Monday, December 3, 2012
Trans people still "disordered" according to latest DSM
Posted by -julia at 1:22 PM
http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2012/12/trans-people-still-disordered-according.htmlThis morning, I woke up and found my Twitter feed full of article links celebrating that transgender people are no longer "disordered" according to the DSM (that is, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - often referred to as the "psychiatric Bible" because it contains all of the official psychiatric diagnoses). The DSM gets revised every 10-20 years or so, and diagnoses sometimes get modified, expanded, or completely removed. The change that people are now celebrating is the fact that the previous diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) has now been changed to Gender Dysphoria.
Admittedly, the new Gender Dysphoria diagnosis is an improvement over GID for a number of reasons - Kelly Winter of
GIDreform.org describes some of these improvements, as well as many of the lingering problems with the new diagnosis. Despite the remaining drawbacks (for instance, that gender variance is still formally pathologized in the DSM), many people seem excited that transgender people are no longer described as being "disordered" in the DSM. But the problem is that this is patently untrue.
When the new DSM committee was chosen back in 2008, all the focus was on what the new committee (chaired by the notorious Ken Zucker) would do with GID. This is understandable, given that this is the diagnosis that trans people are required to submit to if they with to access the means to legally and/or physically transition. It has also been used to justify horrible reparative therapies against gender-non-conforming children. But the greater trans community gave short shrift to the other existing DSM diagnosis that affected transgender people: Transvestic Fetishism.
