{"id":2171,"date":"2025-03-17T16:20:30","date_gmt":"2025-03-17T20:20:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fpga\/?p=2171"},"modified":"2025-03-18T15:41:42","modified_gmt":"2025-03-18T19:41:42","slug":"canada-research-chair-remi-yergeau-considers-transness-and-disability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fpga\/2025\/canada-research-chair-remi-yergeau-considers-transness-and-disability\/","title":{"rendered":"Canada Research Chair Remi Yergeau Considers Transness and Disability"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Canada Research Chair Remi Yergeau Considers Transness and Disability\n <\/h1>\n \n \n \n\n

Throughout their career, M. Remi Yergeau has drawn on their own experience as a transgender autistic scholar to study the intersection of communications with disability and queerness. As the new Canada Research Chair<\/a> in Critical Disability Studies and Communication in the School of Journalism and Communication, Yergeau is studying how anti-trans activists are co-opting the language of psychiatry.<\/p>\n\n\n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n

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\u201cIf you spend any time on the anti-trans internet, you\u2019ll 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\u201d says Yergeau, who points to social media accounts that use the language of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to \u2018diagnose\u2019 trans people. \u201cThe idea behind CBT is that you\u2019re experiencing distress because you\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yergeau says the rise in these armchair social media \u201cdiagnoses\u201d is not new or coincidental: some mental health practitioners have historically linked sexual orientation\u2014and now gender identity\u2014to obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a nascent subtype of OCD called \u2018transgender OCD\u2019 and the name is misleading because in general it refers to presumed cisgender people who have intrusive thoughts about their gender identity,\u201d explains Yergeau. \u201cThere\u2019s this pipeline being created where anti-trans actors are co-opting that discourse for their own nefarious ends.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201ccisgender\u201d norm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe 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 \u2018let\u2019s purposefully misgender you,\u2019\u201d says Yergeau, who has experienced this personally. \u201cPractitioners don\u2019t necessarily think of themselves as anti-trans, but they practice a behavioural modality that I argue is pretty harmful to people who are marginalized.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yergeau is bringing other projects to ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ from their prior work at the University of Michigan, as well. They are the director of the Digital Accessible Futures Lab<\/a>, funded by the Mellon Foundation, which \u201ccenters crip wisdom, neuroqueer futures, and disability liberation in its engagement with the digital.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They are also co-lead on the Crip Computing project<\/a>, funded by the Mozilla Foundation\u2019s Responsible Computing Challenge, which invites students \u201cto learn from disability culture as we (re)imagine accessible futures.\u201d It asks, \u201cHow might we imagine future technologies that prioritize disabled people?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yergeau is looking forward to collaborating with ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ 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. \u201cHow might we attend to the nuances of distress, joy, pain, and obsession,\u201d Yergeau asks, \u201cin ways that ensure the survival of trans-mad people?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cIf you spend any time on the anti-trans internet, you\u2019ll 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\u201d says Yergeau, who points to social media accounts that use the language of Cognitive Behavioural […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":2173,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[37,62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-research"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fpga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fpga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fpga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fpga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fpga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2171"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fpga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2190,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fpga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2171\/revisions\/2190"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fpga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fpga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fpga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fpga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}