By Penny Robo
When it comes to medical care, trans people have long been trapped between a rock and a hard place: the same mental health classifications that have been used to stigmatize us has also been our point of access to health services. The American Psychiatric Association used to have us classified as having “gender identity disorder”, changed it to “gender dysphoria” with the release of the DSM-5 to alleviate negative connotations but stopped short of declassification for a very simple reason: removing us from the DSM could be used as grounds for halting treatment.
This week, the World Health Organization made a move to further destigmatize by not simply renaming the diagnosis to “gender incongruence” (which I must admit sounds pretty slick, like the kind of forced slang you’d find in old sci-fi short stories, though to say it seems lightweight compared to the reality of it all is an understatement) but also moving it from the mental disorders category over to the sexual health section. Continue reading
If you’ve spent just about any time being exposed to what the general public believes about transgender medicine, you’ve likely had the misfortune of encountering the belief that cross-sex hormone therapy is harmful or deadly to us in several respects. From heart disease to stroke risk, from cancer (any or all, apparently) to suicide (based on a misread Swedish study), widespread fear of the dangers that must surely accompany chemicals and artificial hormones is marshaled in the service of the certainty that medically transitioning – “unnatural” as it is – must ultimately be bad for you.
