Journalists such as Rachel Maddow are singing the praises of Dr. Robert Spitzer for retracting his claims about the effectiveness of "reparative" psychotherapies for gays. Maddow called it "step one in what we're now going to see as a real change, a real reckoning, in antigay politics."
But what about Spitzer's legacy of trans pathologization?
Crickets.
Transwoman and Ph.D psychologist Kelley Winters reports:
"Rachel Maddow and other journalists turned a blind eye to Dr. Spitzer's failure to retract a lifetime of trans psychopathologization, stereotyping gender identities and expression that differ from assigned birth roles as mental disease....
"Shifting stigma from one oppressed class to a more oppressed class is not real change.
"Robert Spitzer played a central role in the declassification of same-sex orientation as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) between 1973 and 1987... However, while depathologizing same-sex orientation, Dr. Spitzer simultaneously directed a massive expansion of trans-pathology diagnoses in the DSM...
"We too have been injured by Robert Spitzer's role in perpetuating defamatory stereotypes of mental "dysfunction" and deviance. Trans people continue to lose our jobs, homes, children, families, dignity and civil justice because of these stereotypes and continue to face predatory gender conversion psychotherapies.
"Trans communities have waited more than two decades for a retraction or an apology from Dr. Spitzer. and we are still waiting."