Quote from: goingdown on October 05, 2008, 01:16:00 AM
Because of the power of religious fundamentalist and the Zucker nomination to DSM-V I am asking will it be harder to get SRS in the future? I have still quit a time to wait before I get my recomendations. Using Zucker criters I am not a transsexual. Does that matter more in the future?
I'm not sure what a "Zucker transsexual" is, goingdown. Perhaps one who's in remission or has become a gay male and is happy with that.
The APA will absolutely
not have a huge effect on surgeries, I think. For the doctors who do them and the majority of therapists who write the letters and make the referrals to those doctors there is little effect the DSM will make even if Zucker and Blanchard personally write every word of the sexual identity disorders sections. For the most part their ideas are not mainstream in the first place. Their methods are badly flawed and as a lot of psychological research does they begin with the
fact that their pov is the
truth and then they cram whatever they can into the research to
prove it.
What's always missed in these cases seems to be that the surgeons will be intent on making a living. There is no legal requirement, as far as I am aware, that WPATH or DSM criteria must be used to perform a surgery. Most of that, as is a lot of DSM stuff, is for insurance coverage and the surgeons will be concerned with the appearance of psychotic disorders in a patient that might lead to nasty lawsuits later on. They do need to carry malpractice insurance that doesn't require them to work all year to pay an insurance company.
As someone said, 2012 is the year the DSM-V is supposed to be out. But trust me, no well-trained and experienced therapist is going to go strictly and rigidly by what the DSM says. That would be totally absurd as huge hunks of the DSM are nothing more than new and better ways to pursue pharmaceutical marketing goals and huge hunks are merely ways to strait-jacket a lot of people into a particular societally-acceptable mode of behavior. That's why every conceivable human behavior appears at some point in one or more diagnoses. Those reasons and insurance-reimbursement pretty much are the DSM when you get past psychotic disorders.
The DSM is a good guide to getting paid for treatment when one needs to get paid through insurance. That one reason alone is enough to guarantee, as it already does, that diagnoses like "transvestic fetishism" are only used by high-priced psychiatrists who have self-pay clients. The people who actually work with transsexuals don't use the codes or those diagnoses simply because almost no insurance-provider accepts them as reimbursibles.
Quite honestly that doesn't strike me as problematic at all. It forces us to actually discover whether or not the client has a mental disorder or is simply depressed and anxious over their dysphoria. Not a bad result for any and all concerned.
Nichole
