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More of Dr. Ducheny’s nonbinary thoughts: https://listloop.com/wpath/mail.cgi/archive/adhoc/20220629133822/
Episode transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s8r_S8kQw4Oytpv5-58wd0A8Br3TN3TzCTWf6otXrd4/edit?usp=sharing
Dr. Kelly Ducheny, Psy D., spoke in a WPATH zoom to explain how colonization drove indigequeer genders to the brink of extinction, collapsing far and wide the understanding of gender into male and female. Through patient ecological management, colonizers have been able to revitalize and even cultivate ever-expanding breeds of medicalized indigenous genders.
Instead of recognizing their incurable lack of deep comprehension of all 15,000+ years and 2 continents’ worth of Native spiritualism, and how it does or does not map onto the reality of sex as well as modern colonizer conceptions of “gender,” self-professed colonizer-aligned institutions and professions are now fully embracing a sense of control over the spiritual lives of indigenous people. They are leading the charge to take this ‘collapsed’ gender ecological understanding and then ‘expand’ it again into some three-dimensional “universe of gender.” However, the one idea they will refuse to entertain is that they as white colonizers are wrong now. They will only concede being wrong in the past, followed by the triumphant announcement that they are now even more correct. And they will not be persuaded that male, female, woman, and man, are not genders.
While it may seem like I am griping about professionals not doing what they are now claiming to be attempting to do, the problem is that these professions went from a state of believing they understood, when they did not, and in the process, damaging indigenous cultures and communities (as they acknowledge), to now, believing they understand, when they still do not, and continuing to interfere. And in both circumstances, they were attempting to impose their idea of what Native conceptualization of the world and ourselves is or should be, onto us, without due regard for the harm this may create. They are still placing themselves in a position of authority. They still found a way to feel better than their forebears and deserving of another chance, without having to change or give up that sense of superiority and stewardship of the noble savages. At the same time, they are telling indigenous people that we must believe that our cultures made room for non-men non-women, as well as for men-women.
If they understood the harm they had caused, they would respect the fact that these religious understandings cannot be merged into some utopian “pan-indigenous” understanding, as I frequently see “two-spirit” or “indigequeer” termed. An attempt to study and reify these religious categories as if they were biological is extremely misguided and that is therefore unlikely to improve the care received by Native individuals who identify with these terms based on their specific cultural upbringings, especially those also struggling with some form of post-traumatic syndrome or other illness that is interacting with the belief structures. An example of an illness interacting with belief structures is a seizure disorder which gives rise to religious experiences, which then due to cultural background gives rise to specific subjective psychological experiences of the seizure that take the form of a spiritualist understanding versus being visited by biblical angels or similar.
It’s like they get so close to accepting that we are culturally different, and then have to veer right back into a biological explanation for the cultural difference, landing on the theory that two spirit indigequeers are a natural phenomenon that science can and should attempt to study and cultivate (farm). I am not interested in being psychology’s cultivar, especially not when I am seeking care. Cultural sensitivity demands an understanding that there is a distinction between a devout Christian praying in a culturally monodirectional fashion, a Christian with OCD praying obsessively, and a Christian who is having seizure events in which God prays back, a spiritualist whose prayer style is culturally dialectical when no pathology is present, and a spiritualist whose prayer style is dialectical, who is also praying obsessively, and having events in which the discourse has begun to incorporate pathological hallucinations and delusions. It’s a delicate line to walk.
My experience with some, not all, clinicians, was that the presence of any sort of dialectical thought pattern or style of prayer was seen as an automatic illness symptom, i.e., “thought insertion,” “hearing voices,” and other ways of presupposing there is one way to have a normal mindspace and healthy relational subjectivity. This pathologizes Native spiritualism. Spiritualism is broadly any practice that incorporates a belief that spirits of the dead communicate with the living. People raised in spiritualist understanding of metaphysics may experience thoughts more dialectically, in a way that is then labeled as a pathology by psychiatry. The idea that there could be cultural foundation for that style of thought or experience of thought or prayer seemed fundamentally foreign to the point it was not considered until I pointed out that I had been taught to think and pray this way. And even then, that inspired concerns about the teachers.
I do not have any interest in being legally required to recognize the spiritual status of a person from another culture or religion, due to the fact that this would require I adopt a spiritual understanding I was not raised with and have no interest in converting to. I do not seek to force anyone to convert to the understanding I was raised with, nor the one I have now. A secular society cannot favor one unverifiable understanding over the other, and a healing discipline like psychology or psychiatry must be willing to recognize that difference is not always disease. In being asked to acknowledge a belief that a person has not one but two gender souls, I am being required to pretend to recognize these alternate genders in alternate cultures as though they had some real physical correlate that marked them as a special kind of person, and as though they somehow relate to my culture simply because we’re considered to be from the same “race.” I am being asked to profess a belief in a metaphysics that has not been demonstrated to exist.
To be clear, I am not saying that I embrace the spiritual beliefs I was raised with. It is more like a world-model I was handed and carry with me, alongside my other world models that I have encountered in my life, including the one I do attach to myself (atheist-materialist). It is a system worth preserving and discussing as a contrast to the hegemonic Christian nationalist understanding of the soul and its relation to their proposed other world model. Instead of being raised to believe I am one entity that can communicate with the one god-being that it’s socially acceptable to psychically attempt to interact with, I was raised to believe that there was a mental interaction with anyone, and that one can and should attempt to mentally debate or otherwise discuss problems with other people in this spiritual world, which is a form of prayer. If that belief structure had just arisen from nowhere, then it would have been appropriate to question if the belief pattern was a result of pathology. But I disagree that psychiatry should attempt to diagnose Paul on the road to Damascus, either. People have inner lives in which profound events just happen. Look at the delusions and hallucinations that happen when you fall in love. We cannot start from the premise that only rational experiences are normal.
And so as an adult, I am someone with thought processes which are fundamentally dialectical, but not due to any disease process, and therefore not needing to be “fixed” to be more in line with white Christian anti-spiritualist (because the bible says it’s just demons and false gods) cultural expectations for inner experience. The experience is like the surface of a music visualizer program. There is no one true way to visualize music. There’s no one true way to subjectively experience your brain and its mind’s development and evolution across the lifespan. Not recognizing this led to more than one clinician interpreting non-symptoms as symptoms and mistreating me, resulting in harm. I have had many years of therapy with many different therapists, and problematic clinicians and other service providers were definitely uncommon, but they encouraged me to view the cultural difference in my family as a sign of illness in some of the members who had no significant impairment in functioning, whom they’d never met, and that was not appropriate. Neither is this woman using her position as a clinician to reverse colonization by cultivating indigequeer genders.
More information about Iroquois spiritualism as it relates to death and the afterdeath: https://www.indianz.com/News/2015/04/16/doug-georgekanentiio-death-rit.asp
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