I recently received a Faceb**k friend request from an organization called the Gender Identity Coalition.
Their aim is to have GID (Gender Identity Disorder) removed from the DSM.
Fifteen years ago I agreed that this goal was valuable and necessary to our inclusion in larger society.
“I’M NOT CRAZY,” was what I told everyone.
Now I think, why?
If we want to transform the DSM as a book for good, then we must consider having other diagnoses changed, modified and removed. Why is autism in the DSM? What, really, is wrong with people with autism?
“But Johnny doesn’t hug me!”
“But Sally doesn’t understand social cues!”
Maybe what’s wrong is they don’t act according to our many implicit social contracts.
Right. But in changing my gender – and being diagnosed with GID – I certainly do not conform to several implicit social norms. So why am I not crazy but someone with autism is?
If we want to lobby for the end of the DSM altogether, I’m for that, too.
But to push to have only GID removed smacks of ableism, to wit the belief that we aren’t crazy like all those people who are bipolar or schizophrenic or borderline personality. No siree bob, not us, we’re not crazy. We’re just like everybody else.
Well, I for one, am not like everyone else. I changed my gender. By that fact alone, I’m different. I’m also different because I don’t support objectifying other people as a tool for political change.
If we cannot acknowledge that the same forces that demonize and seek to institutionalize people with severe bipolar disorder or paranoid schizophrenics is the same force that manipulates the medical establishments to treat us like dog food (i.e. fear), then I gladly wish to see the GID as part of the DSM.
The future of my mental health – and dare I say – your future, too – is inextricably intertwined with the destinies of mental health activists, paradigms and practices. If they are crazy, then I am crazy, too. But wait, what about people with X diagnosis who harm others? Then we need to address the bad behavior.
This constant hating on people with so-called real mental disorders has got to stop. Frankly from the perspective of a society that wants everyone to goose-step to strict gender roles, I’m surely a heretic. But our salvation will never be found in goose-stepping to the belief that they are somehow differnt from us.
What good will a medical diagnosis do for us anyway? Now we get to say we’re born that way? We saw that tactic used in the 1990s as a way to advance gay rights. How successful has that been?
Des anyone honestly believe if we have to interact with the medical establishment for a chronic medical condition, we’ll somehow be treated better? Really?
Whether the diagnosis is mental or medical (and this is a stupid distinction anyway, since psychiatry is a medical field), I must still interact with doctors and nurses and therapists and blah and blah and blah. Whether the diagnosis is mental or medical, I still live with the threat that my medical insurance can be rescinded at any time, my marriage annulled and my body imprisoned because I’ve “lied” about who I am.
Having a medical diagnosis won’t protect me from transphobic violence, and it won’t protect you, either.
So please, people, can we just get the heck over our hatred and fear of people living with all kinds of mental states and diagnoses not like your own. Building a movement around “but we’re not crazy, so please stop diagnosing us that way” is just about the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a very long time. The practice of othering an entire segment of society as a way to prove our credibility in the eyes of regular society, is STUPID. If you’re dumb enough to believe your permanent salvation will be found in that way, good luck with that. Get back to us when you’re exhausted and bankrupt and still get treated like shit at the doctor’s office.
Given a choice between a mental health diagnosis or a medical one, I opt out. They are two sides of the same coin. They are both needed by us to obtain medical services and used by others to diagnose and medicalize and manage in a systemic way our so-called differences.
I prefer to stay in the DSM for as long as it takes to end the discrimination against people with so-called mental health illnesses. If they are crazy, then I am crazy. My fate is intertwined with their fate. Maybe your fate is, too.
(P.S. If you really want to revolutionize your gender, be proud you’re in the DSM. The following famous people are, or would have been there, too, seeing as how they are/were diagnosed with bipolar disorder:)
Actors & Actresses
Ned Beatty
Maurice Bernard, soap opera
Jeremy Brett
Jim Carey
Lisa Nicole Carson
Rosemary Clooney, singer
Lindsay Crosby
Eric Douglas
Robert Downey Jr.
