Treatments of GID: What Does This Mean for Us?

Talking about GID always bends one’s mind a bit. Is it really a disorder? Is it fair to define a trans person as mentally ill before they can pursue surgery? Isn’t the fact that GID is still understood as a medical disorder partly to blame for transphobia?

Needless to say there are a lot of articles floating around about this. There are plenty of arguments to be made, but a lot of writers do a pretty shoddy job of explaining what GID is and where it came from in the process. I’ve been thinking a lot about language and what it does to us versus what we do to it, in terms of culture in general and the trans community in particular, since my last post about that mildly atrocious article. This article isn’t atrocious—it’s respectful and treats some common misconceptions—but there are two ideas presented that I’d like to hear reactions on.

One is the presentation of GID as a mysterious and “serious, often deadly” illness, most notably in the beginning paragraphs; later, GID is even compared to skin cancer. The author implies that having GID leads to suicide and essentially blames the condition of being trans, not the diagnosis, for the hardships a trans person may face (depression, unemployment, etc). Depression and suicide are not symptoms of GID so much as natural reactions to society’s treatment of trans individuals. To not make that distinction is almost akin to blaming trans individuals for these situations and implies that all transfolk have depression due to this “illness” they apparently combat.

This brings me to my second observation: the blatant acceptance of the gender binary. The article claims that a trans person’s “brain growth follows one gender track while their bodies follow another” during development. That kind of thinking discredits any kind of non-binary gender in existence and undermines anyone not interested in pursuing a traditional physical transition to what some would view its “completion”.

The article isn’t brand new, but was posted as helpful to someone new to the concept. If you’ve never heard the term before, this article DOES simplify the concept greatly. Which is helpful, but also harmful; are these the ideas we want to be associated with?