NHS England is starting to use a new term in regard to trans people, and particularly trans and non-binary teens who kill themselves over lack of treatment and NHS support: gender distress. That’s not the term used in existing medical literature – that’s gender dysphoria, and more recently gender incongruence. And the reason the new term has been coined is to muddy the waters and imply that these dead kids suffered from a pathological condition.
As Sarah Clarke put it on Bluesky: “Young people who died with gender distress” just sounds so much nicer and cleaner than “Trans kids we drove into a state of suicidal despair”.
There is such a thing as gender distress, as Talia Bhatt explains in this excellent thread. But it’s not something that exists within us. It’s something that’s imposed on us. Bhatt:
Existing in a body that doesn’t feel like your own, whose contours and workings and machinery feel foreign to you no matter how long you’ve inhabited them, *is* distressing. Maddening, even. What’s worse is knowing who’s keeping you there.
What’s worse is friends and family and loved ones letting you exactly what the limits of their love are, that you could be the same person, but will be treated as dead or alien if you choose to change the things about yourself you like the least. What’s worse is this being normalized.
What’s worse is having to confront, day after day, the powerlessness of your position as doctors, legislators, parents, anyone in a position of authority over you bars you from doing the one thing you need to do the most. Making it clear that you don’t own your own body. It isn’t yours to claim.
…People have the gall to locate the resulting distress entirely within trans people ourselves, as though we are ticking time bombs of hysteria rather than utterly dehumanized, unpersoned, abject PEOPLE, who are doing our best to keep it together in a world that wants to own our most intimate aspects.