Self-Portrait (ca. 1941) | Samuel Joseph Brown / Metropolitan Museum of Art / Public Domain
A gay man lowers his voice in the boardroom. A trans woman is detained at border control when her appearance does not match her passport photo. A nonbinary teenager avoids mirrors. A butch lesbian is asked to leave the women’s changing room for “making others uncomfortable.”
These are not moments of private shame. They are the aftershocks of systemic correction.
In my practice as a psychotherapist, I work with queer, racialized, neurodivergent, and disabled clients for whom the legibility of their gender often determines access to intimacy, employment, and health care. Gender readability becomes the price of admission to public life. The costs of deviation are not metaphorical. They appear in eviction notices, job rejections, exclusion from locker rooms and prayer spaces, harassment on public transport, and health care systems that misgender or deny care entirely.
A 2020 UCLA Williams Institute study found that nearly one in four LGBTQIA+ youth experience homelessness—and one third are rejected by family. But statistics capture only part of the story. The unrelenting demand to be read correctly, to render oneself intelligible on someone else’s terms, is one of the most psychologically corrosive forces I witness in the consulting room.
From the very beginning, gender is a well-rehearsed script. The unborn child is seized, coded, and conscripted into a narrative before they draw breath. Pink or blue. Girl or boy. Tutus or trucks. The binary demand is repeated like a drumbeat: become this or face the consequences.
As early as the 1960s, the UCLA Gender Identity Research Clinic developed the “Sissy Boy Syndrome” checklist—a diagnostic tool to identify boys considered at risk of becoming “homosexual.” In the 1970s, Dr. George Rekers, who later cofounded the hate group Family Research Council, promoted techniques to extinguish “gender deviance” in children. These efforts laid the foundation for modern conversion therapy. Though discredited or banned in many places, its legacy persists through disguised forms of counseling, political attacks, and cultural policing. The surveillance of gender and sexual diversity has not disappeared; it has adapted.
Today, gender nonconformity is under renewed assault. Across the United States and Europe, trans athletes are benched, gender-nonconforming people are erased from public records, and gender and sexuality studies programs are defunded or dismantled. In France, first lady Brigitte Macron was recently targeted by conspiracy theorists demanding she “prove” she is not trans, revealing how demands for transparency are wielded not to liberate but to enforce dominant norms.
On dating apps, the message is rarely subtle: “No fems.” “Straight-acting only.” One profile I came across bluntly demanded: “Masc only. Be able to throw a football, not a tantrum.” These are not preferences; they are rules enforcing a hierarchy in which masculinity signals status and femininity marks failure. The closer a gay man aligns with straight, white, middle-class masculinity—disciplined, detached, emotionally flat—the more desirable he becomes. Even without words, the performance screams. Gym selfies flex as credentials. Biceps stand in for character. Even the now-ubiquitous “golden retriever energy” makes clear that softness is only welcome when housed in the right body.
In my consulting room, I witness resistance in small but luminous ruptures. A client who stops muting their laugh. A client who lets their hands move freely when they speak. A client who says, “I do not know what I am,” and smiles.
Édouard Glissant gives us the language we need: “We demand the right to opacity.” Opacity is not shame, not silence, not a return to the closet. It is a refusal to be fully known on terms that were never ours. As Glissant writes, “As far as my identity is concerned, I will take care of it myself … [I]t does not disturb me to accept that there are places where my identity is obscure to me, and that does not mean I relinquish it.”
