It was said less than 20 years ago that often we find “… mainstream media themes of transsexuals and transgenderists as sick, deviant, dangerous, and in need of medical treatment” (Gordene MacKenzie, Transgender Nation, 1994, page 107). Interwoven with the more common (and more negative) media images is a notion that transgender persons are driven by aberrant sexual urges, which probably rests on what psychologists call “confirmation bias” (a normal human tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions).
One might ask, “Where did the mainstream media ever get those questionable ideas, which most crossdressers of all kinds would reject?” The sad truth is that Western religions have contributed. Even more influential during the last half century have been psychiatry and the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (now called WPATH), which long operated on the premise that transgender people are mentally sick and need treatment to address their mental problems. Both of the groups just mentioned believed that transgender persons suffer a form of schizophrenia. Thus medications and talk-sessions to address the schizophrenia are a reasonable strategy for getting rid of the desire to crossdress. Gender Identity Disorder (GID) was the fancy name they adopted to represent these notions.
Transgender activists often picketed and marched outside during meetings of those groups. Those discontented marchers and picketers held that male and female aspects of an individual’s personality are normal. Moreover, some men may have significant amounts of female feelings; and some women may have significant amounts of male feelings. Those are not schizophrenia. They are gender variance in the human race.
The good news is the American Psychiatric Association recently revised its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), replacing GID with “gender dysphoria.” In the new DSM (version 5), GID is gone and “dysphoria” is no longer what Harry Benjamin meant by that term. Rather, in the DSM, it simply means a combination of anxiety and sadness pertaining to gender identity. They state very explicitly that it is not a mental disorder, although excessive anxiety and/or sadness “… may be a condition for which medical treatment is appropriate in some cases.” They make clear, however, that “gender dysphoria” cases are a subset of transgender persons. Most transgender persons do not experience any sort of depression or sadness; but a few do and they might benefit from counseling even though they do not meet the APA’s threshold for being a mental illness.
WPATH is now the lone body (other than hostile religious groups) that sees those of us on this forum as mentally ill; and there reportedly is a faction of young members who are trying to drag WPATH kicking and screaming into the 21st century. APA’s reversal of its longstanding position on transgender identity is a definite change for the better. It is predictable that WPATH will catch up or fade away. The mainstream media already have advanced far beyond where they were when Gordene MacKenzie wrote her book, cited above. So … my beautiful sisters … put on your favorite femme attire and have a great weekend!