It’s traditional to regard other people’s gender and sexuality as pathological. Mostly male medical professionals once diagnosed “female problems,” including hysteria, fainting spells and chronic irrationality. Doctors and psychiatrists considered homosexuality an illness, and for decades it was listed as such in the diagnostic manual of the American Psychological Association. Some still try to treat homosexuality as a curable condition. Gender nonconformists have been relentlessly pathologized, stereotyped, and even criminalized wherever they wandered into public view.

Yet...