Worlds Apart

All my life I felt that I should have been a girl. I wasn’t the typical “boy” in elementary school, I was envious of the girls playing on the other side field, I wanted to play jump rope, and hopscotch instead of the rough and tumble boys’ games where dominance was goal. In high school I got stuck in gym playing sports that I hated in school and on the other field they were playing field hockey while we were playing football… ugh. I probably wouldn’t have like field hockey but at least I would be playing “girls’” sports that were taboo for the boys.

'It’s not an illness,' Fort Myers doc says of transgender patients
Fort Myers News-Press
By Patricia Borns
August 17, 2018

How has your practice evolved since you began treating transgender patients?
I have an unusual perspective because I have been doing it for so long, 30 years. I worked in an intersex disorder clinic during my medical school fellowship at the Medical College of Georgia (now Georgia Health Sciences University. That was in 1989.

Obviously a lot has changed. The rules were much more rigid then. When I was in residency, if a person wanted to transition they had to live the role for a year. Then they had to have surgery. Then hormonal treatment.

Now I need a letter from a skilled mental health professional evaluating the patient to initiate treatment. (Sweet works with certified transgender therapists Kathryn Lowery and Edith Sodova of I-BOS Counseling Center based in Fort Myers.)

The patient can transition to whatever level they would like. You could transition by lifestyle but not hormones. You could have a patient who lives the lifestyle and transitions hormonally but decides not to go through the surgical changes. And others who go full court press.

Ugh! You would think that after all those years he wouldn’t say “lifestyle.”

Your patients had to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a mental illness, in order to be seen by you. Is it a mental illness?
No. I don’t consider it an illness. I don’t think it belongs with psychiatric disorders like bipolar and depression. There is a push to take it out of the next DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders compiled by the American Psychiatric Association). (The World Health Organization declassified gender dysphoria as a mental illness in June 2018.)

And also the World Health Organization doesn’t think it is a mental illness either.

Being transgender no longer classified as mental illness. Here's why
USA Today
By Caroline Simon
June 20, 2018

Being transgender is no longer classified as a mental illness by the World Health Organization – a key sign of progress for an often-marginalized community. 

WHO announced Monday that in its newly released edition of the International Classification of Diseases, gender incongruence will now be classified as a sexual health condition.

Gender incongruence is "characterized by a marked and persistent incongruence between an individual’s experienced gender and the assigned sex," according to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD).
[…]
"It was taken out from the mental health disorders because we had a better understanding that this wasn't actually a mental health condition and leaving it there was causing stigma," said Dr. Lale Say, coordinator of WHO's Adolescents and at-Risk Populations team. "So in order to reduce the stigma while also ensuring access to necessary health interventions, this was placed in a different chapter."

The article also other answers questions…

• Why was being transgender originally classified as a mental illness?
• Why is being transgender now considered a sexual health condition?
• How will this affect the transgender community?
• How are people reacting to the change?

Back when I was running around on playgrounds I did think I was different, when I heard the word “transsexual” for the first time I looked in up in the unabridged dictionary it said “perversion!” It said “fetish” in the World Book encyclopedia. I knew I wasn’t me so when I know that I heard about Christine Jorgensen I knew I wasn’t like her. When I heard Rene Richards I knew that I wasn’t like her because the way the media talked about her wasn’t how I felt.

I believe that one of the causes of Gender Dysphoria is an intersex condition, there might be other medical reason why we are trans and we shouldn’t focus just one.