TELL THE APA: CROSSDRESSING IS NOT A DISORDER!

[Shana A]

TELL THE APA:
CROSSDRESSING IS NOT A DISORDER!    

Drop 302.3 from the DSM    
   March 7, 2011

http://dsm.ifge.org/petition/

Please Join Our Call for Reform

TELL THE AMERICAN PSYCHIATRIC ASSOCIATION:
CROSSDRESSING IS NOT A DISORDER!

To: The Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders Workgroup of the DSM-5 Development Task Force of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the APA Board of Trustees, officers and membership.

Re: Pending revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)

We, the undersigned, call for the complete removal of so-called "Transvestic Disorder" (302.3) as a diagnostic category from the next DSM.

[insanitylives]

Why do we still live in a society where wanting to dress as the opposite sex is a mental problem?

[MarinaM]

If you want to live as a woman, do it. If you need to go back to being a man in your downtime, do it. It's not like you're assaulting people to cope or planning an alcohol I.V.

Society = insane.

[eshaver]

Why do we still live in a society where wanting to dress as the opposite sex is a mental problem?

Humm, I have been out of the closet since 1994. I'm planning some cosmetic work as I can't receive H R T anymore . I guess I'm nutz too ! Ellen

[zakfar]

In 2015, APA is going to update DSM. These mere petitions can't do much difference. If you remember, the DSM version before 70's had 'Homosexuality' as disorder as well, but then they removed from the list of disorders in the later versions, converting it into 'Gender Orientation'. But for that, homosexuals had to physically protest. These days, media is much more powerful. But Media is mostly against Transgenders, as media people only sell what the majority wants to buy. People love to laugh at Transgenders.

Things can change, but for that, some struggle would be required. I just joined this forum, so don't know the activeness of this board. However, if something has to be done, it has to be done with some serious planning.

Zakfar.

[KarenMiami]

You are absolutely correct in your assessment fothe situation.  And comparing the "strugle' the Gay community had to mount against the classification of Homosexuality as being a mental illness is all to valid in alerting the TG/TS community as to what is needed to make change.   

I do not necessarily agree however that the "media" is against TG/TS or that the wider community is as well.   Many TG/TS are forced to live as say, women in the real world, way before its wise for them too.  Way before they have clean faces without a dark beard.  Way before they even are allowed by some psychologis, who has the control on referring to an endocronoligist, they are able to take hormones that will femanize many features.  So because of the cruel and unusual treatment forced on TG/TS  by the Harry Benjamin rules that are so enshrined in the psychiatric treatment of TG/TS, many are forced into daily humiliation looking decidedly male while dressing up in public as a women.  And it is these images that cause the public to have a negative view of all TG/TS.   Of course the bearded women in a dress will allways be viewed by society as something that belongs in the cirucus.  It is so unfortunate that the psychiatric and medical proffession have adopted rules from a doctor who originally developed them for "children" and then later applied the same rules to adults, and in so doing has subjected the most sensative and vulnerable to public embassement, ridicule along with physical and life threatening at times endangeerment.