Flap Flares Over Gender Diagnosis
May 16th, 2008
Transgender and gay activists are objecting to some members of an American Psychiatric Association (APA) committee that will weigh changes to the definition of gender identity disorder (GID), a diagnosis that activists say is used to treat young trans and gay people with the goal of curing them.
But the members are not easily pigeonholed as anti-gay or anti-transgender and the diagnosis itself has been used to gain medical care and legal protections for some transgendered people.
“Kenneth J. Zucker, Ph.D., is a name that every gay man and lesbian woman should know, especially if they were treated to become ’straight’ at a camp or an ex-gay affirming psychologist’s office,” Autumn Sandeen wrote in a May 7 post on pamshouseblend.com, a website popular with gay, lesbian, and transgendered progressives.
On May 1, the APA named the members of 13 working groups that will consider the various diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the association’s official list of disorders. The DSM has definitions only for diagnoses and does not make recommendations for treatment.
The working groups will write the fifth edition of the DSM, which is scheduled to be published in 2012. Zucker, a leading GID expert, will chair the Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders Work Group. A sub-working group, chaired by Dr. Peggy T. Cohen-Kettenis of VU University Medical Center in The Netherlands, will consider the GID diagnosis.
Zucker is accused by activists of being a proponent of reparative therapy, a purported cure for homosexuality, and of treating children with GID with an eye toward preventing adult homosexuality or transsexuality.
A second working group member, Dr. Ray Blanchard, a psychiatry professor at the University of Toronto, is deemed offensive for his theories that some types of transsexuality are paraphilias, or sexual urges. In this model, transsexuality is not an essential aspect of the individual, but a misdirected sexual impulse. Blanchard is not on the Cohen-Kettenis sub-working group.
Tags: center, lesbian, national, rights