Canada Research Chair Remi Yergeau Considers Transness and Disability

“If you spend any time on the anti-trans internet, you’ll encounter a lot of content claiming that trans teens are really neurodivergent or mentally ill, as if you can be trans or mad, but not both at the same time” says Yergeau, who points to social media accounts that use the language of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to ‘diagnose’ trans people. “The idea behind CBT is that you’re experiencing distress because you’re engaging in cognitive errors or distortions. My concern is they are labelling transness as a cognitive error and then seeking to obliterate that so-called error.”

Yergeau says the rise in these armchair social media “diagnoses” is not new or coincidental: some mental health practitioners have historically linked sexual orientation—and now gender identity—to obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).

“There’s a nascent subtype of OCD called ‘transgender OCD’ and the name is misleading because in general it refers to presumed cisgender people who have intrusive thoughts about their gender identity,” explains Yergeau. “There’s this pipeline being created where anti-trans actors are co-opting that discourse for their own nefarious ends.”

While Yergeau notes that therapies like CBT and exposure therapy have been used in many different contexts, they have concerns about some of the messaging embedded in those tools. Yergeau has started documenting examples of psychological materials, such as self-help workbooks and mental health apps, that question transgender identity and operate from a “cisgender” norm.

“The narratives can be particularly damaging because they often rehash stereotypes that practitioners reinforce when they’re working with patients. They sometimes also move beyond just scripting to actual performing, such as ‘let’s purposefully misgender you,’” says Yergeau, who has experienced this personally. “Practitioners don’t necessarily think of themselves as anti-trans, but they practice a behavioural modality that I argue is pretty harmful to people who are marginalized.”

Yergeau is bringing other projects to Carleton from their prior work at the University of Michigan, as well. They are the director of the Digital Accessible Futures Lab, funded by the Mellon Foundation, which “centers crip wisdom, neuroqueer futures, and disability liberation in its engagement with the digital.”

They are also co-lead on the Crip Computing project, funded by the Mozilla Foundation’s Responsible Computing Challenge, which invites students “to learn from disability culture as we (re)imagine accessible futures.” It asks, “How might we imagine future technologies that prioritize disabled people?”

Yergeau is looking forward to collaborating with Carleton students on these projects and more. Yergeau hopes their findings will encourage healthcare providers, community workers, and academics to reconsider practices ranging across disability design, neurodivergent data curation, and intrusive thoughts from a justice-oriented perspective. “How might we attend to the nuances of distress, joy, pain, and obsession,” Yergeau asks, “in ways that ensure the survival of trans-mad people?”