Dr. Kenneth Zucker's War on Transgenders
http://www.queerty.com/dr-kenneth-zuckers-war-on-transgenders-20090206/2/6/09
Lynn Conway is one of the trans community's great heroes. An inventor and computer chip researcher, in the late '60s she was fired from her job at IBM when she began to transition from a man to a woman. She decided to go "stealth" and start her life over again as Lynn. She quickly rose through the ranks and the Department of Defense began using her work on top secret projects. Her textbooks became canonical works on computer chip research, earning her tenure as professor emeritus at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. In 1999, researchers linked Lynn's current work to her earlier work at IBM and she came out as transgender. Since then, her website has been the go-to place for transgenders looking for the latest news about their community.
On Jan. 30th, she received a letter from Peter M. Jacobson, a lawyer for Dr. Kenneth Zucker, who is leading the revisions to the DSM-V, the standard text used by clinicians and psychologists to determine mental disorders. Zucker is accusing her of using libelous language in one of her web posts. The only problem? There's nothing libelous on the site. Why is Dr. Kenneth Zucker trying to silence Lynn? And more importantly, why is he determined to make sure the psychiatric code book keeps saying that gender identity is a mental disease?
