We continue, from part 1, considering an article by Jack Drescher, M.D., who is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, wherein he complied some interesting data with regards to, as he states it within his relevant paper’s title, “Queer Diagnoses: Parallels and Contrasts in the History of Homosexuality, Gender Variance, and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual” which was published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, April 2010 AD, Volume 39, Issue 2, pp 427-460. I will add bold and underlining emphasis for emphasis.
Jack Drescher notes the following of homosexuality’s “transgender wing” who were “striving for suburban normalcy”:
The change is fueled mostly by a community of parents who, like many parents of this generation, are open to letting even preschool children define their own needs. Faced with skeptical neighbors and school officials, parents at the [Trans Health] conference discussed how to use the kind of quasi-therapeutic language that, these days, inspires deference: tell the school the child has a “medical condition” or a “hormonal imbalance” that can be treated later, suggested a conference speaker, Kim Pearson; using terms like gender-identity disorder or birth defect would be going too far, she advised.
The point was to take the situation out of the realm of deep pathology or mental illness, while at the same time separating it from voluntary behavior, and to put it into the idiom of garden-variety “challenge.”
Yet, beyond merely appealing to personal moral preferences and Orwellian newspeak, Jack Drescher notes that “Like an earlier generation of gay activists who turned to scientific findings to support their movements normalizing arguments”:
There have also been studies that have examined a small, sexually dimorphic region of the brain known as the BSTc. Researchers found that the structure of the BSTc region in trans women more closely resembles that of most women, while in trans men it resembles that of most men [Garcia-Falgueras & Swaab, 2008; Kruijver et al., 2000; Zhou, Hofman, Gooren, & Swaab, 1995].
Like all brain research, such studies have certain limitations and caveats, but they do suggest that our brains may be hardwired to expect our bodies to be female or male, independent of our socialization or the appearance of our bodies (Serano, 2007, p. 81, italics added).
That “the BSTc region in trans women more closely resembles that of most women, while in trans men it resembles that of most men” implies that homosexuals cannot appeal to it since the it is virtually the same in trans personages as well as heterosexuals.
Jack Drescher tries his hand at scientific support:
We find that the prevalence of SRS is at least on the order of 1:2500, and may be twice that value. We thus find that the intrinsic prevalence of MtF transsexualism must be on the order of* 1:500 and may be even larger than that.
Note the utter folly of his attempt as the works with a number that is either one ratio or else “twice” as much. Yet, upon such a vague ration the concluded that “thus” the result is either one ratio or another that is “even larger.”
The 2012 AD DSM-V:
…generated a flurry of concerned and anxious responses in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community and blogosphere, mostly focused on the status of the diagnostic categories of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) of Adolescence and Adulthood and GID of Childhood (GIDC).
Jack Drescher was a member of the DSM-V Work Group on Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders.
More comments on socio-political premises follow:
As in the case of homosexuality, arguments for removal of the “trans diagnoses” include societal intolerance of difference, the human cost of diagnostic stigmatization, using the language of psychopathology to describe what some consider to be normal behaviors and feelings and, finally, inappropriately focusing psychiatric attention on individual diversity rather than opposing the social forces that oppress sexual and gender nonconformity.
Moreover:
…the most significant catalyst for diagnostic change was gay activism. In the wake of the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City (Duberman, 1994), gay and lesbian activists, believing psychiatric theories to be a major contributor to antihomosexual social stigma, disrupted the 1970 and 1971 annual meetings of the APA…
The protests were successful in getting organized psychiatry’s attention and led to unprecedented and groundbreaking educational panels at the next two annual APA meetings. A 1971 panel, entitled “Gay is Good,” featured gay activists Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings explaining to psychiatrists, many who were hearing this or the first time, the stigma caused by the “homosexuality” diagnosis (Gittings, 2008; Kameny, 2009; Silverstein, 2009).
Kameny and Gittings returned to speak at the 1972 meeting, this time joined by John Fryer, M.D. Fryer appeared as Dr. H Anonymous, a “homosexual psychiatrist” who, given the realistic fear of adverse professional consequences for coming out at that time, disguised his true identity from the audience and spoke of the discrimination gay psychiatrists faced in their own profession (Gittings, 2008; Scasta, 2002).
Note that gay activism is not merely claimed to be a catalyst for diagnostic change but is “the” and “most significant” one. Moreover, the activists disrupted meetings not due to possession of contrary scientific data but due to their belief that psychiatric theories resulted in antihomosexual social stigma.
The result of socio-political-moral, and not scientific, based protests was a moral proclamation that “Gay is Good.”
The APA published a statement noting:
…If homosexuality per se does not meet the criteria for a psychiatric disorder, what is it? Descriptively, it is one form of sexual behavior. Our profession need not now agree on its origin, significance, and value for human happiness when we acknowledge that by itself it does not meet the requirements for a psychiatric disorder. Similarly, by no longer listing it as a psychiatric disorder we are not saying that it is “normal” or as valuable as heterosexuality….
