Anybody familiar with Gender Identification Disorder?

Factual Questions
21

(Not a doctor or qualified mental health professional)

Right. As far as I am aware, a man or boy who loves to sew, watch chick flicks with girls and cry with them, or even crossdress (e.g. a “sissy”) does not have Gender Identification Disorder unless there is a pervasive discomfort with the person’s natural gender. The same thing applies with a woman or girl who doesn’t want to wear dresses and loves basketball, but doesn’t want to “become” or “be” a man or boy, but is ok with being a tomboy.

My father was a fan of a classic book series that has sometimes been considered “girls books”, and he turned out to be fine with his male identity. I picked up the books too and become a fan, and don’t feel threatened in my masculinity by them.

22

Most of this fall into environmental and nurture.
Is there a hormonal component? That falls into glandular and physical realm.

23

I’m puzzled. Is this disorder defined as (a) a type of self-rejection, or (b) as a rejection of societal norms?

Unless there is a physical deformity that has a negative impact on health, the only problem is the psychological impact associated with (a) hating yourself or (b) being a social misfit. Counseling for these individuals would seem to be appropriate, along with gender reassignment, should they want it.

24

Lousy dial up! I can’t watch the documentary on Youtube.

Other than that- Didn’t it used to be Gender Dysphoria Disorder? When did they change the name? What else did they change?

25

I’m a gender dysphoriac / genderqueer person / etc.

I don’t like it to be medicalized because it designates it as an undesirable situation. I suppose it is, in context (that context being a society that isn’t well equipped to accomodate us) but that’s different from seeing it as a sickness, as an intrinsically undesireable way to be.

I once craved finding others “like me”, like an entire section of town where guys who were girlish in personality and how their sexuality was constructed emotionally but who were into female people as their sexual preference were known to congregate, along with the inverse females who were like guys in a lot of ways but were pouncy-predatory towards the girlish guys, etc, would congregate. I don’t think where I landed is sufficiently a shared sexual identity for that to happen, but I’ve come to realize that I have a lot in common with other genderqueer folk, the whole spectrum of unconventional “roll your own sexual identity” people.

I’m ok with the body I was born in. A small handful of people can wrap their heads around the notion that a small minority of girls are male girls for whom being male is not a problem. And that there is more than one heterosexuality, of which male appetite/dom and female object/sub is just the most common flavor.

I know people who are polysexual rather than bisexual; they don’t perceive the world of physical sexes as coming in just two varieties so much as they perceive the world of sexual identity as coming in a wide range of identities and can relate to several of them, perhaps with different aspects of themselves.

26

On the other hand, you COULD have something.
I’ve often wondered if a lot of GID stuff is due to people growing up in households with VERY rigid defintions of gender.

27

The answer is no. GID is rooted in innate neural structure that cannot be changed. A person who suffers from it is going to suffer from it no matter how the people around them behave. All that one’s family can do with their definitions of gender is aggravate the pain of it. (Or perhaps be understanding and supportive; I don’t know why that’s too much to ask!)

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It’s absolutely not too much to ask. But I think it’s a valid question, as you certainly have people who identify as genderqueer who aren’t unhappy with their physical genitalia (like AHunter3, and like my friend), and those are the people that most confuse me when they call their condition GID or describe themselves as transgendered.

I can absolutely grok people who feel that their penis is missing, and it’s some sort of mistake that they were born female when they don’t feel female. I get that, and I know embryonic development is a complicated process where things don’t always go the way we’d expect and I absolutely agree and support them in changing their physical attributes to match their internal reality.

What I don’t get is a biological female who likes to have sex with males, bears children by choice and likes their vagina but still feels like “a man” because they don’t like to cook and sew and don’t much enjoy the company of women in groups, but have dear friends who are women. My question to them is: what is that if it’s not an overly rigid definition of gender? Why can’t women not like to cook or sew? Why can’t women like to play with chainsaws and go fishing and rebuild engines? Why can’t women prefer to provide advice rather than empathy? Why can’t women be better at math than writing? Why can’t everything (except owning a penis) that defines “the way a man is” be what a woman is? And vice versa for men who like their penises but feel like women. And it’s so hard for me to get real answers to this, because even hearing the question puts people on the defensive.

I’m not at all saying that they’re wrong; I’m saying I’m ignorant and would like to understand it better.

And, I’ll be honest, hearing my friend in particular voice that she’s transgendered bothers me when I see her teenaged daughters listening, and I wonder if they’re wondering if they’re “really” women, since they share a lot of her traits.

I have an inkling of the feeling, because I tend to be analytical and “male” in my thinking, and used to kind-of-but-not-really joke that I was the “man” in my relationships with biological men who were emotionally “women”, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that - for me - it was an overly rigid idea of how different men and women are. Now I realize that there are analytical, problem-solving women and emotional, nurturing men, and that in reality none of us are just one or the other, of either gender. So I guess what I really don’t grok are people who haven’t had that same revelation, or for whom that revelation doesn’t allow them to identify as their biological gender (again, assuming we’re talking the type who isn’t unhappy with their body - so perhaps they’re not suffering from GID at all, but something similar but unnamed.)

29

I’ll grant that it’s hard to nail down and summarize succinctly.

