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Ragi Gupta from Pixstory on ‘Affirmative experiences and its impact on trans health’:
When I think of mental health and being trans, I think a lot about language and how language shapes the way we perceive each other and perceive ourselves, and how it is also taken away and erased from us, from banning LGBTQI+ related books and race-related books in the US to the NCERT trans-affirming guide in India.
Why does it take so long for us to understand who we are and to describe who we are and to get the correct words to say who we are? Why are we raised with a ridiculously boring cis-het lingo? Why does it take 20 years for me to understand that I'm a twink?
When I started getting mental health care, there was a time my therapist sat me down in college and had this book open in front of them and was reading out this definition of anorexia and trying to make me understand myself through that lens.
But I realized that that wasn't something that worked out for me because, no matter what mental health diagnosis I got, the core of the whole mental distress was that I was a trans person who was trying to erase themself without knowing who they were.
A year or two down the line, my therapist from home really helped me – they used a practice called Narrative Therapy, that centered the words that I used to describe myself, and my experiences rather than viewing it through the lens of a certain mental health diagnosis.
That helped me a lot in distancing myself from the person I was trying to be and the person I wasn't. It gave me the tools to understand how my transness is not a mental health diagnosis and the tools for how to live.
I think the medicalization of transness through mental health diagnoses is something that takes a lot of time to break down within yourself and to distance yourself from, when you are taught to view yourself through that medicalized lens.