Gay/Transgender Groups Debate Removing GID From DSM

July 23, 2008 – The American Psychiatric Association is considering revisions for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-V.

The Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender (LGBT) movement is considering whether or not to push for the elimination or redefinition of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) in the DSM-V.The DSM is used by all medical professionals for diagnosing conditions and for insurance billing. It is also used by mental health professionals for diagnosing mental illnesses.

Currently, GID is defined in the DSM-IV under 302.85 and 302.6 as it relates to children. It is defined as strong and persistent cross-gender identification. It requires that some degree of discomfort to be present.

This effort to remove more mental illnesses from the DSM-IV is the same process used by homosexual activists in the early 1970s to remove homosexuality as a mental disorder from the DSM. Lobbying and political pressure were used to get the APA leaders to remove homosexuality. It was not new scientific research that resulted in the removal of homosexuality, but political action – both inside and outside of the APA.

TVC’s report, Homosexuality 101, explains how this process was accomplished. In addition, Dr. Jeffrey Satinover’s paper, The Trojan Couch goes into greater detail about this hijacking of the mental health profession by homosexual radicals.

The diagnosis of GID is controversial among LGBT activists who believe it stigmatizes transgendered individuals and continues to be a way for homosexuality to be treated as a mental illness.

Numerous transgender activists want GID to remain in the DSM-V because it permits them to gain access to insurance benefits for medical procedures and hormone injections as being medically necessary.

Transgender activist Jamison Green, for example, wants “some kind of mechanism to provide access to transitions,” but also to challenge psychiatric assumptions about gender-nonconforming identities. He notes: “A lot of us agree what the best future would be – where transness isn’t seen automatically as some kind of mental illness but where those of us who need to transition have access to the means of transition.”

According to Green: “Gender identity as a category that can be disordered should be removed. But gender variance as [a] social issue ought to be acknowledged. People are going to be in distress and suffer social impairment as a result of being gender-variant and may require assistance of a mental health provider … but we shouldn’t be trying to fix the gender variance.”

Green says: “I’d like to see the APA put out a statement that gender variance is a normal, human condition, and that stereotypes are not desirable.”

Arlene Istar Lev says: “It shouldn’t be in a psychiatric manual; it should be a medical diagnosis. That doesn’t mean there aren’t special needs from therapists, who need to be educated when they’re working with any minority person about the specific issues that people face. But a trans client who is depressed can be diagnosed with ‘depression’ rather than a gender disorder.”

The Advocate magazine (November 2007) published a discussion about GID and the DSM-V.

It featured an interview with Kelly Winters, a male-to-female transgender who retired from Hewlett-Packard after 29 years. Winters has founded Gender Reform Advocates to lobby for the removal of GID from the DSM-V.

According to Winters, “The current diagnosis of GID carries the same burden of social stigma that homosexuality did for gays and lesbians before 1973.”

Winters notes: “Intolerant people don’t make a distinction between gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender. In that respect the equation of difference with disorder, disease, and psychosexual perversion is very much the same for gender-variant people as it was for the gay and lesbian community.”

Shannon Price Minter, the she-male activist who recently testified in Congress among a panel of LGBT activists over so-called “transgender discrimination” in the work place, is concerned that removing GID would be devastating because it would remove access to costly medical care for surgery and hormones. According to Minter: “The medical framework is enormously significant in legal advocacy. When we go to court to advocate for transsexual people to get medical treatment in a whole variety of circumstances, from kids to foster care to prisoners on Medicaid,” the GID diagnosis is used to show that the treatment is medically necessary.

‘GID Reform Advocates’ Lead Effort
To Remove This Mental Disorder from DSM-V

A transgender activist organization known as GID Reform Advocates, (GRA) is attempting to force the APA to add additional members to the DSM-V Task Force who are pro-transgender and who want the APA to “destigmatize” transvestic fetishism and the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder.

It wants the APA to be accepting of cross-dressing, transsexualism, and other bizarre sexual behaviors as normal variations of sexuality. It is organizing an effort to put pressure on the APA to remove GID and Transvestic Fetishism as mental disorders in the DSM-V.

According to GRA, the APA Task Force should have members on it who have “newer, respectful attitudes toward gender diversity that are widely held by practitioners who work with gender variant adults and youth today.”

The GRA claims that current diagnoses of transvestic fetishism and GID are based on diagnoses that are “punitive, judging difference as disorder, something to be ashamed of.”

The APA will release the DSM-V in 2012. A team of 27 men and women will review almost 400 disorders currently listed in DSM-IV. According to gay activist psychiatrist Jack Drescher, “… people invented these diagnostic systems and the medical categories. And what we learn when we use them is that there limits to every system. We may need to find a new way of thinking.”

The APA DSM-V Task Force is scheduled to conduct its work according to this timetable:

Work Group and Subcommittee appointment -- early 2008.
Literature review -- through 2008.
Draft diagnostic criteria -- Feb/Mar 2009.
Review, Testing, Comment on proposed diagnostic criteria -- 2009 through 2010.
Finished diagnostic criteria -- Early 2011.
Printing and Publication -- 2012.

TVC will have updated reports on the effort to remove GID and Transvestic Fetishism from the DSM-V in future months.

Additional Resources:
House Committee Holds She-Male Hearing: Why?
A Gender Identity Disorder Goes Mainstream
Summary Of Transgender Law Center Report ‘Peeing In Peace: A Resource Guide For Transgender Activists And Allies’
Boston Children’s Hospital Opens Center For ‘Transgender’ Children
Pediatricians’ Network Seeks To Normalize Sex Changes For Children
12-Year-Old Boy To Undergo ‘Sex Change’ Operation In Germany
TVC Publishes Back To School Report On Transgender Activism

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