relating embracing an ADHD diagnosis to transness

i started thinking about this great post about “embracing” your diagnosis by @thatadhdfeel on tumblr, and how it can apply to transness. a major conflict between transmedicalists and non-transmedicalists is transness as medical condition versus transness as identity.

adhd is one diagnosis i have. it describes several specific struggles i have in the world, and i do think the word disorder is appropriate for it in my life. i treat it with medication, and my family works to accommodate me in the aspects of adhd that medication doesn’t affect. to me, “medical condition” is a neutral rather than negative description, though i certainly experience many aspects of adhd as negative.

i also take great pride in having adhd, and i enjoy meeting other people with adhd because they completely understand the weird ways my brain will work. i feel like adhd gives me a unique perspective on how society is organized, because of my pushing against what is expected of me.

my pride in my adhd, and my embracing adhd as an identity and a community, is not inconsistent with adhd being a medical condition that i medically treat. while distractability is a major part of adhd that’s necessary for diagnosis, embracing adhd identity refers to pride in the total experience of being a person with adhd.

dysphoria as understood in a transmedicalist paradigm pushes against society’s expectations of how a person of your birth-assigned gender experiences their body. transmedicalists do want to destigmatize dysphoria and make it so that people with (the transmedicalist framework’s concept of) dysphoria can be identified, and quickly and easily access their medical transition needs. (this is not a post that is relevant to critiquing their methods. go read my other posts if you want that.) they do frequently seek out other transmedicalists and create communities based on their shared experiences. all of these things point to the coherence of transness as an identity within a transmedicalist framework.

i am not transmedicalist, but i wonder what it would be like if more transmedicalists understood their transness as i understand my adhd: as medical condition that can be treated medically and as identity. i wonder what it would be like if more transmedicalists started exploring disability justice frameworks.