From Respect to Understanding
By Dwight Panozzo
In this three-part series, Dwight Panozzo, PhD, LCSW, shares his personal and professional journey through the complexities of Gender Identitarianism (GI), a movement he argues may qualify as a New Religious Movement (NRM). In this first post, Panozzo introduces his initial encounters with GI, reflecting on the cultural and clinical challenges it poses. His narrative, rooted in humility and critical inquiry, is a model of how honest reflection can help to deepen understanding and reduce harm in the gender debate.
At Genspect, we support rigorous inquiry into gender issues, and Panozzo’s call for ethical research and clinical practices aligns with our mission to prioritize evidence and compassion. This post offers a framework for addressing GI’s challenges in clinical, cultural, and policy contexts.
Read the full series: Part 2: Missteps in Treatment: Confronting the Limits of My Knowledge | Part 3: Recognizing Gender Identity as a Belief System
Gender identity has become a central topic in clinical practice and public discourse, raising strong emotions and complex ethical questions. As a mental health clinician, my views have evolved through years of experience, reflection, and personal missteps. While some of my perspectives may differ from widely accepted views, I invite readers to approach this narrative with an open mind, recognizing our shared commitment to reducing human suffering and promoting well-being for all. — Dwight Panozzo
Grounding
Life is short, the art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, and judgment difficult. – Hippocrates, C 460–C 370 BCE.
These are words that have stood the test of time for more than two millennia. Each of us grapples with some variation of them at some point. I have been told that comedy arises when we face a challenge, learn from it, and grow. A tragedy, on the other hand, occurs when we face a challenge but fail to learn from it. Just as all may benefit from the lessons in the comedy, all may suffer from the failure to learn the lessons of tragedy.
While it is a simplification, there is a profound truth embedded in it, just as in the words of Hippocrates. In this instance, the probable birth of a new religious movement (NRM) is considered: the perils that individuals, families, and society face because of it, as well as the tremendous opportunity for learning and growth that it presents to everyone.
As is likely with all NRMs, Gender Identitarianism (GI), also known as “transgenderism”, “gender identity”, and “gender queerness”, is a movement that evolves each day, and its borders, players, rituals, sacred texts, blasphemies, and promises change as well. It comes upon us with a speed that probably eclipses that of all previous NRMs, traveling as it does not only from the lips to the ears of humans but through printed words, images, and videos across the Internet.
While religiously motivated killing in support of GI by its adherents is rare, there are exceptions. The Teasley case, where a trans identified male allegedly killed a woman on a hiking trail because of her good looks, and the Zizian cult murders with multiple trans identified members allegedly killing six people, are recent high-profile cases. GI has arguably made up for these isolated cases in the social losses feared and experienced in the cancel culture associated with it, the profound upheaval it has caused in our culture, the ways that it has caused deep rifts in families, the opportunity cost of misdirecting resources away from other clinical issues, and the deep and abiding sadness experienced by detransitioners attempting to come to terms with what has happened to them. They face the task of determining which pathways to life’s rewards are permanently unavailable and how they will find meaning, purpose, and joy amidst their challenges.
The key issue in GI is the movement’s ferocity. It is a force of righteousness, arguably the most dangerous of motivations. My goal is to understand the source of that ferocity and our response to it.
This is also the story of my journey as a mental health clinician through the world of GI: how I acted with compassion and professionalism, but also with ignorance and may have caused harm, how I hid from it, how I entered a wilderness, and how I eventually emerged as a presumably wiser person.
Well-Intentioned Ignorance
I had spent more than 25 years of my adult life as a clinical social worker, in private practice for only 15 years, having earned an MSW, a certificate in psychoanalysis, and a PhD in Social Work, when GI entered my life in a profound way in 2016. Before then, my lived experience around GI had been limited to a coworker in an AIDS agency during the 1990s who dressed in pantsuits and wore thick pancake makeup but maintained his male name and pronouns. He also lost his job after an allegation of having stolen one or more clients’ pain medications on home visits.
It would be fair to say that, in terms of creating a mental model for me of persons engaged with GI, the representation that my experience of him created was a mixture of intellectual heft regarding his knowledge of substance misuse, mystery around his female presentation, and concern for what appeared to be profound flaws in character. I did not understand him, but I felt I had a duty as a human being to respect and support his path in life.
More than 20 years went by before I was confronted again with GI in a serious way. It is also fair to say that part of me was relieved when he was fired for the topsy-turvy aspects he brought to my life and to the lives of my coworkers and clients—yes, he was frequently talked about.
Speaking Out of Turn
In 2016, my local high school board was gripped with questions concerning its policy of supporting gender self-identification and allowing students with cross-gender identification to use the facilities of their choosing. I had lived in the district for more than a quarter century and felt that I had a duty to stand up and have my voice heard to support the members of the “T” in the LGBT rainbow. My speech was not longer than a few minutes, but it was quoted in the student-run online newsletter where I queried…
Where is the epidemic of crimes related to trans women using the women’s room or cisgendered people being traumatized by catching sight of unanticipated genitalia? Those things simply don’t exist, and that means that some of us are paranoid on this issue.
Notably, it is now becoming difficult to avoid stories of females being traumatized by being forced to change clothing in the presence of genitally intact transwomen or of females being raped by transwomen in congregate settings such as prisons and hospitals.
Being ahead of the curve, as it were, the absence of evidence was not evidence of absence. I now know this was my first critical error. The far worse error, from my perspective, was that I spoke at all, not because we should not all have a voice, but because I was speaking out of turn. While it was not quoted in the online newsletter, my far more grievous quote was, “I did not understand transgender people, but that did not mean that I could not respect and support them.” I did not understand what I was respecting nor what support of it could entail. Knowing when to speak and when to continue reviewing the literature on a topic is difficult.
My suspicion is that it should come when one’s review of the literature has reached what qualitative researchers refer to as “saturation.” That is, when no new data or concepts are revealed and further review only leads to reinforcement of what is already known. Having not formally reviewed the literature, I was speaking utterly out of turn.
Talking about what one does not understand is dangerous because of the nature of human knowledge, which tends to rest on chains of trust — and I was the weakest link.
My initial support for GI was well-intentioned but uninformed. In the next post, I’ll share how this ignorance shaped my treatment of transgender patients and the lessons I learned from those missteps.
Continue reading: Part 2: Missteps in Treatment: Confronting the Limits of My Knowledge | Part 3: Recognizing Gender Identity as a Belief System
Dwight Panozzo, PhD, licensed clinical social worker with 30+ years’ experience and Beyond Trans therapist directory member.
Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.
Learning from Experience
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