Transsexual Road Map Notes

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

“DSD” supporters on track to get intersex listed among DSM-V’s disorders

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.

http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Bioethicsforum/Post.aspx?id=5406&blogid=140&utm

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.

A commenter identified as a member of Organisation Intersex International sums up the contradiction perfectly:

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.

Disorders of Sex Development
http://www.intersexualite.org/AliceDreger.html