Information about your state of mind, as well as emotional and spiritual well-being.
Standards of care
Therapy
Self-acceptance
Gender tests
Spirituality
Coming out
Family issues
My friend, producer Jamie Hebert, is working on a documentary about trans people and the Episcopal Church. They are looking for someone in our community who would be willing to appear on camera based on the following criteria. This could help improve how trans people are officially considered within Episcopal canon.
The House of Bishops for the Episcopal Church is voting this year whether or not to add “Gender Identity and Expression” to their national “Ministry Nondiscrimination Canon”.
I am a Producer of a short documentary stressing the historic importance of the passage of this resolution from a personal and spiritual standpoint. We are currently looking for persons to interview that are Transgender and meet any of these requirements:
1. They are at a point in their life where religion is not a priority, but may become one if a religious institution were to enact a resolution like the above.
2. They have been struggling with finding a comfortable religious life, and want a tolerant religious place which to call home.
3. They have any slight interest in the possibility of bringing God back into their lives.
4. They may view religion and God more favorably if this resolution were to pass.
If you feel like any of these describe you, please contact me, Jamie Hebert, at jamiehebert@yahoo.com
This is talk, not advice. See Terms of Use for details.
TransYouth Family Allies has been helping transgender and gender-variant children and their families since 2006. Between now and the end of the year, TYFA is raising money needed for the huge influx of families with young people, and they could use your help with a one-time or recurring donation.
Here’s an overview of the work TYFA does:
TYFA Executive Director Kim Pearson discusses her work, and her first-hand experience helping her adolescent transgender son:
TYFA President Shannon Garcia discussesher work, and her first-hand experience helping her transgender daughter transition socially at age six:
TYFA exists to help transgender and gender-variant children like Josie. Your help with make sure other young people like Josie are respected and celebrated:
In a significant development for the rights of transgender and gender non-conforming youth, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health has taken a clear stance against “treatment” aimed at trying to change a young person’s gender identity and expression to become more congruent with sex assigned at birth. According to Version 7, released today, such action by psychologists “is no longer considered ethical.”
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (September 25, 2011)-The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) will release a newly-revised edition of the Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People, on September 25, 2011 at the WPATH conference in Atlanta.
The SOC is considered the standard document of reference on caring for the transsexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming population. The newly-revised SOC will help health professionals better understand how they can offer the most effective care to these individuals. The SOC focuses on primary care, gynecologic and urologic care, reproductive options, voice and communication therapy, mental health services and hormonal and surgical treatment.
“The latest 2011 revisions to the SOC realize that transgender, transsexual, and gender nonconforming people have unique health care needs to promote their overall health and well-being, and that those needs extend beyond hormonal treatment and surgical intervention,” said SOC Committee Chair, Eli Coleman, PhD, Professor and Director at Program in Human Sexuality, University of Minnesota.
This is the seventh version of the Standards of Care. The original SOC were published in 1979. Previous revisions occurred in 1980, 1981, 1990, 1998 and 2001.
“The previous versions of the SOC were always perceived to be about the things that a trans person must do to satisfy clinicians, this version is much more clearly about every aspect of what clinicians ought to do in order to properly serve their clients. That is a truly radical reversal . . . one that serves both parties very well,” said Christine Burns, SOC International Advisory Committee Member.
More than any other version, 2011 revisions also recognize that gender nonconformity in and of itself is not a disorder and that many people live comfortable lives without having to seek therapy or medical interventions for gender confusion or unhappiness.
This version provides more detailed clinical guidelines to address the health care needs of children, adolescents, and adults with gender dysphoria who need assistance with psychological, hormonal, or surgical care.
In addition to clearly articulating the collaborative relationship needed between transsexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming individuals and health care providers, the new, 2011 revisions provide for new ways of thinking about how cultural relativity and culture competence.
The document includes a call to advocacy for professionals to promote public policies and legal reforms that promote tolerance and equity for gender and sexual diversity. This document recognizes that well-being is not obtained through quality health care alone but a social climate that eliminates of prejudice, discrimination, and stigma and promotes a positive and tolerant society that embraces sexual and gender diversity.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), formerly known as the (Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, HBIGDA), is a professional organization devoted to the understanding and treatment of gender identity disorders. As an international multidisciplinary professional Association the mission of WPATH is to promote evidence based care, education, research, advocacy, public policy and respect in transgender health.
This is talk, not advice. See Terms of Use for details.
The psychological literature on trans and gender-nonconforming youth has been infected by pathological science emanating from Toronto since the 1970s. Psychologists Y. Gavriel Ansara and Peter Hegarty have just published a paper examining the academic logrolling and cronyism that led to the pathological science emanating from an “invisible college” centered on the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). The main culprits are Kenneth Zucker, Susan Bradley, James Cantor, Ray Blanchard, Maxine Petersen; see my diagram from an overview of these connections. New faces in the conservative backlash against progressive conceptualizations of gender variance include include criminologist Michele Peterson-Badali and Kelley D Drummond, also both of CAMH.
