Being trans is not a mental illness, stigma is the harm
Dr Helen Webberley on TalkTV: the conversion therapy ban, with Julia Hartley-Brewer, TalkTV
Being transgender is a mental illness, or at least a sign that something has gone wrong psychologically. A lot of people assume the distress some trans people experience proves the identity itself is the problem.
Being trans is not a mental illness, and I will not stop saying it. The distress so many trans people carry does not come from who they are: it comes from a world that treats who they are as something to be fixed, argued over, or pathologised. When I hear attitudes that dismiss or demean trans people, I think about the real harm those attitudes do, quietly, in the lives of people who are simply trying to exist. The identity is not the wound. The stigma is.
More from this conversation