Patty Duke
Carrie Fisher
Connie Francis, singer and actress
Shecky Greene, comedian
Linda Hamilton
Moss Hart, actor, director, playright
Mariette Hartley
Margot Kidder
Vivien Leigh
Kevin McDonald, comedian
Kristy McNichols
Burgess Meredith, actor, director
Spike Milligan, actor, writer
Spike Mulligan, comic actor and writer
Nicola Pagett
Ben Stiller, actor, director, writer
David Strickland
Lili Taylor
Tracy Ullman
Jean-Claude Van Damme
Robin Williams
Jonathon Winters, comedian
Artists
Alvin Alley, dancer, choreogapher
Ludwig Von Beethoven
Tim Burton, artist, director
Francis Ford Coppola, director
George Fredrick Handel, composer
Bill Lichtenstein, producer
Joshua Logan, broadway director, producer
Vincent Van Gogh, painter
Gustav Mahier, composer
Francesco Scavullo, artist, photographer
Robert Schumann, composer
Don Simpson, movie producer
Norman Wexler, screenwriter, playwright
Entrepreneurs
Robert Campeau
Pierre Peladeau
Heinz C. Prechter
Ted Turner, media giant
Financiers
John Mulheren
Murray Pezim
Miscellaneous
Buzz Aldrin, astronaut
Clifford Beers, humanitarian
Garnet Coleman, legislator (Texas)
Larry Flynt, publisher and activist
Kit Gingrich, Newt’s mom
Phil Graham, owner of Washington Post
Peter Gregg, team owner and manager, race car driver
Susan Panico (Susan Dime-Meenan), business executive
Sol Wachtier, former New York State Chief Judge
Musicians
Ludwig van Beethoven, composer
Alohe Jean Burke, musician, vocalist
Rosemary Clooney, singer
DMX Earl Simmons, rapper and actor
Ray Davies
Lenny Dee
Gaetano Donizetti, opera singer
Peter Gabriel
Jimi Hendrix
Kristen Hersh (Throwing Muses)
Phyllis Hyman
Jack Irons
Daniel Johnston
Otto Klemperer, musician, conductor
Oscar Levant, pianist, composer, television
Phil Ochs, musician, political activist, poet
John Ogden, composer, musician
Jaco Pastorius
Charley Pride
Mac Rebennack (Dr. John)
Jeannie C. Riley
Alys Robi, vocalist in Canada
Axl Rose
Nick Traina
Del Shannon
Phil Spector, musician and producer
Sting, Gordon Sumner, musician, composer
Tom Waits, musician, composer
Brian Wilson, musician, composer, arranger
Townes Van Zandt, musician, composer
Poets
John Berryman
C.E. Chaffin, writer, poet
Hart Crane
Randall Jarrell
Jane Kenyon
Robert Lowell
Sylvia Plath
Robert Schumann
Delmore Schwartz
Political
Robert Boorstin, special assistant to President Clinton
L. Brent Bozell, political scientist, attorney, writer
Bob Bullock, ex secretary of state, state comptroller and lieutenant governer
Winston Churchill
Kitty Dukasis, former First Lady of Massachusetts
Thomas Eagleton, lawyer, former U.S. Senator
Lynne Rivers, U.S. Congress
Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States
Scholars
John Strugnell, biblical scholar
Scientists
Karl Paul Link, chemist
Dimitri Mihalas
Sports
Shelley Beattie, bodybuilding, sailing
John Daly, golf
Muffin Spencer-Devlin, pro golf
Ilie Nastase, tennis
Jimmy Piersail, baseball player, Boston Red Sox, sports announcer
Barret Robbins, football
Wyatt Sexton, football
Alonzo Spellman, football
Darryl Strawberry, baseball
Dimitrius Underwood, football
Luther Wright, basketball
Bert Yancey, athlete
TV & Radio
Dick Cavett
Jay Marvin, radio, writer
Jane Pauley
Writers
Louis Althusser, philosopher, writer
Honors de Balzac
Art Buchwald, writer, humorist
Neal Cassady
Patricia Cornwell
Margot Early
Kaye Gibbons
Johann Goethe
Graham Greene
Abbie Hoffman, writer, political activist
Kay Redfield Jamison, writer, psychologist
Peter Nolan Lawrence
Frances Lear, writer, editor, women’s rights activist
Rika Lesser, writer, translator
Kate Millet
Robert Munsch
Margo Orum
Edgar Allen Poe
Theodore Roethke
Lori Schiller, writer, educator
Frances Sherwood
Scott Simmie, writer, journalist
August Strindberg
Mark Twain
Joseph Vasquez, writer, movie director
Mark Vonnegut, doctor, writer
Sol Wachtler, writer, judge
Mary Jane Ward
Virginia Woolg
The You Don’t Have to Be an Ableist Turd to be Accepted as a Trans Person by Jay Sennett, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
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Being or not being in the DSM is not particularly an issue for me–however, suggested methods of treatment for GID is very important to me. I would, frankly, prefer to remain in the DSM. My condition is one that requires treatment–surgery, hormones, and often therapy to deal with societies strict gender norms. My issue is that if I am included in the DSM, why is my treatment considered “cosmetic”? Lobbying to change that distinction is, in my opinion, much more important and would have much greater positive impact on the lives of trans people.
