DSM-5: Transgender — A New Way to be Human?
TS-SI
By Joanne Proctor
11 January, 2011
http://ts-si.org/guest-columns/28472-dsm-5-transgender-a-new-way-to-be-human (http://ts-si.org/guest-columns/28472-dsm-5-transgender-a-new-way-to-be-human)
To paraphrase Canadian Science philosopher, Ian Hacking, human kinds are both identified and created by an interactive looping process between the identifier and the identified. Whole new categories or kinds, literally new ways of being human, come into existence as they are observed, calibrated and classified. Finally the process of naming and categorising influences the way the new kinds of people subsequently think and behave. [R2]
Martti Olkinuora has described psycho-social contagion as a, "form of collective behaviour that consists of the dissemination of a set of symptoms for which no physical explanation can be found ... " [R3] Accordingly, psycho-social contagions are spontaneous manifestations of an (often transitory) mental disorder that appears as if from nowhere and affects susceptible victims. There are some well documented examples.