The whittling of gender dysphoria in the DSM-5
A masterclass in straddling both pools
The DSM-5 is the Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This is the accepted Bible of the psychiatric world. It wasn’t that long ago when gender dysphoria was spoken to in the Manual in the same manner as many other mental-health disorders such as anorexia, body dysmorphic disorder, limb dysphoria, etc. That’s when the Manual spoke to medicine and science, before it was usurped by ideologues and turned into a vehicle for dogma and The Science. Read these words carefully…
Gender dysphoria not a mental disorder, it’s just a “misalignment”! 😵💫 Interesting, because I don’t hear the same pleas to describe an anorexic as just “misaligned”; one who wants their healthy arm excised due to dysmorphia is never affirmed and encouraged by our medical complex to go for it… until we cut off healthy breasts or a penis and call it “gender affirmation surgery”, then it’s righteous! What would be a medical horror and likely a crime is suddenly championed and encouraged countrywide because leftist ideologues said so.
Yes, this is all as empty and shallow and horrific as I just laid out above. There is only way way to make any logical sense of this analytical framework at all, and that is subscribing to that specific set of lefist dogma, The Human Rights God. For if one genuinely believes there aren’t just male and female humans determined at birth and rather our species comes in this endless array of human classifications…
… then and only then can describing body dysmorphic disorder or anorexia as a mental-health disorder while claiming gender dysphoria is NOT a mental-health disorder and rather a mere “misalignment” hold any water at all. Let me state that another way: there is an inherent requirement to accept the dogma as reality. Absent that ideological subscription, this position is completely empty, it's bare insanity.
Gender theory (leftist scripture) and the notion of gender dysphoria as a mental-health condition are mutually exclusive, they cannot coexist. For if transgender is merely a human of a static sex determined at reproduction who is suffering from the mental-health condition of gender dysphoria, then Lia Thomas has no right in that pool. The male weightlifter had no right competing against women in the Olympics. Male prisoners have no right to demand they be housed among women by simply declaring they now are one. And seeding a mental-health disorder to children in public school would be considered vile and abhorrent to all. But that’s not where things have been pushed, have they? No, we are all being forced to subscribe to radical gender theory whether we want to or not. Everything occuring on this front rests on disposing of gender dysphoria entirely and adopting gender theory across society. It is all about human classification; it’s a machine cementing dogma through institutional leverage and demanding acquiescence. I discuss this in more detail in this piece below.
But let’s return to the top…
If the ideologues so desperately want gender dysphoria to, well, not be considered gender dysphoria any longer, then why haven’t they gone beyond just continually modifying the definition in that medical Bible and simply remove it all together? Because if gender dysphoria is removed from the DSM as a mental-health disorder entirely, then gender drugs and surgery would be considered non-medical/elective and wouldn’t be covered by insurance. Aha! 💡
If we eat the cake, does that mean it’s gone?
. . .
Mmhmm. Well said, Ingrid.
This is a tension (and logical insanity) I am all too familiar with…
They can’t have it both ways, but they do. If someone calls gender dysphoria a mental health disorder, they will be excoriated. If it is not classified as such (such as a “misalignment”), any drugs/surgeries would be considered cosmetic and, therefore, not covered by insurance. There is no logical consistency.
I suppose the lobby could put pressure on insurance companies to provide coverage even less a technical disorder? Shoot, why not lobby for other plastic surgery to be covered? It’s not like we had to push back on our insurance company to cover proton radiation treatment for my husband’s cancer treatment.