Showing posts with label DSM Bad science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DSM Bad science. Show all posts

10/30/12

APA DSM-5 Gender Dysphoria: A Kinder, Gentler Machine Gun Hand


Most all of us who have come to a point in our lives where we feel our transition has been successful, all have one common problem.

Much of the world doesn't recognize or respect our gender expression.

So we are happy, or like me still thrilled, to look in the mirror, to see the external changes. To sit quietly reflecting on our internal growth and the amazing interpersonal relationships which have since sprouted.

To know in my heart this is who my artistic first wife saw when she drew a picture of who she knew I would be in my mature years. No one including myself believed I could be such a wise intuitive soul, but she did.

Much of the world still doesn't know. It's been a battle extraordinaire fighting for my life at the first full time job since transitioning in 2007. Yes five years.

I am winning. I am being grudgingly granted respect by the last of the management holdouts, not because of any revelation on their part, but because I am a person of extraordinaire worth to the company.

A hybrid of sorts. Physically enabled like a athletic man, yet with accessibility of a woman and with the compassion and understanding of a mother. A hybrid gender.

So in a nutshell, I am happy even ecstatic. Then what was holding me back?

"social role dysphoria"

I can't blame all the hardships I have endured getting to this point on the APA, the people largely responsible for creating a social toxic atmosphere, but I will say if they stopped adding gas to the haters fire, the air would start to clear.


Kelly Winters who authors GID Reform doesn't advocate for a total reform arguing that retention would continue to aid many who's insurance covers transitional needs. In all my life I have yet to shake one of those peoples hands, but hey, I know you are out there. But what about the vast majority of us?

Kelly Winters offers these brilliant observations:

"Transitioned individuals who are highly functional and happy with their lives are forever diagnosable as mentally disordered under flawed criteria that reference characteracterics and assigned roles of natal sex rather than current status. For example, a post-transition adult who is happy in her or his affirmed role, wants to be treated like others of her/his affirmed gender, has typical feelings of those in her/his affirmed gender, and is distressed or unemployed because of external societal prejudice will forever meet criteria A (subcriteria 4, 5 and 6) and B and remain subject to false-positive diagnosis, regardless of how successfully her or his distress of gender dysphoria has been relieved."

Then she goes on to address the rigid gender stereotyping at the crux of the issue:

The criteria for children are slightly improved over the DSM-IV-TR, in that they can no longer be diagnosed on the basis of gender role nonconformity alone. However, the proposed criteria are unreasonably reliant on gender stereotype nonconformity. Five of eight proposed subcriteria for children are strictly based on gender role nonconformity, with no relevance to the definition of mental disorder. Behaviors and emotions considered ordinary or even exemplary for other (cisgender) children are mis-characterized as pathological for gender variant youth. This sends a harmful message that equates gender variance with sickness. As a consequence, children will continue to be punished, shamed and harmed for nonconformity to assigned birth roles.

So essentially the APA has recognized they are killing us and are seeing if they can get away with using a kinder more gentle machine gun hand.

Stop killing us! Please sign the petition demanding the APA remove Trans From The DSM-5, Yours is the voice they can't deny. Yours is the kick in the pants that's bringing the undeniable truth out of the shadows.

The APA has lone profited from our deaths. No More Machine Gun Hand.

2/28/12

INFORMED CONSENT: The True Path For Transgender Treatment

Informed Consent, what a concept!

The AMA begins its definition of informed consent as:
Informed consent is more than simply getting a patient to sign a written consent form.
It is a process of communication between a patient and physician that results in the patent's authorization or agreement to undergo a specific medical intervention.
This Campus Progress article suggests instead of the clinical gate-keeping method of admitting a person is a transsexual, which the APA now uses, we simply use informed consent to begin the process of transition.

Informed consent verse pathologization.

PATHOLOGIZE: to view or characterize as medically or psychologically abnormal.

One interview to obtain informed consent to begin transition as opposed to the unbearably long and quite often frustratingly unyielding process of vetting unknowledgeable therapists who never had a clue about transsexualism or any inclination to recommend hormone replacement in the first place. Gone would be the fallacy being forced to live a 'real life test' separates the pretenders. At that early state of transition we are at our most vulnerable. That concept is one which is long over due to be trashed!

The truth is, most transsexuals have successfully transitioned in spite of the DSM, not because of it!

That is why transgender people and those who truly care for our mental and physical well being are no longer using the DSM Regardless of Proposed Revisions as the standard of care. We have by default been using informed consent for years without naming the process!

Now we have a name and you can join with 5000 on facebook and sign our petition to the DSM to remove transgender from the DSM.

Become informed on the ICATH home page and on Facebook.