Clin Soc Work J DOI 10.1007/s10615-013-0447-0 CLINICAL SOCIAL WORK FORUM Gender Dysphoria: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back Arlene Istar Lev Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 Abstract The long-awaited DSM-5 has finally been of unemployment, creating false narratives about their social published, generating controversy in many areas, including lives to appease others and protect their private lives. Now the revised diagnostic category of Gender Dysphoria. This LGBTQ people have the potentiality of full lives—out, commentary contextualizes the history and reform of the proud, married, with families, serving in the military, pathologization of diverse gender identities and expres- working for the government—with strong communities and sions, within a larger perspective of examining psycho- federal laws that protect us against bias-related violence. logical viewpoints on sexual minority persons, and the Forty years ago, I was a 15-year-old Jewish working-class problems with continuing to label gender identities and adolescent, growing up in the tail end of 1960s counter-cul- expressions as pathological or disordered. ture, and deeply in love with my best girlfriend. My journals were full of endless, painful monologues about her, about Keywords Transgender Á Gender Á Diagnosis Á GID Á society, and about where I would fit into the grownup world I Gender dysphoria Á Gender identity Á LGBT Á Trans Á would soon be entering. I wasn’t exactly closeted—I called LGBTQ myself bisexual—but I was filled with angst and confusion and drowning in myriad social messages of what it meant to be a lesbian (which in my journals I spelled ‘‘lesibean’’ because even simple access to seeing words that reflected my experi- Sexualities keep marching out of the Diagnostic and ences in print was non-existent). I did not know how to talk Statistical Manual and on to the pages of social with my mother, my friends, my boyfriend, my girlfriend history. about my emerging queer identity. What could be the future Gayle Rubin 1984, p. 287. for a young dyke? Where could I find a home, a job, a lover, a Clinical Social Work has just celebrated its 40th anni- life? And if I found my way to therapy, what would the psy- versary, and this volume marks the first special issue devoted chotherapist say to me that would affirm my identity? What to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) mental education did she have, what trainings had he attended, what health and psychotherapy. The lives of LGBT people, people journal articles could she/he have read to help her or him help who are now reclaiming the word queer as a proud self- me to grow to be a healthy secure and very queer adult? descriptor to encompass the term LGBTQ (Tilsen 2013), In entering into this discourse with you, the reader, I must have changed dramatically in this same period of time. start with a moment of silence, for all that has not been said LGBTQ people were leading clandestine, marginalized within the therapy professions, within social work and family lives, ostracized by family and friends, unable to have chil- therapy—the professional communities I call home—these dren (or retain custody of them), living with a constant threat past 40 years. The LGBTQ communities have been hard at work informing politics, changing policy, opening minds, indeed transforming the world in many ways—and our clin- & A. I. Lev ( ) ical communities have followed along, taking a mostly pro- School of Social Welfare, State University New York at Albany, Albany, NY, USA gressive, supportive stance on issues as they have arisen, e-mail: [email protected] incorporating a ‘‘gay-affirmative’’ approach into our clinical 123 Clin Soc Work J practices (Levy and Koff 2001), but as a social work com- nothing to say about homosexuality now that it was no longer a munity, I wonder if we have done enough (Levy and Koff diagnosis in the DSM? Really?! 2001). Have we been at the vanguard of advocacy and pro- However, despite the silence within training institutions, gressive change, or have we merely followed the evolving there have been many positive changes for LGB people trends (Hegarty 2009)? I hope that this inaugural issue heralds socially and politically. In the past few decades lesbian and a change not just in direction, but in conceptualization, so that gay people have secured many civil rights. It is worth LGBTQ issues become not a ‘‘special issue,’’ but are incor- pondering whether these social changes would have hap- porated into the framework and organization of the journal. I pened if homosexuality had remained in the DSM. Do you was taught many years ago to always ask the questions ‘‘Who think we would be seeing these massive social changes, is not present at the table? Whose voice is not being heard?’’ like marriage equality? Throwing off the yoke and stigma The challenge of fully incorporating LGBTQ clinical of ‘‘pathology’’ allowed not only for the coming out of gay, knowledge into the mainstream of clinical social work is to lesbian, and bisexual people, but also allowed for legal, deconstruct heteronormative thinking, to queer the discourse. I political, and clinical transformations that could never have will try in the words that follow to move this discussion past been granted a ‘‘mentally ill’’ population. How would your ‘‘gay-affirmative’’ therapy, and to imagine a more queer psy- psychotherapy practice look different than it currently chotherapy, one that truly challenges the pathologizing of does, if homosexuality was still a mental disorder? These LGBTQ lives, and heteronormativity of non-queer ones. I want questions are an important prelude to the discussion of to look at the role that diagnoses play in the development of Gender Dysphoria in the DSM. identity, communities, and the therapeutic gaze. The context of The acronym LGBT has become a moniker, a catch-all this discussion is the change from Gender Identity Disorder to expression meant to include a group of people who may not Gender Dysphoria in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and have all that much in common. It has become a practice of Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5;American mine, whenever I receive new classroom textbooks, to look Psychiatric Association (APA) 2013),butitisbynecessitya in the index for the phrase LGBT, and then see what the wider discourse about both sexual orientation and gender content reveals. Most of the time what is revealed is gen- identity, the social and political context of the holding envi- eral information on lesbian and gay people. The B and T ronmentwecalltherapy,aswellasanemergingqueersensi- are too often silent. Although I mentioned above that I feel bility that challenges the hegemony of pathological labeling. relatively secure that lesbians and gay men are receiving The shift in diagnostic nomenclature initiates a potential shift in competent care when seeking therapy, I do not pretend to clinical conceptualization from gender nonconformity as feel that trusting about the clinical treatment received when ‘‘other,’’ ‘‘mentally ill,’’ or ‘‘disordered’’ to understanding that we toss in the unique issues bisexual people face in either gender, as a biological fact and as a social construct, can be heterosexual or same-sex partnerships (see Scherrer, this variable, diverse, and changeable, and existing without the issue for an in-depth discussion regarding bisexual indi- specterofpathology.De-centering the cisgender assumption viduals). And what about the complex issues transgender, that normal people remain in the natal sex (cis) and that dis- transsexual, and gender non-conforming people experience ordered people change (trans) is at the root of debate regarding within the confines of the consulting room? gender diagnoses in the DSM and the battle for their reform. I began to work with transgender clients and their I became a social worker 25 years ago to work with what families in the mid-1980s. I had no training in under- we then called the gay community. I fought and lost the battle standing gender identity, gender expression, gender dys- as the Chair of the ‘‘Gay Issues Committee’’of the New York phoria, or the process of transitioning one’s sex medically, State Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers legally, or psychologically. In my first sessions with a (NASW) to change the name to the ‘‘Lesbian and Gay Issues transwoman I will refer to as Krystal the Duchess, I was Committee’’; the word lesbian was still foreboden. Although initially baffled, bringing to the sessions not much more this was over a decade after homosexuality had been removed than a compassionate heart, an open-mind, and deeply from the DSM, ‘‘gay’’ issues were poorly integrated in my challenged feminist politic. Krystal arrived in therapy, social work education. The only time I heard the word trans- presenting as a mild-mannered, disheveled and middle sexual as a student (the word transgender had not yet been aged depressed man named Norman who lived at home coined) was when a teacher said, ‘‘You know that some people with his mother. Norman could have easily been diagnosed want to change sex?! Really!’’ She leaned into the class and with various personality disturbances, severe anxiety, and repeated in a loud incredulous whisper for emphasis, perhaps a mild psychotic disorder, and indeed would have ‘‘Really!’’ When I became an adjunct professor (in the same been if diagnostics were the primary clinical lens I used. Social Work program in the late 1980s) and I asked my col- Krystal then revealed herself to me, bigger than life, a drag leagues how they addressed issues of sexual orientation in the artist who traveled to New York City on the weekends to curricula, I was met with blank stares.