LISA SALAZAR — BLOG

Introduction “What one remarkably civilized online discussion revealed about gender dysphoria, language, and the slow growth of understanding.” I follow an intersex woman on Facebook named Jackie Green. She regularly posts short educational videos about sex, gender, and biology, usually in a calm and accessible way. In one recent video, she responded to a charge often aimed at both intersex and transgender people, that they are “mentally ill.” In less than two minutes, Jackie explained something that still seems to get lost in many public arguments. Being transgender is not classified as a mental illness. What medicine recognizes is gender dysphoria, the distress that can arise when a person’s body and gender identity are experienced as being at odds. The purpose of care is not to erase identity, but to alleviate distress. Her explanation brought to mind a public exchange I had nearly fifteen years ago with Michael Brown, when I tried to make a similar point in a very different cli...

  Public debates rarely end with one person convincing the other that they are wrong. Minds seldom change that way. Yet conversations like these can still matter deeply, often for reasons that are not obvious at first. They are rarely only between two people. They unfold in front of an audience. Nearly fifteen years ago I found myself in a lengthy public exchange with Dr. Michael Brown, a well-known evangelical author and speaker. The discussion took place online in the comment section of a Facebook page connected with his ministry. What began as a direct conversation between two individuals gradually became something larger.

Image: depositphotos.com Even before the bloody Columbine High School massacre in April 1999, mass shootings had been frequent in the US. From schools and churches to shopping malls and city parks, radicalized, politically motivated, and mentally ill persons with easy access to guns continue to shed blood and leave death in their wake.  So what else is new? The recent shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, occurred at a Christian school where the killer had once been a student. The shooter happened to be trans, which opened the door for hyper-conservatives to attack the trans community. The conservative media quickly seized on this fact and is using it to spread more lies and further their agenda to erase trans Americans. They labeled trans people "domestic terrorists" and are now using this unfortunate incident in Tennessee to justify their inaction regarding the gun violence epidemic. This is a pattern that minorities have seen before, with the Black, Muslim, Jewish, and Asian c...