Imagine a young girl. She has never liked dolls, preferring instead to play ball with her older brothers. She thinks the other girls her age are too prissy and wants to have short hair so she can play more outside without having to worry about it getting dirty or caught in anything. According to the American Psychiatric Association, these are not innocent signs of being a tomboy, but rather symptoms of a mental disorder.
The official term for what most know as transsexualism is Gender Identity Disorder - and I use all caps because it still occupies a place in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV TR), the be-all reference for all mental disorders for the APA. Since homosexuality was removed from the list in 1973, this specifies that what the APA finds to be disordered about transsexual people is not same sex attraction, but their eschewal of gender roles. What is a gender role exactly? Some would say (and Okin would agree with them) that gender roles are cultural systems that vary based on the society - and are not set out by natural law - which set the bar for what is normal for each sex to do. Because they vary from culture to culture, some manners of comportment or actions could be considered normal in one society that could be seen as symptoms of Gender Identity Disorder in another. Here is a simple example: a man walking around in a skirt in America would be seen as very unusual, whereas the citizens of pre-colonial Hawaii would find pants to be more odd than what we would see as a skirt. Too flimsy of an example? In many Native American cultures, a man or woman who dressed as the opposite gender and wished to take a spouse of the same sex was called Two-Spirit (having both the spirit of a man and a woman) and was often respected in the tribe as being particularly spiritual.
With this in mind, how are we to consider the breaking of cultural rules to be an illness? The APA does not consider anarchists to be mentally infirm simply because they do not follow normal societal rules. I believe the time has long since come for transsesualism to be considered not a mental illness but a secularly acceptable alternative lifestyle, in order to make way for such necessary civil rights concessions as the addition of gender identity to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. This would afford some protection to this already disadvantaged group (97% of trans people report gender based discrimination in the workplace) and make America a little more just for all its citizens.
http://advocate.com/Print_Issue/Current_Issue/The_Gender_Identity_Divide/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-Spirit
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3 comments:
I would agree with Okin that sometimes the so-called gender role was forcefully given to the two genders by the culture of specific society. Nevertheless, is it really true that the girl as described in your first paragraph will be diagnosed as Gender Identity Disorder? I am just wondering because you didn't seem to have given the EXACT definition of GID given by DSM-IV TR. Therefore, the example you gave might not apply.
I agree with Sir Dracula; the girl described would most likely not be diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder. Being a tomboy is one thing totally different than the official symptoms of Gender Identity Disorder: strong and persistent cross-gender identification, persistent discomfort about one's assigned sex or a sense of inappropriateness in the gender-role of that sex, clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. Being a tomboy does not always mean these factors, particularly the significant distress or social, functional impairment. In my opinion, Gender Identity does not seem to be a way of classifying all people who identify with the other gender as ill; but rather, if, as a result of identifying with the other gender, a person suffers from functional impairment and psychological stress, then they are indeed suffering from a disorder. This distinction serves to draw the line between mere transgender identification and actual Gender Identity Disorder.
Link and Sir Dracula bring up great points. Overall, however, your post did a great job at showing the extent to which cultural definitions influence our own diagnoses of mental illness.
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