from WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Thursday, June 1st.

It's the first day of Pride Month. And we'll start by turning to a term that many of you have heard by now and turning it on its

head. Even if you don't know any trans people, you've probably heard the term gender dysphoria,

right? The National Institutes of Health defines gender dysphoria as a market incongruence between a

person's experienced or expressed gender and the one they were assigned at

birth. Wikipedia defines gender dysphoria as the distress a person experiences due to that

mismatch. The Cleveland Clinic website notes that many insurance companies require you to submit

specific documentation of consistent gender dysphoria

before they will cover a gender affirming surgery. So in an oversimplified nutshell, that's gender

dysphoria. And many of you, even with no trans folks in your life, probably had at least

heard that term and had a vague sense of what that is. But let's turn that

term and the distress that comes with it on its head because there is also such a thing as gender

euphoria. You all know what euphoria is, that feeling of extreme happiness and elation and joy that I hope

everyone listening right now has experienced at least sometimes in your life.

And if you do a Google search for gender euphoria, you'll find millions of hits.

One of the first to come up, the website Healthline, which defines gender euphoria as feeling right in your gender, when you can look at the way your gender is presented and received and feel happiness or joy.

So as we begin our Thursday Pride Month series here on the show amid all these laws and policies being passed

and all these states trying to erase non-binary and trans people in one way or another.

We will talk about those hate laws some of the time and gender dysphoria some of the time.

But let's start on the idea of gender euphoria, feeling right in the way your gender is at least presented

and sometimes hopefully perceived. We'll invite your gender euphoria calls in a minute, and we're

very happy to have two guests for this. Imara Jones is back with us, former journalist

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