If you’re a person who disavows gender as a batch of silly outmoded concepts and you really don’t see any reason that anyone in this day and age should have a gender identity at all, any more than they need a “blue-eyed person” versus “brown-eyed person” identity, then yeah, it can be a bit of a reach to realize why a person who is OK with the plumbing they were born with and whose anatomical sexual preference is for the anatomically opposite sex would consider themselves different from the heterosexual norm for their anatomical sex.

At the opposite end of common perspectives, if you’re a person who believes rather strongly in gender and believes the sexes are inherently different and that gender is just a manifestation of sex, you may believe all non-heterosexual people are people with a specific chromosomal or congenital variation and that their difference makes them have traits of the opposite sex and also switches their sexual attraction to their own anatomical sex. For you, people who want sex reassignment surgery are just an extension of that. The world is composed of conventional people (straight guys and straight girls) and people who have this anomaly (inverted guys and inverted girls), for a total of four, with gay and transsexual just being expressions of the latter. And again it can be a difficult for you, coming from that vantage point, to see any reason why someone who is OK with their plumbing and who is attracted to the opposite sex to say they’re different, too.

But psychological and social existence for most people is such that they grow up exposed to portrayals of the erotic, the romantic, the relational. And some of those portrayals become incorporated into our imaginations and built into our senses of ourselves. And neither a rigid correspondence of identity with biology nor a comprehensive dismissal of the need for any roles at all can really take that into account because both ignore the social and interactional components of sexuality and identity.

30

With the rhetorical question about being understanding and supportive, “…is that too much to ask?” I was referring to child-rearing and family relationships, specifically, thinking of my own family and many painful personal memories around that.not to the participants in this thread.

I’m about as binary a woman as they get; I don’t know what to answer about people who don’t fit into the binary, because I don’t know what it feels like to be that way. But I feel strongly they deserve equal rights and acceptance for being who they are. Who they are, exactly, is for them to determine. As for your confusion about where to apply the term transgender, well hey, welcome to the club! As I noted above, the word is so poorly defined (scarcely even defined at all) that no one ever really knows what anyone else means by it. As a linguist, and a descriptivist at that, I very much dislike this state of affairs. The confusion is not actually caused by the individuals themselves, but by the lexical inanity of “transgender.” I blame the linguistic fail, not the people concerned.

Another consideration: A person’s understanding of their own self is likely to evolve over time. Especially for trans people who from their earliest memories have been surrounded by everyone telling them they’re wrong about who they are, and moreover enforcing that with coercion, violence, and pervasive fear. Fear that can leave a person in deep denial of their own inner reality.

For example: Seven years ago, I remember defining myself right here @ SDMB in the same terms as AHunter3. Which is to say, back then I was still in denial of being transsexual (even though deep down I’d known it all along, but was too fearful of the consequences to admit it to myself). But then I had to rethink it, as the severity of GID increases over time if it’s ignored, and soon it got to where I had to drop the denial, which was many years overdue. So some of the people who don’t cop to full-on transsexualism/GID right now are likely to accept it in themselves further on down the road. Others may be content to stay with a nonbinary gender status. (I had tried that route, but it turns out I hated it.)

So, exasperating as the process may be to onlookers, it can take time for these alignments to shake out. Especially in a world where fear is beaten into us (literally beaten, with fists) on account of our real selves and society’s fucked-up attitudes toward gender, and one is driven into hiding, so that it makes people’s real selves hard to discern.

31

Thank you for that thoughtful answer, AHunter3. I really do appreciate it, and I appreciate you not getting angry with me for asking. I’m really trying to understand.

ETA: And you, as well, Johanna. Thank you.

32

This column is a breath of fresh air. It so rare to see a such a reasoned discussion on this subject.

I think there is a problem in understanding the people who fall so far outside the societal ‘norms’. The lives of people in these situations will be altered by their interactions with others because they are perceived and treated differently. We may have no way to distinquish between the problems caused by the disparity between perception and reality, and the problems that result from an inequitable role in life.

There is also the difficulty in reconciling the difference between those who say they believe they are actually a person of the opposite sex, and those who say they feel like a person of the opposite sex. In the former case, a person is showing signs of mental illness because of the disparity between their perception and reality, while in the latter case the person is expressing an emotional identification. But do we really know if there is a difference? Both could represent the different results of living within a world where they do not fit into the neat categories that the vast majority of people can identify with.

33

More precisely: Seven years ago, I defined myself similar to AHunter3’s self-definition at that time. Since then, we’ve both evolved with respect to this, but in very different directions.

AHunter3, which pronoun do you wish to be called? (<–Johanna modeling good 21st-century etiquette)

34

[QUOTE=Johanna]
AHunter3, which pronoun do you wish to be called? (<–Johanna modeling good 21st-century etiquette)
[/quote]

Everyone who sees me uses male pronouns and it has never really occurred to me to wish it otherwise, but nearly everyone who doesn’t know me otherwise and first encounters me on the phone uses female pronouns and I don’t correct them or anything. One of my partners has started sometimes referring to me as a girl and I’m finding that I like that too.

I don’t seem to have any strong universal expectations or preferences about it.