Diagnostic Criteria For Gender Identity Disorders

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Male, Female or Other It’s 2017, you walk into the store with your two children, your eight year old son and your daughter, who is five. It is time to go shopping for back to school clothes. She wants to go to Justice to buy the cutest new sparkly unicorn shirt, he wants to buy some new sports jerseys everything seems to be quite normal. You are in the checkout line at Justice and your daughter is all excited because you allowed her to pick out a new bubble gum scented lip gloss. On the other side of the store, there is a mother and her son who looks to be the same age as your daughter. He’s seemingly upset because it looks like his mother is having him try on dresses and he wants no part in that. Are we forcing gender …show more content…

According to Webster's Dictionary gender dysphoria is defined as, “a distressed state arising from conflict between a person's gender identity and the sex the person has or was identified as having at birth; also : a psychological disorder marked by such distress”. To doctors gender dysphoria is considered a mental health disorder. There is multiple different types of gender related psychological issues that have been discovered. In the article The DSM Diagnostic Criteria for Gender Identity Disorder in Adolescents and Adults by Cohen-Kettenis, Peggy, it is stated, “These problems concern the confusion caused by similarities and differences of the terms transsexualism and GID… the potential risk of unnecessary physically invasive examinations to rule out intersex conditions, the necessity of the D criterion (distress and impairment), and the fact that the diagnosis still applies…”. She discusses here that professionals are not going to the correct lengths for mental health evaluations as much as people saying, “I believe I am a boy trapped in a female body” and the solution should not be to jump so quickly into changing and becoming the opposite gender, than the one that you were assigned at …show more content…

When people like to make big deals over miniscule issues they are distracted from the bigger picture. Bigger pictures meaning wars foreign and domestic weather its hunger or homelessness people are more caught up with what gender they want to be and what bathrooms to use. In a perfect world everyone would be happy in their own bodies and others and there would be no room for debate whether you were a female or a male. Laws concerning gay marriage or transgender laws would be across the country so no one would have any questions on what is allowed and what is not. People need to stop wasting their time and hard earned money on a cause that is not as big an issues as it is made out to