the mirror, every time you think about yourself it’s like a knife in the gut because it’s wrong wrong wrong. It’s not you but it won’t go away and it won’t stop and it hurts, it hurts like nothing you can imagine and nothing I can describe. It’s so bad that I would literally rather die than feel like that again, even for a day.”
His mother Neca adds: “Lots of times cisgender people describe gender dysphoria as a mismatch between brain and body, but that understates the reality that many transgender people experience. For my son it was distress; it was PAIN. And unlike carsickness, for four years he couldn’t get out of the car.”
Richard Ostler adds, “The pain and distress Grayson experienced is not a condition of mental ill health. Indeed, . . . the World Health Organization moved transgender related issues out of the mental and behavioral disorders into “conditions related to sexual health,” reflecting that “trans-related and gender diverse identities are not conditions of mental ill health. Classifying them as such can cause enormous stigma” (World Health Organization, “Brief: transgender health in the context of ICD-11,” Listen, Learn and Love, 248).
Also in our “Imagine” series:
"There never seems to be a polite way of saying, 'Look, the problem isn't me. It's your inability to greet me as I am instead of how you want me to be” (Blaire Ostler, Listen, Learn and Love, Richard Ostler, 157).