Understanding Gender Dysphoria

What a trainwreck of a book. This book was written for one group only: white, cisgender, straight, evangelicals. This book is in service of that group, because this book does nothing to inform or educate on trans people. It serves only to further bias against trans people.

This book has so many problems I don't even know where to start. I guess first I would start with the constant dead-naming. Mark even does this on the first page of the introduction. There is no excuse, or reason to dead-name a trans person. All you are doing is causing harm to that person and giving the signal to others that it's ok to invalidate who they are. The book gets even worse by misgendering almost all the time.

Then, the author can't decide between “transgender” and “transsexual.” Seriously, pick one. He actually puts up a fuss about the term “sex assigned at birth,” when that's literally what it is. He constantly dehumanizes trans people with terms such as “gender dysphoric persons.” He constantly uses the term “biological male/female” which is a made up term as scientifically, there is no such thing. He constantly pretends gender and sex are a binary, when they are not. This has been shown to be true for decades now. Sex is bimodal and gender is a social construct with no basis in reality. He constantly uses discredited studies such as ones claiming that trans people become trans due to fathers being emotionally distant, and ones that claim most “desist” from a trans identity. He also pretends that studies show that abuse causes people to be trans. He constantly makes controversies like when he claims that people are protesting against the term “assigned gender” because of intersex people. He constantly makes claims and never substantiates them, I guess believing that everyone reading already agrees, such as: “sex differences are instructive.” He pretends that studies show that transitioning doesn't help trans people's mental health improve when literally almost every single study does say that trans people's mental health improves from transitioning. I could keep going on about the problems with this book, but at some point I need to wrap this up.

The most infuriating thing about this book is how he tries to pretend to be this enlightened centrist when at times he directly says what he wants: for trans people to learn how to live as their assigned sex at birth (despite studies showing this to be harmful) and for children to be forced back into “normal” gender roles instead of gender-variant ones. He directly says these things throughout the book. I honestly would have had more respect for him if he had just been open in his transphobia and desire for trans people to submit to what he directly calls “Biblical views on sex and gender.” Nothing is more angering than a person hiding their true views in a terrible attempt to appear neutral. At least others like Abigail Shrier had the decency to be open about their true beliefs. Mark Yarhouse continually write transphobic things (so many that this review would be much to long to read), and then turns around and says he believes trans people and wants what's best for us, and then turns around again and says we just need to fit in to evangelical views and not live in what he calls “the diversity framework,” which is what we live in because it's the only “framework” that brings healing, joy, and meaning. It's the only affirming one that builds one another up. The “integrity” and “disability” frameworks are destructive and only cause harm to trans people. Yet, he pushes them on us while claiming he cares about trans people. While promoting parents to not let kids transition, while saying trans adults shouldn't transition and get surgery. The worst slap in the face is taking Ray Blanchard seriously. Blanchard has been discredited by actual experts on trans psychology and medicine for decades. Yet, Yarhouse (consistently) decides he's smarter than the experts and takes Blanchard seriously and uses Blanchard's discredited views to create his own views on trans people. Actually, now that I think about it, the worst slap in the face is when he directly admits that trans people's internal gender identity (e.g., someone assigned male at birth identifying as female, a.k.a. a trans woman) is their real selves. He directly says that. He says that me, someone assigned male at birth is living as my real self by living as a woman (something I am currently doing). Then he immediately turns around and says that we shouldn't be living as our true selves. Why not? Why do cis gender people get to be their real selves but I'm not allowed to. It's needlessly cruel. 

This book is woefully un-informed on psychology, history, science, studies on trans people, and theology. In the end, I want to wrap this up by saying that Mark Yarhouse is not a serious person meant to be taken seriously.