Remi Yergeau recently arrived in Ottawa from the United States to pursue their new role as the Canada Research Chair in critical disability studies and communication at Carleton University.
Yergeau researches the intersection of transgender and disabled identities within obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and therapy, hyperfocused on today’s digital landscape.
They also lead the Digital Accessible Futures Lab, where they study disability activism, anti-racism practices and “crip” joy to find alternative futures.
The Charlatan sat down with Yergeau to discuss their research.
The Charlatan (TC): What can you tell us about your research as the new Canada Research Chair in critical disability studies and communication?
RY: Where I’m headed now is still focused on neurodivergence, but looking more at obsession as a phenomenon related to autism and other people with disabilities who experience obsession, which is used as an attack point by anti-trans people online.
There’s this big contingent of the anti-trans movement focused on this presumption that disabled youth, especially youth who are neurodivergent or have psychiatric disabilities, aren’t really trans. They’re just too “disabled or mentally ill” to know their transness or that transness is a symptom of their condition.
It’s morphed into this interesting discourse online where, in particular with OCD workbooks, people almost entirely narrate this as a bad experience. This is really different from how I see a lot of autistic folks and others with disabilities talking online about it where the discourse is more about reclaiming their identity.
TC: How are you going about this research?
RY: At the moment, I’ve been mostly focused on workbooks and online therapist-created content and less on the patient discourse. I’ve combed through around 50 of these workbooks so far, trying to see how often they’re speaking to themes of gender and sexuality.
Part of this project is also looking at historically how both OCD and transness have been conceptualized in behavioural therapy — it’s not a completely new idea. I’m trying to chart a lineage and focus on the particularly heavily digitized moment where this is taking fuel.
TC: Why is your research focused on trans studies, disability studies and digital communication?
RY: There’s a history behind behavioural therapy used for autism and conversion therapy. The therapeutic modalities used on autistic youth today were used on young children perceived to be effeminate or at risk for homosexuality.
There’s been a long-standing discussion about behavioural therapy in autistic spaces, and it’s still the dominant practice because behavioural therapies are really focused on the external. It ignores the inner lives of people who are presumed to not have “inner lives” or who are presumed to have “diseased inner lives.” I’m neurodivergent myself, so these are communities that I am very committed to and interested in.
TC: What issues are you trying to tackle through your research?
RY: There have to be better options for providing support and care. Exposure therapy examples are potentially really violating, but that’s what the options are. The way exposure therapy often gets framed in OCD spaces suggests that other forms of therapy are going to make your OCD worse, so you need to do exposure and response prevention therapy.
There are also plenty of people who have narrated positive experiences with those therapies and I don’t want to discount that. But I’m trying to ground a deeper conversation about how the OCD and exposure therapy workbooks I engage with largely imagine patients or readers from more privileged backgrounds and experiences.
TC: How do you hope to use your new position to fill in the advocacy gaps in this field?
RY: Other scholars in my area have been trying to make a justice-oriented push. Part of this is ensuring people are trying to think about response to the threats and about coalition-building so they’re also not throwing each other under the bus.
So, when something is happening that’s concerning immigration status, disability or trans people, it’s affecting everyone to varying degrees. We’re all implicated, so it can’t be a monolithic single-identity issue. It’s important to focus on all elements and not just disability or gender.
TC: What is your vision for the future?
RY: There’s this feeling of constantly moving backwards rather than forwards. From a disability perspective or in the communities that I’m really tethered to, it means having some degree of autonomy over their lives. We shouldn’t have support-seeking scenarios where you either have to fall under a guardian or you end up locked in a ward.
Thinking especially about how those questions around psychiatric infrastructures, as other people in disability studies have pointed out, are tightly interwoven with other carceral systems.
I hope for a future that’s accessible to everyone, a future providing community and care and where people can dictate their terms of support.
This article has been edited for length and clarity.
Featured Image by Simon McKeown/the Charlatan.
