What's Up, Doc?

Would removing transgender from the list of mental disorders do more harm than good?

By Sue Rochman

From The Advocate November 20, 2007

The last word kelley winters would ever use to describe herself is disordered. But that’s exactly how the medical profession describes her. Forget for a moment that Winters is a well-spoken Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Idaho who went on to have an impressive 29-year career at Hewlett-Packard before retiring this June. Winters, who was born male, is transgender. And to receive the medical care she needed to transition, she had to be officially diagnosed with gender identity disorder -- the psychiatric term used to describe people who feel their gender identity doesn’t match their birth gender.

Winters agreed to the GID diagnosis so that she could live her life as a woman, but she refused to accept it. Instead, she founded GID Reform Advocates, an organization committed to changing how psychiatrists view and classify transgender men and women. Her ultimate goal? To remove GID from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the physician’s bible for diagnosing mental health problems.

“The current diagnosis of GID,” says Winters, “carries the same burden of social stigma that homosexuality did for gays and lesbians before 1973.” When the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove the diagnosis of homosexuality from the DSM on December 15, 1973, it was a watershed for the gay rights movement. “With homosexuality no longer classified as a mental illness,” says psychiatrist Jack Drescher, past chair of the APA’s Committee on GLB Issues, “it removed the rationalization for discrimination, and it made the question about whether gays should be accepted as full citizens a moral one.”

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