Gender Dysphoria Essay

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There is an ongoing debate about the gender dysphoria diagnosis in the current edition of the Diagnostic Manual. The diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder first appeared in the DSM-III and was retained through DSM-IV-TR until it was replaced by the diagnosis of gender dysphoria in DSM-V. The shift between gender identity disorder and gender dysphoria terminology underscores the APA position that gender variance per se, much like homosexuality per se, is not itself deserving of the label of mental disorder. The APA position statement on Discrimination Against Transgender and Gender Variant Individuals written by Drescher and Haller (2012) echoes that APA resolution removing homosexuality from the Diagnostic Manual; the position statement states …show more content…

The DSM-V emphasizes that “gender dysphoria refers to the distress that may accompany the incongruence between one’s experienced… gender and one’s assigned gender. ...The current term is more descriptive… and focuses on dysphoria as the clinical problem, not the identity per se.” (American Psychiatric Association, 2013, p. 451). Thus, applying Spitzer’s model of distress plus disability, we can see that the gender dysphoria diagnosis does include a distress component that may be the target of clinical …show more content…

These stigmas have a negative effect on the persons labeled as deviant; stigmatization rises to the level of a fundamental cause of health inequalities (Hatzenbuelher, Phelan, and Link, 2013). Mental illness stigma is associated with fear of mental illness and exclusion because of the perceived threat of violence, authoritarian attitudes supposing that mental illness makes a person incapable of caring for themselves, and patronizing benevolence (Corrigan and Watson, 2002) (Corrigan and Bink,