Good points, Eli. Thank you.
I concur. You don’t get to call me “crazy” AND not pay for said treatments! If I’m “crazy” then you pay for hormones, surgery, etc. that are prescribed to address this GID I’m diagnosed with. If I’m not crazy then I pay for all this on my own…but the way it’s set up now it’s unfair.
I get hormones and stuff on the NHS, there needs to be some sort of official diagnosis, so they keep covering that. I don’t think it belongs in the DMS, though, not because people with mental illnesses are bad, but because it doesn’t seem to make sense to make me see a shrink so I can get hormones. If bad eyesight were in the DSM, I guess we’d all need to see shrinks before we got glasses too?
I like your post. Good points. I think GID should be considered a medical condition and not a psychiatric condition because in countries OUTSIDE the U.S. that also use the DSM and even within the US depending on the psychiatrist, I have to sit and answer a million and one extremely personal questions that have nothing to do with my gender identity. But if I don’t placate the psychiatrist or if I’m “uncooperative” or if I don’t meet THEIR interpretation of GID then I don’t get my medical care. GID should be treated like pregnancy– pregnancy is a huge body and life-altering choice that often requires lots of medical care including surgery. But people don’t have to go through a 1 year real life test or dozens of psychiatric evaluations before they’re allowed to get fertility treatments, ultrasounds, cesareans or anything else pregnancy related just because there are a few people who do regret becoming parents. Lots of talk about “transsexual regret” but very little about “parent regret.” That is the difference between a psychiatric and a medical diagnosis.
I am diagnosed bipolar / hypomanic episodes etc, and my son is diagnosed autistic. As a woman who is also recovering from too many years of testosterone abuse, I also am intimately familiar with the GID diagnosis, the reformers etc. I wanted to jump on the GID reform bandwagon, but I quickly realized that there needs to be some label in order to access ‘treatment’. Of course now the negotiations continue for the bigger, better V version of the DSM, but what diff does it really make what the label is – it’s still a label. I have become friends with a lot of people diagnosed with mental illnesses over the years, and I can assure anyone that they are simply more willing to face, accept, and deal with the state of their own mental health than the majority who consider they are ‘normal’, and have nothing ‘wrong’ with them. The paranoia surrounding mental illness is still very much alive and well.
Good article.
Transsexualism will be depsychopathologized soon enough, France, Spain and now WPATH have called for that.
Somatic (of the body) diagnoses can be used for physical treatments. The KEY is to reuse OLD diagnoses, and NOT create new ones.
For example if you propose to do top surgery on a “transman” then diagnose N62 Gynaecomastia. This is the diagnosis used when it is proposed to remover the breasts of a non-trans man; and transmen are (in human rights) entitled to equality.
I enjoyed this post (actually found it last month but just commenting now). There are not enough people discussing the ableist side of GID removal. While writing a blog today I thought of this entry, so I came back! I’d be interested in your input.
http://midwestgenderqueer.com/index.php/archives/1090#more-1090
“Having a medical diagnosis won’t protect me from transphobic violence, and it won’t protect you, either.”
This is true, and I think it speaks to the multitude of issues that need to be addressed. People can’t expect a magic wand to be waved and automatically we will be safe in society. We have a long way to go, and a lot to change before that happens.
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