ABSTRACT
In contemporary culture, any therapist who deems transgender people mentally ill is clearly politically incorrect. By and large, all transgender people were hidden from sight in the larger culture. Until the mid-1990s, many transgender people had no tribe. The Internet played a pivotal role in offering tribal support to the transgender community. By the mid-1990s, mothers and fathers of gender-nonconforming kids began to find each other in online newsgroups, chat rooms, and message boards. Tansgender people experience a profound sense of dissonance. They don’t feel like their assigned gender. In the LGBTQ community, gender boundaries have always been considered permeable. The smashing of the gender binary paradigm has facilitated freedom for people who may fit between the two poles of masculinity and feminity but who do not identify as transgender. The boundaries between male and female are getting fuzzier and fuzzier. In some ways, transgender and gender-nonconforming people reflect a larger cultural trend.
