Update: Statement on Gender Identity Disorder and Transvestic Fetishism in the DSM-V
Kelley Winters, Ph.D.
GID Reform Advocates
http://gidreform.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/update-statement-on-gender-identity-disorder-and-transvestic-fetishism-in-the-dsm-v/The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association, is regarded as the medical and social definition of mental disorder throughout North America and strongly influences the The International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD). The current psychiatric classifications of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) and Transvestic Fetishism (TF) in the Fourth Edition Text Revision of the DSM (DSM-IV-TR) inflict great harm to gender variant, and especially transsexual, people in three ways:
Unfair Social Stigma. The GID and TF diagnoses falsely label identities and expressions that differ from assigned birth sex as mental illness and sexual deviance. Behaviors and emotions considered ordinary or even exemplary for other (cisgender) people are mis-characterized as madness for gender variant people. Transwomen (those who identify as women and were birth-assigned male) are consequently maligned as crazy and sexually suspect "men" by this stereotype and vice versa for transmen. The defamatory classification of Transvestic Fetishism particularly targets transwomen, including a great many transsexual women (whose gender identities are dramatically incongruent with born physical sex characteristics), as "paraphiliac" or sexually perverse. Across North America, these diagnoses are cited directly when gender variant people are denied human dignitiy, civil justice, and legal recognition in their affirmed gender roles. Gender variant people lose jobs, homes, families, access to public facilities, and even custody and visitation of children as consequences of these false stereotypes.
also at
http://www.bilerico.com/2009/11/update_statement_on_gender_identity_disorder_and_t.php