Currently, Zucker and Bradley’s (1995) version of this model is the most widely used approach to these children in psychology. This approach involves behavioural modification techniques and aversive conditioning to ‘fix’ genders that do not match children and adolescents’ external gender assignments (Spiegel, 2008; Zucker & Bradley, 1995). While this model emerged decades after Rekers and Varni’s (1977) article on the ‘pre-transsexual’ child and some of their original terminology has been replaced by newer terminology, both approaches share a focus on preventing transsexual adulthoods.
After listing numerous guidelines and policies in place in the fields of psychology and other disciplines, which address the elimination of cisgenderist language and ideology in the field of psychology, they make a clear assessment of the problem and its relationship to Kenneth Zucker and CAMH. They write, “Far from fulfilling a ‘leadership role in working against discrimination towards transgender and gender variant individuals’ (APA, 2008, para 17), the continuation of mis- gendering language in psychology suggests that psychological journal publication policies are falling behind those of other professions.” The authors add:
By way of contrast, a recent article that was published in an APA journal and co- authored by the head of the invisible college identified in our sample referred to participants who self-identified as boys as ‘girls with gender identity disorder’ in both title and body (Drummond, Bradley, Peterson-Badali, & Zucker, 2008). Hegarty (2009) critiqued this
article on the grounds that these children’s ‘gender identities’ had been described as ‘disordered’ and in need of modification. In response, Zucker, Drummond, Bradley and Peterson-Badali (2009, p. 906) dismissed Hegarty’s critique due to its focus on ‘politically incorrect language’. By so doing, Zucker et al.’s (2009) rejoinder overlooked the possibil- ity that language might shape research questions, methodology, interpretations and impact (Crasnow, 2008; Danziger, 1990; Messing, Schoenberg, & Stephens, 1983). Research find- ings suggest that beliefs in ‘political correctness crusaders’ are more common among those with conservative gender ideologies (Lalonde, Doan, & Patterson, 2000). In light of Zucker et al.’s (2009) response, our finding that Archives of Sexual Behavior, a journal for which Zucker serves as editor, was among the two journals that published the largest number of psychological articles on children’s genders and expression may explain how editors in this field can fail to notice or address cisgenderist ideology in articles submitted for publication.
Reducing cisgenderist bias in psychological publications on children will require the active collaboration of researchers, editors and leading figures in APA. Yet psychologists and mental health professionals need not turn to journalistic guidelines to accomplish this task, as a minority of authors in our sample offered existing conceptual frames that would decrease cisgenderism in the literature.
Anne Tamar-Mattis, an intersex activist with Advocates for Informed Choice, has embraced the problematic concept of DSD (Disorders of Sex Development). She has just published a piece in which she seems surprised that this short-sighted choice is about to usher in a new era of repathologization of the people her organization serves. She notes:
I am very concerned about the move to classify people with intersex conditions who reject their gender assignment as a subtype of the gender dysphoria diagnosis.
For years, many of us have pointed out that Gender Identity Disorder (GID) and Disorders of Sex Development (DSD) are merely variations on a theme. Both turn traits into diseases. DSD is especially problematic because it conflates issues of function with issues of cosmesis, and it categorizes a wide range of naturally-occurring traits (even those not requiring medical intervention) as diseases to treat. DSD is a dangerous setback that erases decades of hard-earned rights and sets the stage for radical “cures,” including reparative therapy already used on trans youth, and in utero “solutions” that identify those who are “disordered” so they can be dealt with accordingly.
With respect this contributor fails to see her own part in this. Calling Intersex people disordered and using pathologizing language is at the heart of the need to further pathologize us when we reject our birth assignments.
We not only do not have a gender identity disorder we likewise do not have a condition or a disorder of sexual development. We have anatomical differences that society finds so reprehensible the only acceptable explanation is a disease model. Your language is as problematic as that proposed by the writers of the DSM who incomprehensibly thought gender identity disorder was too stigmatising yet thought nothing of calling Intersex disorder of sex development. Recall the DSD terminology was invented by physicians who then and now seek to patrol the edges of human sex expression both physical and behavioural by categorising acceptable and unacceptable bodies and rectifying them to normalcy when they are thought to break those boundaries. The medical diagnose for Intersex is as stigmatising for us as the mental “condition” of GID is for Trans.
All pathologizing of difference is stigmatising and when used to describe people who have no illness , disease or reason for medical interventions save for societies discomfort with our bodies it is insultingly so.
In Australia we are able to have our cardinal documents changed in three states, on the basis of a mistaken assignment at the time of birth, simply by producing evidence of our intersex. Every country in the world would do well to follow this example and further respect our rights by including us in anti-discrimination and human rights law.
The notion that bodies that are not clearly male or female are somehow diseased and must be made, so far as possible, to conform to one or the other of those two stereotypes has to be scotched once and for all.
Those who argue that DSD, GID, and other pathologizing conceptualizations of human diversity are necessary usually claim it assists in getting subsidized healthcare. Trading our basic human dignity in order to save money on healthcare is a devil’s bargain. Reclassifying intersex people as diseased because their initial sex assignment does not match their personal conception of themselves will be the legacy of separatists who claim that intersex and trans rights issues need to proceed on separate paths. Thanks to DSD, its short-sighted supporters are about to find themselves in the same political boat as trans people, and it’s their own doing.
