Women Born Transsexual

By Sady Doyle, Comment Is Free

Posted on May 23, 2009, Printed on May 23, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/140207/are_women_today_really_more_unhappy_/?page=1

Zoe has a really interesting post on her blog A.E. Brain

A letter I recently received from Dr Ecker, to whom many thanks:

Hi Zoe,

Yes, we gave our presentation to 60 plus psychiatrists from the US, AU, FR, IT, EU, UK, Holland etc.

We spoke for 2 1/2 hours on why cross gender identity was a normal inherited variation of humans. We showed how Transgender Brains think, smell, and hear like the opposite sex. We presented internationally accepted guidelines for hormonal treatment of transsexuals to be published Summer 2009.

Here are my slides and with my participants’ permission I shall send you theirs. We are now in print in the APA Syllabus and soon in the APA Journal this summer. I am checking if we were recorded.

My greatest personal compliment came from Frank Kruijver, from Holland, whose research of the human brain in TSs started it all. He thought we have taken his work very far in our understanding of the human brain. Hope you can do something with this. Sid Ecker, M.D.

Continue Reading at: http://aebrain.blogspot.com/2009/05/brain-gender-identity-presentation-by.html

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090520/ap_on_re_eu/eu_ireland_catholic_abuse

DUBLIN – After a nine-year investigation, a commission published a damning report Wednesday on decades of rapes, humiliation and beatings at Catholic Church-run reform schools for Ireland’s castaway children.

The 2,600-page report painted the most detailed and damning portrait yet of church-administered abuse in a country grown weary of revelations about child molestation by priests.

The investigation of the tax-supported schools uncovered previously secret Vatican records that demonstrated church knowledge of pedophiles in their ranks all the way back to the 1930s.

Wednesday’s five-volume report on the probe — which was resisted by Catholic religious orders — concluded that church officials shielded their orders’ pedophiles from arrest amid a culture of self-serving secrecy.

“A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from,” Ireland’s Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse concluded.

Victims of the abuse, who are now in their 50s to 80s, lobbied long and hard for an official investigation. They say that for all its incredible detail, the report doesn’t nail down what really matters — the names of their abusers.

“I do genuinely believe that it would have been a further step towards our healing if our abusers had been named and shamed,” said Christine Buckley, 62, who spent the first 18 years of her life in a Dublin orphanage where children were forced to manufacture rosaries — and were humiliated, beaten and raped whether they achieved their quota or not.

The Catholic religious orders that ran more than 50 workhouse-style reform schools from the late 19th century until the mid-1990s offered public words of apology, shame and regret Wednesday. But when questioned, their leaders indicated they would continue to protect the identities of clergy accused of abuse — men and women who were never reported to police, and were instead permitted to change jobs and keep harming children.

The Christian Brothers, which ran several boys’ institutions deemed to have harbored serial child molesters and sadists on their staff, insisted it had cooperated fully with the probe. The order successfully sued the commission in 2004 to keep the identities of all of its members, dead or alive, unnamed in the report. No real names, whether of victims or perpetrators, appear in the final document.

The Christian Brothers’ leader in Ireland, Brother Kevin Mullan, said the organization had been right to keep names secret because “perhaps we had doubts about some of the allegations.”

“But on the other hand, I’d have to say that at this stage, we have no interest in protecting people who were perpetrators of abuse,” Mullan said, vowing to “cooperate fully with any investigation or any civil authority seeking to explore those matters.”

Buckley, who said she was abused at an orphanage run by the Sisters of Mercy, which ran several refuges for girls where the report documented chronic brutality, said the religious orders for years branded the victims as money-seeking liars — and were incapable of admitting their guilt today.

She criticized Mullan for suggesting that “today, having read the report, he doesn’t mind if the abusers are named and shamed. Isn’t that a little bit late for us?”

The report found that molestation and rape were “endemic” in boys’ facilities, chiefly run by the Christian Brothers order, and supervisors pursued policies that increased the danger. Girls supervised by orders of nuns, chiefly the Sisters of Mercy, suffered much less sexual abuse but frequent assaults and humiliation designed to make them feel worthless.

“In some schools a high level of ritualized beating was routine. … Girls were struck with implements designed to maximize pain and were struck on all parts of the body,” the report said. “Personal and family denigration was widespread.”

Ireland’s myriad religious orders, much like their mother church, have been devastated by 15 years of scandals involving past cover-ups of abusers in their ranks.

The Christian Brothers have withdrawn from running several schools that still bear their name and the order has had few recruits in Ireland in the past two decades. Other orders are down to a handful of members, and their bases are closer to nursing homes than active missions.

“Most of these orders will literally die out in Ireland within the next generation or so,” said Michael Kelly, editor of the Irish Catholic newspaper in Dublin. “Many of them are already in wind-up mode. They lack the confidence even to seek new vocations (recruits), due to the stigma associated with their members’ shocking, scandalous behavior.”

The Irish government, which in 1999 apologized for its role in permitting decades of abuse and established the commission to nail down the full truth of the matter, has tried to use money to bring closure to the victims.

A government-appointed panel has paid 12,000 survivors of the schools, orphanages and other church-run residences an average of $90,000 each — on condition they surrender their right to sue either the church or state. About 2,000 more claims are pending. Irish Catholic leaders cut a controversial deal with the government in 2001 that capped the church’s contribution at $175 million — a fraction of the final cost.

Some victims emphasized, even as they began thumbing through the report, that nothing — not even criminal convictions of their long-ago tormentors — will ever put right their psychological wounds and make their nightmares go away.

