This post has a content warning.
Due to my health problems and history of severe abuse perpetrated over decades, I try not to engage with, or weigh in on, upsetting topics in the media. In fact, one of my main mental health and recovery strategies is to deliberately avoid engaging with the news. However, I can’t let this one go by without comment.
Queensland is having a trans youth regression moment, and as a person with diagnosed gender dysphoria – which makes me trans – I have something to say about that.
Gender dysphoria is real, and is what is known in psychology and psychiatry as a ‘mind state’. Once a person’s mind has entered a gender-dysphoric state, it can’t be reversed. Gender dysphoria is a one-way ticket to a new mindset, a new appraisal of the lived body, a new gender, new pronouns, a new name, and a new life.
We don’t know exactly how, when, or why a person develops gender dysphoria, but we do know that it’s a combination of genetics (brain patterning) and environment (what the person is exposed to during their life).
To use myself as a case study, my contributing genetics are that I am neuroatypical, with my primary presentation being giftedness, and my contributing environment is that I have endured decades of violence and neglect in many forms and in many arenas.
My lived experience of gender dysphoria is that it takes a great toll.
In the last few years, some of my symptoms have included:
- Not recognising myself in the mirror
- Expecting to see a different person in the mirror
- Hatred and revulsion towards my body
- A wish to change my body but knowing and accepting that this is not medically possible due to my many and serious health problems
- A desire to wear a binder that I can’t fulfil because I would cause myself injury
- Feeling unloveable
- Experiencing an increased sense of isolation and loneliness
- Experiencing an increased sense of being ‘wrong’
- Depression
As you can glean from this list, gender dysphoria causes great distress to the person living with it. This means that the kindest thing we can do for anyone who has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, is to lessen this distress.
I initially diagnosed myself with gender dysphoria at around the age of 50. Before that, my gender dysphoria was so tightly woven into and hidden in my life that I could neither see it nor understand it. It was only after a young, close family member came out as trans, based on their lived experience of gender dysphoria over a number of years, that I very slowly and painfully realised that I was living with it too. Following self-diagnosis, came diagnosis by a clinical psychologist, and then a psychiatrist.
The Queensland government’s decision to immediately cease all medical intervention for minors will only hurt the ones they seek to protect.
We, as a society, need to remember that not everyone wants medical intervention; that not everyone can tolerate medical intervention; that medical intervention exists on a spectrum, as well as on a scale; and that government bureaucrats do not know more than medical and allied health gender specialists.
For anyone wishing to learn more about gender dysphoria, I strongly advise you to read the text in the above image. Trans was written by a British psychiatrist who has spent over twenty-five years working in a leading London-based gender clinic. This text is by far and away the best I have read on the subject, with the most evidence to back it up.
Gen Memory
February 2025
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