Gender: A Wider Lens on how online communities shape thought, desire, and doubt about transition
It was really lovely to talk to Sasha and Stella for last week’s episode of Gender: A Wider Lens (my favorite podcast)! You can watch our conversation on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts!
Forgive a little fuzzy-headedness on my part — I was still getting over being sick and had taken two kinds of cough suppressants to make it through the interview!
In this episode, Sasha & Stella chat with graduate student and Substack author Eliza Mondegreen, who is dedicated to the study of online trans and detrans communities. She also studies the knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs underpinning affirmative care.
The conversation with Eliza begins with a deep dive into what led to her intimate exploration of gender. She shares how her history with eating disorders, an early interest in the study of totalitarianism, advocacy work around women’s reproductive health, and her relationship with a close friend during their transition experience all helped pave the way for her intense interest and curiosity about gender, specifically the psychological experience as it relates to projecting distress and the medical interventions for managing the distress. Eliza shares how she explores these concepts in depth through her engagement with online communities (like Reddit) where she observes and reflects on the stories, ideas, and reactions shared by other members inside the internet-based groups.
Eliza also speaks about her attendance at both the EPATH conference recently in Ireland, and the WAPTH conference last year in Canada for a fully immersive experience and a first-hand account of the affirmative approach to trans healthcare and medicalization. Eliza writes extensively on her Substack about her encounters and observations, and her first-hand exposure from inside the online and medical communities indulging the identity that is “trans.”
Very glad to learn of you (through Lisa Selin Davis). We all have reason to be enormously grateful for your ongoing thorough research, intelligent insights, and courage. I was particularly appreciative of your observations on the “headset” of medical providers who are engaged in, and seem to believe in, “gender affirming” interventions, against all odds and evidence. I had just run across this video conversation with Blair Peters, a surgeon at OHSU, flabbergasted, all over again, that he is blind to the harm in what he is doing: https://youtu.be/FhIycMvV8vk Your observations were really helpful to give the context for this. It is indeed an alarming state of affairs.
Thank you for such a thoughtful interview and for your work in this area. Your discussion, early on, of the impossible position that someone is in as the loved one of someone transitioning resonated deeply with me. It is so hard. Thank you for giving voice to that.
And the overlaps of anorexia and gender dysphoria are very compelling, and maybe point to different approaches to the gender-questioning young person. I recall all too clearly Diane Ehrensaft herself explaining to me so patronizingly why they were not at all the same (basically, how stupid a parent I was to wonder if they were).
Keep up your excellent work - you're onto something very important.