Tom Sweeney, who spent five years in two Christian Brothers-run institutions where he was placed for truancy, says he suffered sexual abuse and beatings. He also has bitter memories about more everyday humiliations — such as being forced to wrap his urine-stained sheets around his neck and parade in front of other children when he’d wet his bed.

“It’s something you’ll never forget, the way you lived in these industrial schools,” he said.

http://www.intersexualite.org/LetterTrans.html
There has been much misrepresentation (1, 2, 3) in the attempt to understand the potential for hormonal administration to alter sexually dimorphic human brain nuclei.

In an effort to correct these misconceptions, OII staff member M. Italiano has received permission to post an unpublished letter by Dick F. Swaab, M.D., Ph.D. of The Netherlands Brain Research Institute to publicly correct these misconceptions.

To read Dr. Swaab’s response: Click here

Leslie, who has been one of my BFFs since 1972 tells me how she just doesn’t understand where I am coming from almost every time we talk.

Thirty seven years…  What a long time to be girl friends.  We’ve known each other through joy and sorrow, relationships and break-ups.

We met when Ron, a man who has been helpful and supportive of both of us sent her to the NTCU office when she came to California from Virginia.

She popped up on a Monday morning just as I was opening the office up.  I took her to breakfast at the infamous Compton’s Cafeteria.  She told me she was a model and I wrecked her by asking to see her portfolio.

We couldn’t possibly be more different. I was a stone Yankee on the fringes of Weather Nation with a deserter boy friend and ultra left wing politics, an atheist even then and she was the last southern belle, conservative and traditional.  I was feminist hippie with a pop taste in clothes, she was ultra feminine in chiffons and other flowing fabrics.

She told me she couldn’t believe I was a sister and that when she met me she assumed I was a co-ed working at the office while going to school, a sort of internship.

We got our surgery at Stanford, me in 1972 and her in 1973.  At one point Dr Laub, who was far more in tune with what girls and women from the Bay area were like asked me if I thoght she was a transsexual and not a queen because she was so ultra feminine and flamboyant.  I said with a shrug, “She’s Southern.” drawing out the word southern for emphasis.  Thirty some years later I would visit the Rose Festival Museum in Tyler, Texas and see exactly how profoundly accurate that assessment was.

We went to movies together, black and white classic movies of the 1930s and 40s.  She loved the glamor and I loved the photography.

We ran through the gay dance clubs that allowed women in as well as men, mainly the Stud on Folsom Street owned by Alexis Muir, the probable model for Mrs Madrigal of “Tales of the City”.

She slept with my lover and confessed to me some ten years later.  I told her I knew, that he had told me when it happened.  She couldn’t understand my in-difference.  I told her the only thing different about that particular incident vis a vis   my relationship with my boy friend was that I hadn’t slept with her too.

She was shocked but when it had happened we were a far better world, also we were young and bohemian… Life was a movable feast.

I became a groupie and a model.  I focused on lead singers, lead guitars and rising movie stars along with a bunch of never going to make its.  I was indifferent to modeling and preferred to be looking through the viewfinder.  She wanted to model but lacked the ambition and ambition so clashed with her desires for a 1950s life as a traditional wife.

I became a radical feminist and a woman identified woman, something that meant a militant lesbian in those days.

Now, when we talk, which is trying for me since she has been very ill for a long time with a pancreatic problem I am afraid she is dying.

She tells me she is disappointed I never married and entered a traditional relationship, I tell her how sad it is that she wasted her considerable artistic talents.  We talk about our friends who are no longer with us and how we miss them, the tragedy of lives live too fast for too little time.

When we talk I am reminded of a Dylan song, “And you’re right from your side and I’m right from mine, we’re just one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind.”

The reality is she did what she thought was right for her and I did what was right for me.  I wouldn’t trade my life for hers nor would she trade her life for mine.

I am writing my life story, I’m afraid she has neither the time nor will to write hers.

We love each other and cherish  the friendship that has had its high moments and lows for nearly 40 years if you include the years when we were so angry with one another we swore we would never speak to each other.

Nerissa Belcher made a comment on “Pathologizing our partners” that bugged me on several levels but mostly for the assumptions she made.

First let me get a major sticking point out of the way “bio-gals and GGs” are politically unacceptable terms on this list. I use WBT for post-SRS sisters and WBF or women born female for natal women. Cradle women or natal women are aslo better terms that tend to keep the playing field level.

Over some 40 years or so I have seen us had being straight, lesbian, bisexual and asexual with a few into various kink.

One of the most dickwad heterosexist assumptions is that women who are lesbians are that way because they can not get a man. This assumse that all men are somehow more attractive than all women and that one would have to be some sort of loser to not have a relationship with a man.

Or that we opt for a relationship with a sister because we are such losers that we can’t get a “bio-gal”. That train of thought shows a serious lack of self worth. Over the years I have found that many of my sisters are some of the brightest most charming women I have ever had the pleasure of meeting.

Further the idea we are losers because we associate with sister or that we live in the imaginary “transghetto” because of that is another false assumption since our involvement might only consist of a couple of phone calls every month or so, perhaps a once a year get together and an on line presence.

But then too the fact that there are some super cool, brilliant sister out ther with the same skewed sense of the absurd is reason enough for those sorts of friendships.

Indeed when these assumptions get put together they seem like some gender therapist’s prescription aimed at insuring a returning clientele that feels crappy about themselves, alone and isolated etc.

Integrating into post-SRS life has only one real rule and that is to say fuck off to anyone’s list of assumptions and rule that you are supposed to follow. Or the idea that you should feel bad for failing live up to some imaginary set of rules. Screw that idea. Do what is right for you and quit the judgmental bullshit regarding the lives of others. Perhaps they are doing what is right for them.

