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Gender good and gender bad
David Steinberg, who sends out columns on sexuality and related matters once a month or so, included the following in his latest missive:
The board of the American Psychiatric Association recently overturned Gender Identity Disorder as a psychiatric diagnosis, a major victory for transsexual activists. According to the APA board, the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder can itself be problematic because it creates the notion that atypical gender identity is a disease rather than just one more way of defining yourself and relating to the world.
The APA is the accepted authority on who is and who is not mentally ill. Its revered "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" categorizes mental illness into an elaborate scheme of categories that become the basis for a wide variety of legal, medical, and financial determinations, ranging from psychiatric commitments to insurance settlements. Getting GID out of the DSM is no small thing.
I cannot tell you how much that made my day. As you may already know, I distrust psychologists, psychiatrists, et alia. The fact that any one of them could look at me and pronounce me mentally ill just because I'd prefer to have been born female might have had something to do with that. Call me suspicious. Heck, call me paranoid. Just don't call me crazy.
Even so, this is kind of an empty victory. It's like reading a news story about some backwards state (usually in the South, alas) which has finally gotten around to correcting some unenforced oversight in their law - like finally making slave ownership illegal, or some such. You think to yourself: Am I supposed to cheer over this?
In the same way, realistically I know that a good psychologist wouldn't automatically consider me mentally ill just because of gender dysphoria ... that it's the equivalent of an unenforced, cobwebby law.
But there's also a part of my brain that says "gender identity disorder" should never have been in the damned DSM in the first place.
Along with many, many other things. In this society we tend to condemn anything that's not a narrowly defined norm. That frightens me.
Mind you, I'm not playing holier-than-thou; I have a mirror. I am acutely aware of the times when I try to avoid something because I don't want to be seen as "too different." But, damn it, I don't assume someone's mentally ill because they happen to be a Trekkie ... even if I don't care for their ways ... whereas there are still plenty of people who are willing to assume I'm mentally ill because I don't care much for the gender I was born with.
On the other side of the coin, there are parts of the world that have had genderbending stuffed down their throat, resulting in a completely different minefield.
One of the reasons I am trying to finish the Aedie book first - even though it is a more commercial book, and in many ways a more shallow book, than The Novel On the Barroom Floor - is because one of the central points of TNOTBF is a gender change.
(The fact that I am even willing to tell you that should indicate how likely I think it is that this novel will see daylight anytime soon. I consider that one of the major surprises of the book, and here I am letting the cat out of the bag.)
Everybody and their brother writes about sex changes now. Why, over on Fictionmania you can find several thousand stories - admittedly amateurish - on this same theme. The idea of being the opposite sex, seeing things from the point of view of the opposite sex, exerts a strong fascination. Always has.
And I'm late to the party. I think the audience is saturated by now. Gender changes are commonplace stuff, and frankly, since a great deal of the novel involves how that character copes with the resultant changes in his/her life ... who cares besides me?
But do not think for a moment that contemplating this has gotten me down. After an absence of several days, I wrote six thousand words on the Aedie novel today.
Six. Thousand. I am in bliss.
© Columbine
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