Gender Dysphoria And The DSM

The trans community has lobby hard to get gender identity disorder removed from the DSM but instead they renamed it but we still carry the stigma of it being in the DSM, case in point…

Opinion Being transgender isn’t a mental illness. What’s sick is a society that treats it that way
L.A. Times Opinion
By Nico Lang
June 28, 2016

Forget science – a Kansas lawmaker thinks he knows what makes people transgender: mental illness.

In a speech attacking the Obama administration’s support of trans students, state Sen. Steve Fitzgerald dismissed the entire idea of a trans identity. “You’re either male or you’re female, and it’s not changeable,” he said. “It’s reality. Inability to deal with that reality, or to recognize that reality, is disoriented, and can be disoriented to the point of insanity.”

Fitzgerald isn’t alone in his diagnosis. In February, Tennessee House Rep. Susan Lynn put forward an anti-trans bathroom bill based in the idea that transgender people are dangerously mentally unstable. Lynn wrote on her Facebook page, “[N]o one should be forced to entertain another's mental disorder, and it is not healthy for the individual with the disorder.”

In a May letter to Tennessee Atty. Gen. Herbert Slatery, state Sen. Janice Bowling agreed with Lynn, accusing the federal government of “[accommodating] students with gender identity disorder at the expense of the mentally healthy enrollment.” Bowling’s letter was cosigned by 13 senators and 20 House representatives — all of whom, thus, endorsed the idea that being transgender is a disease.
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But the APA amended that classification four years ago. It’s now known as “gender dysphoria.” As Mother Jones put it, this change to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was intended to show that “being transgender is not a disease but a human variation—more like being left-handed than schizophrenic.”

The APA’s Jack Drescher further stated that the goal of the switch was to end the medical practice of pathologizing transgender people, simply because their existence made others “uncomfortable.”

But to the lay person and legislators they see no difference; the DSM is the DSM which they see as a list of mental disorders. Then we also have to put up with the likes of Dr. Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins University who is one of the founders of the American College of Pediatricians.

That hasn’t stopped right-wing advocacy groups like the American College of Pediatricians ACP from comparing gender reassignment to genital mutilation. The ACP has further advised that school administrators “reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex.”

Bear in mind, the ACP is a political lobbying organization, and not a legitimate medical group. As ThinkProgress’ Zach Ford explains, “Its name is designed to be mistaken for the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is a national organization with some 60,000 members.”

The ACP membership is somewhere between 200 and 400 members, but they have a loud voice with the Republicans like to quote.