Over the last 40 years I’ve had sisters get weird on me when I was a radical feminist with a WBF lover. Does this mean you are going to go back?

I had a couple call a Sansei Japanese American man I was seeing a gook.

Call me a “nigger lover” when I had a relationship with a black man

And all sorts of weird names when I was in a relationship with a Cuban American transgender sister.

The real pisser is that a couple of these judgmental assholes never had a relationship that was anything more than a casual date with sex and I had passionate relationships that lasted for months and sometimes longer.

I have been in a committed relationship with Tina that started on-line and on the phone since the start of 2001 and we have physically been together since 2002.

Moser, C. (in press).   Autogynephilia in Women.  Journal of Homosexuality.

Charles Moser, PhD, MD

Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality

Charles Moser, PhD, MD, is Professor and Chair, Department of Sexual Medicine, Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, San Francisco, CA 94114.

Correspondence may be addressed:  Charles Moser, PhD, MD, 45 Castro Street, #125, San Francisco, CA 94114.  (E-mail:  Docx2@ix.netcom.com)

The author would like to thank Peggy J. Kleinplatz, PhD, for her very helpful editorial assistance and Walter Bockting, PhD for his comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

ABSTRACT

Autogynephilia, an erotic interest in the thought or image of oneself as a woman, has been described as a sexual interest of some male-to-female transsexuals (MTFs); the term has not been applied to natal women.  To test the possibility that natal women also experience autogynephilia, an Autogynephilia Scale for Women (ASW) was created from items used to categorize MTFs as autogynephilic in other studies.  A questionnaire which included the ASW was distributed to a sample of 51 professional women employed at an urban hospital, 29 completed questionnaires were returned for analysis.  By the common definition of ever having erotic arousal to the thought or image of oneself as a woman, 93% of the respondents would be classified as autogynephilic.  Using a more rigorous definition of “frequent” arousal to multiple items, 28% would be classified as autogynephilic.  The implications of these findings are discussed concerning the sexuality of women and the meaning of autogynephilia for MTFs.

[continue reading at:  http://home.netcom.com/~docx2/AGF.htm ]

Parents Of 8-Year-Old Allow ‘Him’ To Live As ‘Her’

POSTED: 10:58 am EDT May 18, 2009

UPDATED: 3:55 pm EDT May 18, 2009

OMAHA, Neb. — An Omaha couple is allowing their 8-year-old son to openly live life as a girl. It’s a decision that means the child is no longer able to attend Catholic school. Therapists and the child’s parents say the second grade student is transsexual, a medical condition where a person’s inner sense of identity doesn’t match their biological gender. Some gender experts say as many as one in 500 people may be transsexual or carry significant traits of the opposite sex.

“It’s kind of like you’re trapped somewhere and you can’t get out,” said the child, whose name and face are not being made public to protect the family from potential harm.

“She’s been a girl since the beginning, everything about her, the way she dances and skips around and the things she’s attracted to. It’s more than toys and clothes,” said the child’s mother.

[continue reading although you will have to correct their lame usage of transgender instead of the more appropriate transsexual through out.]

http://www.wptz.com/family/19491867/detail.html

APA: Major Changes Loom for Bible of Mental Health

By John Gever, Senior Editor, MedPage Today
Published: May 19, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO, May 19 — Some familiar disorders may be dropped and diagnostic criteria for others are in line for substantial revision in the forthcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V).Schizoaffective disorder and gender identity disorder are among those that may be on the chopping block, according to members of the working groups leading the revision who spoke here at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting.

Perhaps more significantly, they said, DSM-V is likely to include dimensional assessments in addition to the familiar symptom checklists from past versions of the “psychiatrist’s bible.”

Since it was first published in 1952, the DSM has provided the definitive word on what is and is not mental illness, with enormous influence within medicine and on the world beyond.

The elimination of homosexuality as a mental illness in the third DSM edition issued in the 1970s, for example, is now widely viewed as a watershed development in changing society’s view from outright hostility to varying degrees of acceptance.

DSM-V is on track to be published in 2012, capping 13 years of literature reviews, commissioned research, and intensive discussions among more than 160 mental health professionals.

“Most of us involved would like a couple more years, but we know that’s not going to happen,” said David Kupfer, M.D., of the University of Pittsburgh, chairman of the task force overseeing the revision.

The 13 working groups in charge of DSM’s major subsections must still reach decisions on proposed language defining conditions and disorders. Field tests of revised diagnostic criteria are scheduled to begin this summer, with results ready for analysis in mid-2010, Dr. Kupfer said.

After further tweaking, the draft manual must be approved by the task force and ratified by the APA’s Council on Research, the Assembly, and the Board of Trustees.

Changes could be sweeping

No limits have been placed on the extent of the overhaul, explained William Narrow, M.D., the APA’s research director for DSM-V. Before the process that resulted in DSM-IV was launched, the APA had stipulated that changes be incremental.

Leaders of several work groups who spoke at a forum on Monday reported that the freedom granted this time around could indeed lead to substantial and even drastic revisions.

For example, William Carpenter, M.D., of the University of Maryland and chair of the work group on psychosis, said his team had considered moving bipolar illness into the category of psychosis rather than its current classification as a mood disorder.

But he acknowledged that such a move would face strong opposition and was unlikely. “It would happen over a number of dead bodies,” he quipped.

On the other hand, he said, “we hope to get rid of schizoaffective disorder.”

