TheyThemTheir by Eris Young

Author:Eris Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784508722
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Published: 2019-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

My experience with mental health and gender

I’ve got a long personal history with mental illness, which interacts in various ways with my gender identity. I now believe that many of my early symptoms of mental illness may have been early manifestations of a dissonance I wasn’t fully aware of until my twenties. I can divide my life so far broadly into various periods defined by the experience of one or another mental disorder: ADHD, anxiety, insomnia, depression. I include some detail here to give you an idea of the various ways that gender variance and accompanying social stigma can lead to, interact with or worsen mental illness.

My ‘story’, as it were, is typical for a trans person. I first started to question my gender identity in my early teens. This was the time during which, having left the relative shelter of my liberal suburban home for the more normative environment of school, I began to be more aware of the social roles I and my classmates and friends would be placed in, based on our perceived genders. This was a time during which I realised I had to conform to social expectation. I had never really been comfortable with the binary pronoun people used to describe me, but it was peripheral, easily ignored, and my parents were pretty laissez-faire: it didn’t seem to matter much to them if I did ‘boy things’ like karate or ‘girl things’ like playing with dolls, or both.

Now, it did. In middle school (the American analogue for the first few years after primary school) I had to change for and shower after gym class with the other ‘girls’: I have distinct memories of anxiety and stress associated with using the showers, but I didn’t yet understand what was upsetting me. I was too young to be fully cognisant of the differing expectations placed on girls and boys– or more precisely, cognisant of the idea these were something someone could be uncomfortable with. This was a time during which a more flexible or mixed school environment would have made me a great deal more comfortable.

At the end of middle and the beginning of high school my friends also began to pair off, almost exclusively into heterosexual units (neither half of which I felt comfortable in), which brought the gender divide into even sharper focus.

Around this time, though starting in elementary school (the American analogue to primary school) and extending through all of middle and high school, I was also taking medication for ADHD, following a diagnosis in second or third grade. I don’t think there’s necessarily any correlation between instances of ADHD and instances of nonbinary gender, but I’ve recently come to fully comprehend the influences that ADHD and the medication I took for it had on my physical development, which in turn affected various other aspects of my mental health, and my self- and body-image.

After a series of detentions and notes home to my parents (and in a decade when doctors and parents were, perhaps,

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