What will be the effect of carrying out such a proposal? No doubt, homosexual activist groups will claim that psychiatry has at last recognized that homosexuality is as “normal” as heterosexuality. They will be wrong. In removing homosexuality per se from the nomenclature we are only recognizing that by itself homosexuality does not meet the criteria for being considered a psychiatric disorder. We will in no way be aligning ourselves with any particular viewpoint regarding the etiology or desirability of homosexual behavior (American Psychiatric Association, 1973, pp. 2–3).Nor did the diagnostic change immediately end psychiatry’s pathologizing of some presentations of homosexuality. For in “homosexuality’s” place, the DSM-II contained a new diagnosis: Sexual Orientation Disturbance (SOD)…In 1980, DSM-III dropped SOD and in its place substituted “Ego Dystonic Homosexuality” (EDH) (Spitzer, 1981).
Jack Drescher also noted:
…it was obvious to psychiatrists more than a decade later that the inclusion first of SOD, and later EDH, had been the result of earlier political compromises and that neither diagnosis met the definition of a disorder in the new nosology (Mass, 1990a, 1990b)…ego-dystonic [basically, a reference to esteem] homosexuality was removed from the next revision, DSM-III-R, in 1987 (Krajeski, 1996)…
In 1992, the World Health Organization (WHO, 1992) removed “homosexuality” from the Tenth Edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), replacing it with a diagnosis similar to Ego-Dystonic Homosexuality (Nakajima, 2003).
Currah, Green, and Stryker are quoted to the following effect:
…“identity politics,” the struggle to articulate new categories of socially viable personhood, remains central to the consideration of individual rights in the United States, and to the pursuit of a more just social order. The emergence of “transgender” falls squarely into the identity politics tradition (p. 3).
Furthermore:
…changing cultural attitudes about what exactly constitutes “appropriate” expressions of gender are leading some clinicians to encourage parents in helping their children transition at earlier ages (Kennedy, 2008; Rosin, 2008; Spiegel, 2008a, 2008b)…as in the case of homosexuality in the 1970s, LGBT advocacy groups have had some recent successes in changing professional opinions about GID diagnoses.
For example, in November 2008, “After repeated contacts” from the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (RFSU) and the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights (RFSL), the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare (Transvestitism no longer, 2008), a governmental agency made Sweden the first country to remove the GIDC diagnosis from the Swedish version of the ICD-10, citing its potential, along with five other diagnoses, of being offensive and contributing to prejudice…trans activists, with the support of LGB and straight allies, are calling for removal of the GID diagnoses. In many respects, these calls resemble historic arguments that led to the 1973 removal of homosexuality from the DSM-II…removing the GID diagnoses from DSM could accelerate trans social acceptance and tolerance.
With reference to the “increasingly militant homophile movement” (homophile being advocacy for homosexuality) Jack Drescher mentions 1969 AD when “the ‘homophile movement’ evolved into ‘gay liberation’ and repudiated the medical model of homosexuality. The rest, as they say, is history.”
By the 1950s and 1960s, ambivalence toward the medical model would play out in the publications of the American homophile movement as its members and allies openly debated the relative social merits and costs of pathologizing homosexuality.
At the term “American homophile movement,” Drescher’s footnotes thusly, “The most notable organizations in this movement were the Mattachine Society for men and the Daughters of Bilitis for women. The Mattachine Review and DOB’s The Ladder would publish numerous articles debating normalizing versus pathologizing models.”
Thus, you will note the change from militancy and advocacy into the concept of liberation which denotes seeking freedom, rights whilst inciting empathy even from people outside of the in-group and, of course, American’s love the underdog.
In this regard, Dr. Margaret Nichols is quoted thusly:
Ironically, psychiatric diagnosis has also served a humanistic purpose, sometimes for the same groups that it oppresses. Psychiatric classification can initially increase public empathy for people who are seen as suffering from a “disease” and can even enable oppressed groups to be treated more humanely, but classification comes at the cost of reinforcing the belief that certain behaviors are deviant, subnormal, or pathological, and therefore less deserving of genuinely equal rights…These events are the result of changing cultural norms and they have had a significant impact in rapidly changing cultural views on “appropriate” expressions of gender as well.
This ends the specific consideration of homosexual socio-political psychiatric activism but Jack Drescher has a lot more to say on related topics. Thus, we will continue this series within the next segment, “History of sex change reassignment and religious homosexual issue.”
Dreschel’s Table 1: “lists some of the parallels between homosexuality and gender variance as they relate to psychiatric diagnosis. Homosexuality and GID: Contrasts Possibly Harmful Consequences of Removing GID.”
Dreschel’s Table 2: “lists some of the contrasts between homosexuality and gender variance as they relate to psychiatric diagnosis. Are Clinical Interventions with Gender Variant Children Reparative Therapy?”
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