Schizoaffective disorder on the chopping block

The addition of dimensional assessments — on such features as depression, anxiety, cognitive impairment, and reality distortion, which can appear in conjunction with a wide range of psychiatric and somatic conditions — makes it possible to jettison the familiar and widely-used diagnosis, Dr. Carpenter suggested.

Patients who have previously been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorders could instead be said to have schizophrenia with a strong mood dimension.

Dr. Carpenter said his group was also likely to remove catatonia as a component of schizophrenia.

And the group was leaning heavily toward proposing a new risk syndrome for individuals — especially young people — that research has suggested are strongly predisposed to schizophrenia and other psychotic conditions.

He acknowledged, though, that there was danger in creating such a classification. It could stigmatize people diagnosed as at-risk but who don’t show overt pathology. “There are questions about how to distinguish them from the non-ill population,” Dr. Carpenter said.

He said he expected these proposals to be controversial, but when the question-and-answer period began, none of the approximately 300 people in attendance spoke against them.

“I’ll report to our work group that we had enthusiastic endorsement,” he joked.

In a similar vein, Katharine Phillips, M.D., of Brown University and Butler Hospital in Providence, R.I. — head of the anxiety conditions group — said hoarding may be added to the family of obsessive-compulsive illnesses as a separate disorder.

Genetics not ready for prime time

At the forum, and at a press briefing earlier on Monday, questions were raised about whether diagnostic criteria in DSM-V would include findings from genetic tests or neuroimaging as well as clinical presentations.

Dr. Phillips said that was not on the table, at least in her sphere. “I think at this point, it’s not clear to our work group that there are enough replicable, sensitive, specific findings from neurobiology that would allow [us] to incorporate the findings directly into diagnostic criteria,” she said.

Dr. Carpenter agreed, saying it was very unclear what to make of the gene discoveries related to schizophrenia for diagnostic purposes.

On the other hand, said Dr. Phillips, such data could inform thinking about the broad groupings of mental disorders.

Gender identity gets attention

One DSM issue that is drawing close attention from outside the psychiatric community is what to do with gender identity disorder.

The condition — in which people, often during childhood, realize that their biological gender does not match what their minds tell them — is now included in DSM-IV as a sexual dysfunction alongside pedophilia and sexual sadism.

Not surprisingly, transgender individuals and the groups representing them are lobbying hard to have gender identity disorder dropped from DSM-V.

A four-member group has been charged with developing recommendations and two of its members appeared at a separate forum here.

As described by its chairwoman, Peggy Cohen-Kettinis, Ph.D., of VU University in Amsterdam, the group is facing three main options: keep gender identity disorder approximately as it is, jettison it entirely, or change the name and diagnostic criteria.

Dr. Cohen-Kettinis said the group was nearing a decision, but both she and fellow group member Jack Drescher, M.D., a New York-based psychiatrist and prolific author on sexuality and gender, were noncommittal on which way the group was leaning.

A number of speakers at the forum represented the transgender community and most pleaded for option two.

Rebecca Allison, M.D., a Phoenix-based cardiologist and transsexual, said the ideal would be to drop the condition from DSM but keep it in the International Classification of Diseases system as a medical condition, with a name like “gender variance.”

Such a move would make it more likely that insurance companies would cover transgender transition services such as hormonal treatments and surgery, she and other speakers said.

Last year, the American Medical Association approved a resolution calling for full insurance coverage of transition services for transgender individuals — in part because of the efforts of Dr. Allison, who chairs the AMA committee on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues.

“In a perfect world, psychiatrists could treat patients with gender variance, but not for gender variance,” she said.

Dr. Drescher argued that having gender identity disorder included in the manual’s earlier editions served a useful purpose.

In the 1970s, when it was first added, most psychiatrists considered it a neurosis or even psychosis, he said — suggesting a need for treatment and not with transition services.

He suggested that its separate identity in DSM-III and DSM-IV helped pave the way for its recognition as a physical problem rather than a psychiatric pathology.

Dr. Narrow, the research director for the DSM revision, said the process gave nearly unlimited latitude to work groups to determine diagnostic criteria that would be tested in field trials.

But he said that a recommendation to drop a disorder from DSM-V entirely would be reviewed closely at the task-force level.

Gender Identity Disorder: Has Accepted Practice Caused Harm?
May 19, 2009
APA 2009
Lois Wingerson

As transgender activists protested outside the American Psychiatric Association (APA) meeting, speakers at the meeting were presenting on the same topic: gender identity disorder (GID). Some of their words would add clinical weight to the political slogans.

Some of the speakers are activists themselves, including Rebecca Allison, MD, cardiologist who is transgender, widely published author Sarah Hoffman, whose son is gender variant, and Hewlett-Packard engineer Kelley Winters, PhD, founder of GID Reform Advocates. Winters1 has called on the APA to use the DSM-V revision to affirm that “in the absence of dysphoria, gender identity and expression that vary from assigned birth sex are not, in themselves, grounds for diagnosing a mental disorder.”

Some mental health professionals made the same point in their own presentations. Sidney W. Ecker, MD, a former clinical professor of urology at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, Washington, DC, and chief of urology at the Washington DC VA Medical Center, was scheduled to review studies documenting that factors that influence gender identity are present before birth. While social and hormonal influences act later during childhood, he wrote, “gender identity is determined before and persists despite these effects.”2

Diane Ehrensaft, PhD, a professor at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, Calif, had a message more difficult for psychiatrists to hear. “The mental health profession has been consistently doing harm to children who are not ‘gender normal,’ and they need to retrain,” she told Psychiatric Times. Ehrensaft has specialized in therapy for foster children as well as for children with gender issues.

