Transgender advocates seek new diagnostic termsBy LISA LEFF
Associated Press
Published: Saturday, Jul. 21, 2012 - 9:59 am
Last Modified: Saturday, Jul. 21, 2012 - 10:21 am
http://www.sacbee.com/2012/07/21/4647247/transgender-advocates-seek-new.htmlAlthough the association's new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is not scheduled to be printed until the end of the year, the updates are taking shape after three rounds of proposed changes... the latest wording, while not going as far as many advocates wanted, respects the broader shift in society's understanding and acceptance of what it means to be transgender since the last major revision of the manual was published in 1994.
New York psychiatrist Jack Drescher, a member of the APA subcommittee working on the issue, said "We know there is a whole community of people out there who are not seeking medical attention and live between the two binary categories (of male and female.) We wanted to send the message that the therapist's job isn't to pathologize."
In the manual's next incarnation, individuals displaying "a marked incongruence between one's experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender" would be diagnosed instead with "Gender Dysphoria," a term that comes from the Greek word for emotional distress....
Unlike sexual orientation, the accepted protocols for treating many patients expressing profound discomfort with their given gender call for medical intervention....
"All of us who work in this field are seeing a huge increase in the number of people who come to see us who have Gender Dysphoria," Zucker said. "There is clearly a clinical need for there to be specialists in this area, and apart from the philosophical musings, having a diagnosis facilitates that."
