The president of the US has endorsed same-sex marriage, but the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is about to finalize a new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) with atavistic quack "diagnoses" of profound "mental illnesses" such as cross-dressing and boys playing with dolls.
Although homosexuality was removed from the psychiatrists' bible in 1973, gender variation in children and adults continued to be a rich vein for conversion therapy -- a practice the APA still quietly supports (particularly for children) by naming notorious trans reparatists and transphobes to head DSM committees. In practice these reparatist "therapies" are largely aimed at feminine boys whose parents are in a panic they will be gay. Such therapies for children may soon be illegal in California, but the APA's NARTH-approved committee chairman for the DSM committee in charge of such sick, sick boys has made his career out of "curing" them forcibly.
The political climate in 1973 (the Watergate era) contributed to the APA's decision to remove homosexuality from the DSM. But the entrenched transphobes at the APA are about to enshrine their 1950s sexist attitudes toward gender for another decade -- and they don't care where national opinion is headed. One wonders whether the APA is linked with ALEC... psychiatry now seems mainly a sales force for the pharmaceutical industry. The vast expansion of "diagnoses" in each new edition of DSM couldn't possibly have anything to do with creating new drug markets, could it?
[Editor's Note: the item below was excerpted from Lynn Conway's Trans News Updates.]
GID Reform Advocates: “Final Public Comment Period For Proposed DSM-5 Criteria Ends June 15”, by Kelley Winters, Ph.D.
The American Psychiatric Association announced a third and final period of public comment on proposed diagnostic criteria for the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), ending June 15. Criteria for the draft diagnostic categories of Gender Dysphoria in Children and Gender Dysphoria in Adolescents or Adults (formerly Gender Identity Disorder, or GID) are unchanged from the second round proposal in May, 2011. The Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders Workgroup of the DSM-5 Task Force only partially responded to concerns raised about the GID diagnosis by community advocates, allies and care providers. Their specific diagnostic criteria continue to characterize gender identities and expressions that differ from birth-assigned roles as pathological and therefore contradict access to medical transition care, for those who need it, rather than lower its barriers.
Worse yet, the punitive and scientifically capricious diagnosis of Transvestic Disorder (formerly Transvestic Fetishism) offers no medical justification for its continued inclusion in the diagnostic manual, despite growing insistence on its removal. Many in the trans and allied communities are outraged at defamatory "autogynephilia"/"autoandrophilia" specifiers in this diagnosis that falsely stereotype many transsexual women and men as self-obsessed sexual fetishists. An online petition, sponsored by The International Foundation for Gender Education (IFGE) now has over 6,700 signatures, calling for complete removal of the Transvestic Fetishism/Disorder category from the DSM.
[As predicted when they were given control of the GID-section revisions, trans-reparatist Ken Zucker and autogynephilia-witch-hunter Ray Blanchard have intensified the psychiatric stigmatization of trans people in the upcoming DSM -- in spite of massive social and medical evidence that their thinking is unsound.]