When she trained in the late 1960s, Ehrensaft said, the attitude of psychiatrists who taught her about such matters was that “children with gender identity issues other than normative are confused and are suffering from dysphoria” and need to be reoriented. That is “diametrically opposed” to what has been found since, she added.

To document the harm that has been done, she cited a January 2009 article in Pediatrics that found homosexual and bisexual young adults to have highly significant increases in a history of depression, illegal drug use, unprotected sex, and attempted suicide if their parents had rejected their sexual orientation.3 That study, in turn, cites numerous others over the prior decade with similar results, although none had previously examined parental rejection.

Ehrensaft said she would advise psychiatrists at her presentation that their role today is to help children understand their gender identity—which may not be what the birth certificate says—and to support rather than pathologize or malign their parents. “There’s more evidence of harm now than even 10 years ago,” she added, “and also a developing field of practice that clearly demonstrates means of helping these kids.”

Protestors are also focusing on the fact that the DSM-V Task Force on Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders is being led by Kenneth Zucker, PhD, psychologist-in-chief and head of the gender identity service in the child, youth, and family program at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health as well as professor in the departments of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Toronto. Zucker has been on the record as saying that parents and clinicians should work to socialize very young children who behave in ways discordant with their physical gender so that they come to identify with it—but that teens who have not done so should be helped to adjust to their discordant gender identity.

A program at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC, takes a different approach, offering in-person and online support groups to help families adjust to and help their children work through their own gender identity issues. Edgardo Menvielle, MD, MSHS, director of the program, was curious whether children seen in Washington have different mental health profiles than kids involved with the Toronto program. Based on Child Behavior Checklist ratings, he reported that the Washington youth showed “less pathological tendencies,” suggesting that peer support may “lessen manifestations of pathology in the child.”4

Speaking by telephone before the conference, Menvielle hastened to distance himself from that conclusion. “The implications are not very clear,” he said. “We’re dealing with a population that appears healthier overall, but it could be that we attract different families.”

Menvielle also said there is “a lot of anger about these issues,” and added, “I hope I don’t receive any tomatoes.”

Psychologist Ehrensaft said she’s eager to see studies that compare adults who received treatments intended to “normalize” their gender identities as children with those treated in more accepting environments. Meanwhile, she said, there is a move afoot to change the membership of the Task Force so that it is “more balanced.” She added that she hopes the protests do succeed in reorienting psychiatrists’ thinking about GID.

“We got homosexuality out of the DSM because of protests at the APA,” she pointed out. “Now it’s time to do the same with GID.”

References
1. Winters K. Beyond conundrum: strategies for diagnostic harm reduction. Abstract presented at the American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting; May 18, 2009; San Francisco.
2. Ecker SW. Brain gender identity. Abstract presented at the American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting; May 18, 2009; San Francisco. 3. Ryan C, Huebner D, Diaz R, Sanchez J. Family rejection as a predictor of negative health outcomes in white and latino lesbian, gay, and bisexual young adults. Pediatrics. 2009;123:346-352..
4. Menvielle EJ. Psychopathology and gender variance in a clinical sample of children. Abstract presented at the American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting; May 18, 2009; San Francisco.

In the 1970s I marched in a demonstration on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco at an APA gathering carrying a sign saying, “Homosexuality is not a Mental Illness!”

I met Dr. Evelyn Hooker at a gathering and spoke to her about how transsexuality wasn’t treated as a mental illness the way homosexuality was.

She warned me, “It will be!”

About 10 years ago I did an internet performance piece I called “If”.

You see one day in IIRC 1973 the APA cured all American gay men and lesbians not with massive amounts of therapy but with a vote and the stroke of a pen.

“If” took an announcement of the APA that took the removal of homosexuality from the DSM one step further and said that even suggesting that gayness or lesbianism was a mental disorder created stress and problems.

I appropriated the article and with some judicious editing used it to not only remove transsexuality from the DSM but declare GID a mistake and add that suggesting a connection between transsexualism and psychiatric conditions created psychiatric conditions where none had existed.

I posted this appropriation in several venues and tracked it around the world.

Ironically a number of transsexual and transgender people were upset as they relied upon GID as a diagnosis to base medical claims as well as legal issue on.

Time has come to abolish the strangle hold the APA has upon our psyches. Declare them irrelevant. Refuse to co-operate in our own oppression.

Start picketing every single meeting they have.

If the French can do this so can the rest of us.

By Sharon Gaughan

PARIS (AFP) — Transsexuality will no longer be classified in France as mental illness, according to a government decision Saturday that qualifies as “historic” by concerned organizations, on the eve of the World Day against homophobia and transphobia.

Roselyne Bachelot, Health Minister, issued a staement today that decrees the removal of transsexuality from the list of psychiatric disorders, reported a spokesman for the ministry.

So far, transsexuals have enjoyed an exemption from co-payment for medical care in the ALD23 for afflictions under classified as long-term and persistent disorders.

For the Department of Health, it is a “strong signal to the whole community ” of agreement that with the position of transsexuals that inclusion under ALD23 is stigmatizing.

This classification, derived from that of the World Health Organization (WHO), was also linked to the fact that transsexuality was on the list of diseases identified in the DSM medical manual (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) that guides the medical profession, just as homosexuality had for many years.

In an article published in Le Monde dated Sunday-Monday, many leaders, including First Secretary of the PS Martine Aubry, the Communist Marie-George Buffet, Green Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Nobel Prize winners Françoise Barré-Sinoussi (medicine) and Elfriede Jelinek (literature), have requested that WHO “no longer consider transsexuals as mentally disordered. “

This is based on the WHO decision on 17 May 1990 to delete homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses; the same data was chosen for the World Day against homophobia and widely celebrated on Saturday and Sunday.

