Who Actually Has a Gender Identity Disorder?

Pauline Park, writing for Visible Vote 08, thinks it's not transgender people but rather society that is disordered.

I do not have a gender identity disorder. It is society that has a gender identity disorder. And I find it outrageous that transgendered people in the United States and elsewhere have to have themselves declared mentally ill in order to access health care or to get a job. What is commonly referred to as the problem of gender dysphoria is not to be found in the mind of a transgendered person but rather in the society that is too rigid to allow for those born male to identify as women or those born female to identify as men – or to allow those born male, female, or intersexed to identify as something other than men or women.

In fact, GID is most often used to subject gender-variant children and adolescents who ‘deviate’ from this rigidly defined norm to ‘reparative therapy’ that can and sometimes does include electroshock and long-term institutionalization. Such ‘ex-gay conversion therapy’ is in fact the recommended ‘treatment’ for gender identity disorder among gender-variant youth and is used by parents who seek psychiatric ‘help’ to ‘cure’ or ‘prevent’ homosexuality and/or transgender in their children.

As part of a progressive agenda for social change, we must commit to removing the GID diagnosis from the DSM as well as outlawing ‘reparative therapy’; doing so will help liberate thousands of gender-variant youth from the psychiatric abuse to which they are currently being subjected. We have to reject the notion that the body of a transgendered person is a diseased body or that the mind of a transgendered person is a diseased mind. We must reconceptualize pathologization as the problem and not the solution to our problems. We must find means by which transgendered people can access forms of medical intervention such as HRT and SRS without having to subject themselves to the degradation of being declared mentally ill simply by virtue of their gender identity.

Beyond holding on to tradition, just how important ARE clearly defined gender identies? Is there any rational reason to discriminate against people who don't fit into these fairly rigid molds society has cast in stone beyond the fact that those exceptions make some people uncomfortable?

I think someone putting their comfort ahead of another person's basic rights is the epitome of selfishness and, despite the fact that religious fundamentalists are some of those pushing the hardest to do just that, it is FAR, FAR away from the example Jesus set for us; to love our neighbor as ourself without exception.

Click here to read Pauline Park's entire essay.