“The federal government defines gender dysphoria as significant distress or impairment resulting from a mismatch between a person’s gender identity and their assigned sex.” - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Feb. 17, 2025.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution report we reference is focused on Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr’s participation in a multistate lawsuit designed to dismantle a federal rule that, during the Biden administration, included gender dysphoria among conditions protected from discrimination. Carr spokesperson Kara Murray explained their opposition to a disability rights position that would ban support for all disabilities because of its inclusion of gender identity: “We are fighting one woke policy added by Biden for virtue signaling.”
What might exacerbate the everyday indignities faced by LGBTQ+ people in their interactions with the public? We offer the example of a state attorney general and gubernatorial hopeful who wants to demolish federal policies that offer them, along with people with disability status, some support.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
Where is the virtue in that? What kind of “dysphoria” awaits those who see the people running their state and nation attempting to deny them basic privileges of citizenship? How can they take school seriously when they are seen as unwelcome threats to those who have all the power, yet who feel menaced by the presence of an LGBTQ+ person?
Schools and universities have been under pressure to eliminate DEI programs designed to make life less harsh for students historically excluded from acceptance in society’s mainstream. The LGBTQ+ population is among those whose existence and needs have been denied in schools, universities and other public institutions.
No bathrooms for you. Or books in the library or place in the curriculum. Or recognition that you exist as a decent person of social value.
Credit: Con
Credit: Con
Among the beliefs governing their rejection is the assumption that they experience “gender dysphoria.” According to this point of view, written into policy, they loathe their own biological makeup and wish they could conform to binary conceptions of gender and sexuality. President Donald Trump has issued an executive order that declares sex as “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.”
Those who identify outside this binary, he believes, are just plain wrong. The federal definition of gender dysphoria agrees. Both assume that LGBTQ+ people whose gender identity doesn’t align with the sex that they were assigned at birth realize the fallacy of their lives when they feel bad about themselves.
But that’s not how LGBTQ+ people themselves see things. Rather, if LGBTQ+ people feel distressed or impaired about their gender identity, it’s because of how others treat them. This treatment includes the creation of punitive laws that encourage others to view them as subhuman. These feelings follow from external abuse, not internal conflict over having a gender identity that does not conform to the binary that Trump has declared to be incontrovertible.
LGBTQ+ communities largely reject the term “gender dysphoria.” It is applied to them by people who assume that they are confused or have been hornswoggled into thinking that they are not who they were born to be. In fact, many studies affirm that they know exactly who they are, in spite of the incessant messaging they get from society that they are deviant and odious.
These debilitating assumptions are driven by the rest of society’s lack of understanding and unwillingness to learn about people who are different from themselves. This problem characterizes other forms of social discrimination as well. In all such cases, the problem arises from the environment, where people inflict emotional damage on others when they don’t accept them as they are.
In schools and universities, LGBTQ+ people are continually surrounded by antigay slurs and anti-pride slogans. It’s no surprise, then, that they often feel dysphoric in the face of the euphoric hatred they frequently confront from the cisgender heterosexual population, including its leaders.
Even during the Biden administration and its presumed virtue-signaling wokeness, the FBI reported that “Hate Crimes Against LGBTQ+ People Surge.” LGBTQ+ people have always been easy targets for haters, often with the support of police and administrators. When a school board clears out any book that accords LGBTQ+ people dignity and humanity, when their classmates may taunt them without fear of discipline, when teachers refuse to acknowledge their identities, our educational system not only marginalizes them, it sets them up as objects of hate and torment.
As long as these policies remain in place, schools will perpetuate the problem that society treats LGBTQ+ people as disposable garbage. The rates of suicide, self-harm, social withdrawal and other reactions to cruelty that LGBTQ+ students — estimated to comprise 25% of the student population — experience through the sneers and assaults from peers, school officials, school board members, the law and political leaders is a manifestation of these policies.
This malicious treatment is underscored by a federal definition of dysphoria that locates the psychological distress experienced among LGBTQ+ people as their own creation, one that flows from their self-hatred over not identifying with their birth-assigned sex. We urge readers to shift responsibility to where it belongs: with those who make their lives miserable with their constant torrent of loathing and abuse, all because they can’t and won’t see their humanity within.
Stephanie Anne Shelton is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill who identifies as a genderqueer lesbian. Peter Smagorinsky is a retired professor from the University of Georgia who identifies as a heterosexual male and who served as Stephanie’s major professor during her doctoral studies.
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