France chose the symbolism to be “the first country in the world” to “delete transidentité from the list of mental illness, commented the Committee IDAHO (International Day Against Homophobia and transphobia).

This “historic decision” is also “an explosion of hope for all trans people around the world, “said Joel Bedos, Secretary General Committee IDAHO.

The association, Homosexualités et Socialisme (HES), issued a “welcome” message that supports the “long-range” claims of the lesbian, gay, bi and trans (LGBT) in France. For UAS, it is time now to move from the concrete symbol in fighting against trans violence and discrimination.

Beyond “this declassification, it is still necessary to ensure that the transgendered are completely recognized as citizens of the front rank”,
insisted the Coordinating Inter-LGBT committee.

France announced that transsexuality will no longer be classified as a mental disease.

Concerned associations announced the historic government decision regarding the declassification of transsexuality as a mental disease on Saturday, the day before the World Day to fight Homophobia and transphobia.

The Minister for Health, Roselyne Bachelot, chose yesterday to issue the decree removing transsexualism from the category of psychiatric afflictions, said a spokesman for the ministry.

The Ministry of Health’s action sent a powerful signal to the transsexual community that it recognized inclusion in ALD23 (their DSM) was stigmatizing.

This classification, rising from that of  The World Health Organization (WHO), was also related to the fact that the transsexuality was included on the list of the pathologies listed in the medical handbook DSM (Diagnosis and Statistical Manual off Mental Disorders) to which refers the medical community, just like  homosexuality until a few years ago.

In a political statement published in Le Monde last Sunday-Monday,  many noted individuals including first secretary of the PS Martine Aubry, the Marie-George Buffet Communist, the Green Daniel Cohn-Bendit or the Francoise Nobel Prize Barred-Sinoussi (medicine) or Elfriede Jelinek (literature), asked l’ WHO “  to no longer regard  transsexuals as having a mental disorder.

Because  WHO had decided on May 17, 1990 remove homosexuality of the list of the mental diseases, this date has become the day appointed for the World Day Against Homophobia, celebrated Saturday and Sunday in many places.

The Association of Homosexuality and Socialism (HES) also placed this advertisement which says “On this important day for ” the French lesbian, gay, Bi and trans  Community (LGBT). and for HES, it is  time, now, to move from the symbolic to  concrete acts, while fighting against violences and discriminations which weigh heavily on the transpeople.

Inter-LGBT coordination insisted that “Beyond this measure of declassification there remains much to do to insure that transsexuals are fully recognized as first class citizens.

I need someone to translate this from French.  I am Babel Fishing it now but an actual translation would be best

PARIS (AFP) — La transsexualité ne sera plus classée en France comme une maladie mentale, une décision gouvernementale qualifiée samedi d’”historique” par les associations concernées, à la veille de la journée mondiale de lutte contre l’homophobie et la transphobie.

Posted by: Cara in Do Something, GLBTQ, Trans Tomorrow,

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2009/05/16/may-17-international-day-against-homophobia-and-transphobia/

May 17, is the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia.

This year, IDAHO is focusing on transphobia: Each year, the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (the “IDAHO”, as it is usually called), will see actions and initiatives take place in many countries and contexts and on many different issues.

All these activities and initiatives are a very strong signal to all, decisions makers, public opinion, civil rights movements, human rights defenders, etc. throughout the world that our fights for our Rights as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, intersex, etc… is vibrant!

The Day provides all different kind of actors with a very powerful opportunity to express their demands and to advocate for their case. Each year also, the IDAHO aims at using the extra public, political and media attention that it provides at all levels to highlight one specific aspect of the struggle for sexual rights.

This year, we chose to highlight the often neglected but important issue of Transphobia.

Click here to read the full appeal for rights for all trans people across the world (pdf). And then click here to sign the appeal yourself.

Remember, this is an international appeal, so anyone can sign. And of course, don’t forget to spread the word.

By NORMA LOVE, Associated Press Writer

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/05/14/national/a115152D16.DTL&feed=rss.news

Thursday, May 14, 2009

(05-14) 14:57 PDT Concord, N.H. (AP) — Gov. John Lynch said Thursday he will sign a bill to make his state the sixth to legalize gay marriage as soon as the Legislature makes some changes, which legislative leaders immediately said they would back.

Lynch asked that the already-approved legislation be revised to better protect churches and their employees against lawsuits if their beliefs preclude them from marrying gays. Gay marriage supporters said they do not object.

“Throughout history, our society’s views of civil rights have constantly evolved and expanded,” Lynch told reporters. “New Hampshire’s great tradition has always been to come down on the side of individual liberties and protections.”

Lynch said he personally opposes gay marriage, but decided to view the issue “through a broader lens.”

A gay marriage bill and companion legislation were adopted last week, but had yet to make it the governor’s desk. Now, they will be held until the changes proposed by Lynch are approved, said Senate President Sylvia Larsen.

Larsen and House Speaker Terie Norelli predicted the Legislature would act quickly to adopt the changes, perhaps as early as next week.

“I want to thank the governor for his leadership in finding a way that our state can move forward to enact marriage equality and, at the same time, respect religious tolerance,” said Norelli, D-Portsmouth.

The bill’s main sponsor, state Rep. Jim Splaine, said the bottom line is that Lynch supports marriage equality for gays.

Mo Baxley, executive director of New Hampshire Freedom to Marry Coalition, a group supporting gay marriage, approved of Lynch’s proposed changes.

“This is language we can support,” she said.

Four other New England states — Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts and Vermont — recognize same-sex marriage. Iowa is the other state to legalize gay marriage.

