From homosexuality to "autogynephilia": The American Psychiatric Association hasn't learned.

In an obituary about Charles Silverstein, Neil Genzlinger gives some interesting insight into how Silverstein helped remove homosexuality from the American psychiatric manual, the DSM,  back in 1973. 

Silverstein had pointed out how the  American Psychiatric Association had fallen into the trap of creating pseudo-scientific sounding terms for sexualities the psychiatrists did not understand. Yes, this is unfortunately relevant to the trans community community today.

I looked up the original interview from 2019. 

Silverstein was part of a delegation from the Gay Activists Alliance, and he said this about their meeting with the people behind the DSM:

Syphilophobia and other silly diagnoses

 "I wrote [my speech to the  Nomenclature Committee of the American Psychiatric Association]  the night before, after having studied diagnostic systems, other diagnostic systems. 

What I did was write a parody, a satire, of all the absurd things that the American Psychiatric Association had diagnosed, and some of them were embarrassing. There were silly things. [He mentioned illnesses like “syphilophobia” (irrational fear of syphilis).]

At the end, I said, "These are the mistakes that you made before. You're making the mistake. Now, correct it." It seemed to have impressed them, and this came back to us in a number of publications. That was in February. In December of that year, homosexuality, per se, was eliminated from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. 

How trauma may affect the lives of LGBTQ+ people and what they can do about it

This post will look at how psychological distress may play out among queer and transgender people and give you an introduction to the concepts of trauma, PTSD and Complex PTSD (CPTSD) in an LGBTQ+ setting. I will point to some steps you could take to help yourself or a friend suffering from trauma related issues. 

By Sally Molay

If the headline above caught your attention, you might know someone who struggles with the effects of trauma. Or maybe you suspect that you yourself carry unresolved trauma and the time is right to look into that. In either case, welcome to this primer and good luck in your important work!

Please note: I am not a doctor or a psychologist. This is not medical advice. I am a queer person and a trans ally. I suffer from complex trauma from childhood emotional abuse. I am also a survivor of sexual assault. I have been fortunate enough to heal and learn through years of therapy. I am also a trained instructor of iRest, a research-based relaxation and meditation technique for healing trauma.

I would like to underline that being trans is not a mental illness. Having a sexual orientation different from the straight one is not a psychological disorder. The current medical manuals explicitly state that being trans is not a mental illness.  However, the ways a cis/hetero-normative world treat queer people can often cause trauma. Moreover, queer and trans people are people like other people, and as such they can face emotional challenges that are not directly linked to their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Which topics are covered?

This is a lengthy post. If this feels daunting, I have included this little menu that you can use to jump to the parts you want to investigate: 

• What to do if you are in distress right now
• Why write about trauma in an LGBTQ+ context?
• What is a trauma? 
• Flight, fight, freeze, fawn
• PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)
• Complex PTSD
• Somatization (bodily expressions of trauma)
• The window of tolerance
• How to get help
• How to help yourself
• Resources

Transgender and nonbinary news curation in social media

We provide links to the latest transgender and queer news and resources through our social media channels on twitter, tumblr, Flipboard and Telegram.

Anyone who wants to keep track of the transgender and queer debate – whether this applies to culture, politics, health or models of understanding – is facing a serious challenge as to how to find relevant news and quality content.

Search engines like Google are becoming increasingly irrelevant in this respect, as few of us go beyond the first two pages of search results and because so much of the content delivered is produced by anti-trans and anti-queer activists.

This is why we need curators who can identify and share relevant content with those who want to know more about trans, nonbinary and queer issues.

Here's the problem: There is, to our knowledge, very few who provide such services. Reddit provides some input of this kind, but it is limited to the interests of those active there. Sites like Pink News, The Advocate, LGBTQ Nation, and Washington Blade provide a lot of useful information, but they are – for obvious reasons – focusing on their own content.

This is why we are providing transgender, nonbinary and queer news curation in several channels, the latest of which is our Transgender World Telegram channels.

Here are our our transgender and queer news sites and accounts:

Trans Express on twitter.
This is our most expansive and up to date news source. We post some five to ten links of relevant content every day.

Trans Express on tumblr.
On average we publish one new post presenting relevant transgender and queer content every day.

Transgender News on Flipboard
Here we present much of the same content as on twitter, but in a practical newspaper format.

Transgender World on Telegram
Telegram is our newest offering. We realized that there were no serious transgender news sources on this popular platform and decided to provide our own. This channel will present selected links from the sources mentioned above.

Photo: Alessandro Biascioli

The DSM-5 updates its gender/transgender vocabulary in a positive way, but "autogynephilia" remains

The American psychiatric manual, the DSM-5 (now called DSM-5-TR) has revised the chapter on gender dysphoria. The main changes reflects a more on target and respectful language for describing gender variance. 

• The term “desired gender” is now “experienced gender.“
• The term “cross-sex medical procedure” is now “gender-affirming medical procedure.”
• The term “natal male”/“natal female” is now “individual assigned male/female at birth.”

It seems to me that the doctors writing this chapter are both willing and able to have a constructive dialog with trans people.

I am not saying that the gender dysphoria  text is perfect. Why on earth they continue to use the term “disorders of sex development” for intersex people, given the history of “gender identity disorder”, is beyond me. They did at least include the term “differences of sex development” as an alternative.

You can read the revised introduction to the DSM-5-TR gender dysphoria chapter here. 

Autogynephilia remains

What they have failed to do is to remove the “autogynephilia” diagnosis from the paraphilia chapter. 

The inclusion of this pseudo-scientific term is extremely unfortunate, and reflects the influence of Ray Blanchard on the DSM-5 process. The term is actively used by anti-trans activists to invalidate trans women. Indeed, Blanchard himself is actively helping TERFs and right wing extremist spread their transphobic gospel.