All week long I’ve been running posts about: “GID Removed from the DSM.”
Hopefully, you’ve noticed, I’ve run a number of posts that warned against excessive exuberance.
I think Julia Serano, Mercedes Allen nailed it when they basically said nothing changes.
My take on GID and its return to its original name is this: Did any one really expect a bunch of people making money off a bunch of sketchy at best “diagnoses” to kill one of their money streams?
Do you have any idea how much in student loans these clowns needed to borrow to get their degree in psychiatry?
Where’s your compassion for these peddlers of religion disguised as science, these tinpot satraps, with degrees who run power trips that impact the lives of TS and TG people?
Never mind that the people behind this diagnosis seem as sketchy and as closely aligned with the religious right as Paul Cameron, Charles Socarides and George Reker.
Paul McHugh is allegedly part of Opus Dei. Bailey, Blanchard and Zucker are commonly cited by right wing hate groups such as Focus on the Family and American Family Association, when those groups are looking for “expert opinion” to help further their bigoted goals.
Having these people create this diagnostic criteria is the same as having Tony Perkins, of the Family Research council, (Also named as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center) write a diagnostic criteria for pathologizing homosexuality.
The weasels are in the hen house on this one, folks.
Perhaps it is time for WPATH, the physicians and surgeons, we rely upon for medical care to rewrite the Standards of Care and change the requirement to say a two hour screening for SRS with a maximum charge of say three hundred dollars US.
Eliminate these vultures who do more harm than good with their bigotry from the process. (TS/TG people as ATMs either from pocket or from Health Care Programs)
Create a new diagnosis or return to simply calling it transsexuality. I’m not miserly when it comes to diagnoses, changing sex and sexual characteristics both primary and secondary covers a lot of different procedures.
After reading Jay Prosser’s Second Skins, I realized that both transsexualism and transgenderism share one thing in common, both are about a way of finding comfort within our own skins.
Dysphoria without all the baggage of the multitextural term “gender” does sort of describe what pushes people to come out as transsexual or transgender. Of course discomfort and a searching for happiness or comfort within one’s own skin is one of those basic freedoms.
Placed in a different context, the requirement that TS/TG people submit to a degrading and stigmatizing label in order to obtain medical treatment is same as the invasive vaginal ultra sound probe before being permitted to obtain an abortion. It is allowing people to insert religion based road blocks between patient and physician.
A ritualized form of abuse, abasement and degradation that violates people’s basic human rights.
That it is mandatory is even worst. It turns psychiatric professionals in to extortionists disguised as caring professionals.
It makes those who accept this abasement, in order to obtain health care coverage for the medical attention they need, into collaborators in their own degradation.
If this were occurring in a vacuum, or if this diagnosis were an isolated matter it would be one thing. It is not.
The creation of sketchy at best psychiatric conditions has become a way of expanding income for the Psychiatric and Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex which is closely partnered with the Health Insurance Industrial Complex.
Prior to the invention of GID/Gender Dysphoria in the latter part of the 1970s. Transsexuals were treated for transsexuality. That’s what it says on my medical reports.
This means I never had either GID or GD because neither had been invented yet.
Some things make sense. I personally think what is called the RLT makes sense. I have a friend who disagrees.
What ever we come up with it should involve input from TS/TG people and our physicians and surgeons not from the psychiatric industry.
Kelley Winter at GID Reform has a new piece up that has a more positive view. See: Gender Dysphoria Diagnosis to be Moved Out of Sexual Disorders Chapter of DSM-5
GD is supposed to be placed in a chapter of its own, no longer linked with sexual dysfunctions and paraphilias (which will also have chapters of their own)
This reclassification, along with the change in title from Gender Identity Disorder to Gender Dysphoria, is a significant improvement in the diagnostic coding used for access to medical transition care, for trans and transsexual people who need it. Preceding diagnoses of Transsexualism/Gender Identity Disorders were grouped with “psychosexual” disorders in the DSM-III. They were briefly moved to the class of Disorders Usually First Evident in Infancy, Childhood or Adolescence in the DSM-III-R in 1987 but were returned to the sexual disorders chapter in the DSM-IV, and DSM-IV-TR. Community advocates and supportive medical providers have long raised concern that this placement was clinically misleading and reinforced false stereotypes about gender diversity. Gender identity is not specifically related to sexuality, sexual orientation or sexual dysfunction. Political and religious extremists have exploited the sexual disorder grouping in the DSM to sexualize gender diversity and defame trans people as deviant. Trans and transsexual individuals have consequently lost their jobs, homes, families, children, and civil justice.
At the same time the Taliban Christian faction at Life Site News has this gleeful headline: EXCLUSIVE: APA still considers transgenderism a mental disorder, just changed the name
I really wish the APA would take a serious look at the mental health of these fanatical religious nut jobs and just leave TS/TG people alone.
There’s a bunch of other posts from different people I’m going to try to include.
I’m not celebrating and fortunately I’m so many years post-transsexual that I never had to deal with these mindfuckers so look at what a bunch of other folks have to say.
From planetransgender: APA DSM-5: The D word Switcharoo
From Huffington Post: Debating ‘Gender Identity Disorder’ and Justice for Trans People
From Huffington Post: The End of Transgender as a Mental Illness