Lynch said he wanted the law modeled on Connecticut’s, which he said contains better protections than the proposal adopted by the New Hampshire Legislature. For example, Lynch wants to be sure an organist employed by a church opposed to gay marriage could legally refuse to perform at a gay wedding.

New Hampshire Republican Party Chairman John H. Sununu criticized Lynch, a Democrat, for his position.

“Once again, Gov. Lynch has discovered a way to be against something and for it at the same time,” Sununu said.

Kevin Smith, executive director of gay marriage opponent Cornerstone Policy Research, said Lynch’s proposed changes are a disingenuous attempt to obscure the fact Lynch misled the public into believing he opposed same-sex marriage.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/05/14/national/a115152D16.DTL

By Frances Kissling – WeNews commentator

(WOMENSENEWS)–The end of Barack Obama’s first term as president will almost coincide with the 50th anniversary of the invention of the birth control pill.

The pill changed women’s lives, sexual relations and reproduction irrevocably. It was the beginning of one of the most significant social transformations of modern history. It was as important as the invention of the printing press and the industrial revolution.

And, like all social transformation, it has been hotly contested; the site of an unfinished culture war.

Promotion of the pill–and a woman’s right to control her fertility–moved forward rapidly for the first 20 years, fueled by an engine known as feminism. Since then, for the past 20 years, it has been sidetracked by the religious right.

Now the question is what will happen under Obama?

So far he’s done a lot.

Obama has increased federal funds for family planning for low-income women and college students and made emergency contraception available to17 year olds, as well as to older women.

He has restored respect for the right of recipients of U.S. foreign assistance to participate in efforts to make abortion legal and available in their countries–using their own, not U.S. money.

He has fully funded the United Nations’ effort to provide family planning and maternal health services to women worldwide. And he promises that decisions about health will be based on science and the common good, not ideology. Hopefully that will lead to comprehensive, evidence-based sexuality education; a goal not yet achieved.

Baby Steps

Those were easy baby steps though.

Tougher measures that must be tackled include the restoration of federal Medicaid funds for poor women seeking abortion–who have as much right to choose as other women–and lifting the restriction on the use of foreign aid for abortions in developing countries.

About 50,000 women a year die globally in botched abortion attempts and we must save their lives as well.

Obama has not yet indicated a willingness to stand up for these women and the choice movement is reluctant to insist that he do so.

We are rightly concerned that rolling back 20 years of neglect may be the most that can be accomplished–and we do not want to annoy the president.

However, all these legislative steps are only the prelude to completing the social and cultural transformation begun in 1961. The president needs to lead the cultural discourse regarding the link between women’s (and men’s) sexual and reproductive rights and their human rights.

Important Steps

Obama has taken several important and positive steps in this direction. First, he has insisted that he will listen to leaders on all sides of the cultural divide on issues of reproductive health. While he calls it a search for common ground and eschews a “culture war,” he engages in cultural discourse.

In listening he has come to emphasize values that are important to both sides.

To those opposed to abortion, Obama stresses respect for life in an effort to avoid abortion–a goal that women also have.

At the same time, he upholds a modern human rights frame for abortion rights, one that not only trusts women as moral agents, but asserts that agency. In answer to a question at a recent press conference, the president said: “I think (women) are in a better position to make these decisions ultimately than members of Congress or a President of the United States–in consultation with their families, with their doctors, with their clergy.”

There is some hope that such an approach can lead to social transformation.

It will require hard work by those of us who are committed to a world in which the focus is on human rights and individual freedom.

We must listen to those who disagree with us but also reject the pre-transformational model of moral decision making in which sex was something one paid for with unwanted pregnancy and birth, and assert a vision where sex is something that, when approached responsibly with concern for consequences and with justice for our partners, is a social good.

Social Transformation

If the president can go that far, 50 years of cultural struggle will result in social transformation that makes women free.

Whether Obama, who is lauded as a transformational leader, along with those of us who supported him will fulfill the promise of that social transformation in the next four years is yet to be seen.

There would be a certain hubris in taking on the task, sort of like claiming one could end war forever.

But there is no accomplishment that a president could be more proud of than solidifying a vision of human relationships in which women were truly recognized as the moral subjects of their sexual and reproductive lives.

Such recognition would not only mean that there was no controversy when women decided to use contraception, but also none when she chooses to bring children into the world or to end a pregnancy in abortion.

It would also mean rape would no longer be tolerated, children would be provided for, child brides would not exist and women would not be stoned, burned, or otherwise tortured for seeking to be free.

Yes, achieving a woman’s right to control her fertility will make those other rights real.

The president, perhaps aware of how important reproductive rights are to all women’s rights, has taken the first practical steps. They are, however, steps that merely bring us closer to where we were 20 years ago. The road ahead is still unmarked.

Frances Kissling is a visiting scholar at the Center for Bioethics, University of Pennsylvania, and the former president of Catholics for Choice.

I have added Greta Christina’s Blog “Blowfish” to the Blog Roll list.  I find her both wise and witty and have been reading her in various forums for several years now.  The following was on Alternet and gives a sample of her writing.  I hope y’all dig her too.

By Greta Christina, The Blowfish Blog
Posted on May 14, 2009, Printed on May 14, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140014/
For some reason, the sex- positive community is also, very often, a spiritual community. (At least in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live.) It’s not often a conventionally religious community; but many varieties of Wicca, Goddess worship, shamanism, Tantra, astrology, chi, chakras, belief in a collective metaphysical consciousness, and other forms of New Age belief and magical thinking permeate it, both privately and publicly.

