English Found Poem Artist Statement REVISED (1)

Ashe Matteson

Professor Skylar Locke

English 170

8 February 2023

The Importance of Trans Healthcare and Listening to Trans Youth

In the last few years there has been lots of news highlighting transgender healthcare and rights, with a plethora of bills being passed in different states concerning the affordability, and legality of it. As someone who identifies with and is close with members of  the trans community, affordable and accessible trans healthcare is something that I am a strong advocate for. 

The article that I turned into a found poem is a FOX news article that interviewed teens that used to identify as transgender and started to medically transition, only to realize that they weren’t trans and de-transitioned. The article mentions that all they needed was “a little time to grow up” (Weiss)  and how “…there is a suspicion… that the adults weren’t really listening to the children as much as superimposing their own politics onto them” (Weiss) this article struck me because parents forcing their ideas onto their children is not only wrong, but dangerous to imply. To any parents reading this article, this implication could lead them to believe that certain feelings their children are expressing about their identity are invalid. Instead I chose to make the message of the poem about how gender-affirming care is important for trans people, especially for youth that are not able to get the care they need without their parent’s permission. Hormone replacement therapy is an important treatment method for alleviating dysphoria for adults and teens alike. Often shortened to HRT, this form of care is when someone replaces the hormones in their body to better match the sex which they prefer to identify, almost like the biological function of puberty. Along with this, they would also take puberty blockers to help stop the changes their sex assigned at birth would normally go through. With this type of care, trans youth can start their transition to help them with their gender dysphoria. Dysphoria, which is somewhat of a different concept than dysmorphia, is the “psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity.” (“What is Gender Dysphoria?”) This is different from dysmorphia, which is when someone has a distorted view of how they look, whereas those with gender dysphoria do not have a distorted view of how they look. The amount of bias that this article expresses also ties into a TED Talk that Chimamada Ngozi Adichie gave on the danger of how a single story, which gives only one perspective, can be used in mainstream media to influence the opinions of others. They chose to interview trans people who detransitioned to confirm their bias that trans people may be trans because of the “beliefs” that are “forced onto them.” However, those who detransition are only a small part of a much larger community. This article is a very inaccurate representation of the trans community, and to take away from the message this article is trying to spread I turned it into a found poem about how important gender affirming care is for trans youth.

When writing my poem, my choice of words was an important factor for me. The article expresses a lot of bias, and I wanted my message to express the opposite. I organized my selected words with the goal of making it look like a regular poem, until the end where instead of cutting and pasting words, I erased text to spell out an entire sentence. This resulted in the letters being spaced farther apart. I chose to format so that as the reader finishes the first part of the poem the change in formatting forces them to put more effort into figuring out what the spaced out text says. It reads, “help and listen.” I find that this is a very important message, and spacing it out in a way that requires more effort to be read will help that message sink in. In order for trans youth to be able to get the gender affirming care they need, we need the parents of these youth to listen to what feelings their children are expressing to them. 

The last two lines before the change to negative space are the most important lines of the poem in my opinion. The sentence’s purpose is to serve as a wake up call to people who may be against or even neutral on the topic of whether trans youth should be able to start their transition as early as their freshman year of high school. A lot of adults believe that their child might be “too young” to know what they want, but the consequences from this assumption could have a lasting negative impact on the mental wellbeing of their child. Not many people understand how big of an issue not transitioning from earlier on in your life might actually be, and aren’t aware of the psychological impact that it could have on a person. An article form Stanford Medicine states “Compared with members of the control group, participants who underwent hormone treatment had lower odds of experiencing severe psychological distress during the previous month and lower odds of suicidal ideation in the previous year.” (Digitale) The article goes on to give statistics about how those who received treatment in the early stages of their life experienced less psychological distress than those who received treatment later in their life. 

Reading the FOX News article was somewhat difficult, as someone who feels strongly connected to the trans community. The amount of bias the article has goes to show that most media nowadays will choose to only pick information that will support whatever point they are trying to make. This starts to create the single stories that Adichie warned about in her TED Talk, “The Danger of A Single Story” where one will become so trusting on these few facts they know about an issue, and when presented with the opposite position that what they’ve been hearing from, will be almost appalled at the idea that they could be in the wrong about what they heard. This is why we have to shatter these single stories by sharing what we know about an issue or a story, whether it is through art, writing, or any form of media. Looking at the finished product of the poem, I believe that it gets the point I was trying to make across very clearly, and that others can look at it and be able to see a side of a story they weren’t aware of before.

 

Works Cited

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story | TED Talk, 2009, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en. Accessed 12 February 2023

Digitale, Erin. “Better Mental Health Found among Transgender People Who Started Hormones as Teens.” Stanford Medicine, 12 Jan. 2022, https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/01/mental-health-hormone-treatment-transgender-people.html. Accessed 11 February 2023

Gillespie, Brandon. “Report: Teens Expressing Regret over ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ Are ‘Going Unheard’ by the Biden Administration.” Fox News, FOX News Network, 19 Apr. 2022, https://www.foxnews.com/media/report-teens-regret-over-gender-affirming-care-unheard-biden-administration. Accessed 11 February 2023

“What Is Gender Dysphoria?” Psychiatry.org – What Is Gender Dysphoria?, Aug. 2022, https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphoria/what-is-gender-dysphoria. Accessed 11 February 2023