This troubles me. I am a hard- core atheist/ materialist/ naturalist/ humanist/ skeptic/ whatever you want to call someone who doesn’t believe in any supernatural entities or substances. And I’m just as unconvinced — and almost as troubled — by the ideas of the Goddess and chi energy and immortal consciousness and so on, as I am by the ideas of God and angels and Hell.

Now, I’m not writing this piece to argue against religion. I may yet write a piece criticizing spiritual beliefs and practices in the sex- positive community . . . but it’s not what I’m doing here. (If you want to see my reasons and arguments for my lack of spiritual belief, you can do so here, and here, and here and here and here.)

What I want to do here is offer an alternative.

I want to offer a positive way of looking at sexuality and sexual transcendence that doesn’t involve any sort of belief in the supernatural. I want to offer a sex- positive philosophy that is entirely materialist. The materialist view of life in general and sex in particular is often viewed as cold, bleak, narrow, mechanical, reductionist, and generally a downer. I don’t think it is. And I want to talk about why.

•

The materialist view says that there is no supernatural world. At all. There is only the physical world. All those things that seem non- physical — thoughts, feelings, choices, selfhood, transcendent sexual ecstasy, consciousness in general — are actually products of the brain, and of the brain’s interactions with the rest of the body and the rest of the world. We don’t yet know exactly how this works — the science of neuropsychology is still in its infancy — but the overwhelming evidence we have so far is that this seems to be so.

And to me, this is not a downer. This is magnificent.

To me, the idea that, out of nothing but earth and water and sunlight, these wildly complex living beings have developed, not only with the capacity for consciousness but with the capacity to create the experience of ecstasy for ourselves and one another . . . that is just jaw-droppingly astonishing. We can create the experience of joy, of deep, expansive pleasure that takes us out of ourselves and into one another . . . and we do it through a complex re-arrangement of the energy of the sun, and the atoms and molecules of the planet.

That is magnificent. That, more than any spiritual belief I ever had, makes me feel both humble and proud. That makes me feel intimately connected with the rest of the Universe . . . in a way that no spiritual practice ever did. What’s that old hippie song about how we’re stardust, made of billion- year- old carbon? You don’t have to believe in metaphysical energy to think that that is wicked cool.

There’s something else, too. When you look at human beings from a materialist and evolutionary standpoint, not as special spiritual entities or children of the Goddess but simply as another twig on the evolutionary tree . . . that view puts sex squarely front and center in the human experience. Sex has an immensely important place in the evolutionary scheme. Darwin wrote an entire book about it.

Why does sex feel so good? Sex feels so good because it evolved to feel good. Sex feels profoundly, transcendently amazing because evolutionary forces strongly favor animals who really, really like to boff. That’s an oversimplification — for one thing, evolution can also favor animals who are picky about their sex partners — but it is a huge part of the picture.

Of course, birth control and other non- reproductive sexual practices have been shifting this picture somewhat for humans, putting reproduction into our conscious control and increasingly setting it apart from sexual pleasure. And as a queer spanking fetishist who neither has nor wants kids, I’m very much in favor of that. My DNA is apparently under the impression that it’s going to replicate by spanking other women, and I’m happy to let it dream on. But it is undeniable that these evolutionary forces are where the roots of sexual pleasure lie . . . roots that go back hundreds of millions of years.

In other words: According to a materialist viewpoint, the capacity for transcendent sexual joy is hard- wired into our brains . . . and it’s deeply and powerfully hard- wired, as a crucial and central feature of our lives, by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. And this doesn’t just mean that suppressing or trivializing sex is stupid and futile, dangerous and harmful, a cruel and pointless crusade against the deeply- laid grain of our nature. (Although it certainly does mean that.)

It means that the act of sex, and the experience of sexual pleasure, connects us to every other living thing on earth. We are the cousins of everything that lives on this planet, with a common ancestor of primordial soup going back billions of years . . . and we are all related, not entirely but substantially, because of sex.

That is awesome. That makes me want to go fuck right now, just so I can feel connected with my fish and tetrapod and primate ancestors. That is entirely made of win.

And finally:

When you don’t believe in God or the soul or any sort of afterlife — when you believe that this short life is all that we have — then making the most of that short life, and taking advantage of the joyful experiences it has to offer, suddenly becomes a whole lot more important. It’s almost a moral obligation. The odds against you, personally, having been born into this life, are beyond astronomical. Are you going to waste that life by not giving yourself, and other people, as much joy as you possibly can?

Now, this doesn’t mean, as many anti- atheists claim, that without a belief in God or an afterlife, we can and would behave entirely selfishly and with no moral compass. It doesn’t mean that even a little bit. But it does mean than we can base our morality — including our sexual morality — on how our behavior demonstrably affects people in this life, and not on how it supposedly affects invisible beings in an unproven hypothetical life after this one. And it means that — as long as we don’t cause harm to people in this life — it is not only acceptable, but a positive and meaningful good, to engage in any activities that bring joy and epiphany and meaning to ourselves and the people around us. Including, and maybe even especially, sex.

In other words:

I don’t think we need to see sex as spiritual in order to see it as transcendent.

I don’t think we need to see sex as blessed by the Goddess, or a telepathic connection between souls, or a channeling of the chi energy, or as any form of worship or spiritual practice, in order to see it as valuable. I think we can see sex as a physical act between animals . . . and still see it as richly, deeply valuable and meaningful. I think we can see sex as a physical act , and still see it as an act that connects us intimately, not only with ourselves and with one another, but with all of life, and with the expanse of history, and with the vastness of the universe.

Read more of Greta Christina at her blog.

© 2009 The Blowfish Blog All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140014/