SDD757 said:
It’s time for psychotherapists to seriously address the unique causes of each individual’s gender dysphoria before encouraging them to pursue hormones and surgery.
Having nearly lost my marriage and the life I spent nearly 50 years building because my therapist kept ramming the notion that I was "late onset transsexual" down my throat, I wholeheartedly agree. THREE years later when the time/memory loss, flashbacks and night terrors began, I was RE-diagnosed with Multiple Personality/Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID/MPD) System resulting from childhood sexual and psychological trauma and referred for trauma recovery therapy. I have met an alarming number of others in my situation on various gender forums. You can read more in my forum intro post:
http://www.discussion.malesurvivor.org/board/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Main=69729&Number=485959#Post485959
The most recent clinical statistics available show it is more likely that a person is suffering from DID than they are transsexual. 1% to 3% of the population have Dissociative Identity Disorder according to The International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation. About the same as the number of people who are gay/bisexual.
http://www.isst-d.org/downloads/guidelines_revised2011.pdf
Only 0.6% were estimated to be transgender in the Williams Institute's landmark 2016 study.
http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/How-Many-Adults-Identify-as-Transgender-in-the-United-States.pdf
Complicating things even more, the psyche can completely block all memory and feelings of trauma from the conscious mind. In my case, it took THREE years of therapy to begin to recover my memories of my childhood sexual and psychological abuse.
Transsexuality shares many symptoms with DID and other trauma related disorders resulting from sexual abuse. Transsexuals also experience gender dypshoria, sexual confusion and the feeling of having been born in the wrong body for as long as they can remember. They were bullied and did not fit in with other children who were the same assigned at birth gender. Transsexuals often struggle with the idea they are transsexual, are survivors of childhood sexual and psychological abuse, and suffer from the very same psychological conditions DID uses to mask itself (depression, PTSD, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia). Transsexual people can even have Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Medical protocols revolve around probabilities and treatment from a perspective of doing the least harm. Why then...Despite it being more likely that a person is DID than he is transsexual...Despite the devastating impact a transsexual diagnosis will have on a person's life...Particularly for someone who does NOT believe himself to be transsexual...Is transsexualism the "go to" diagnosis for a person who experiences a need to express himself as another gender?
I wish I could chalk it up to professional error, like a doctor assuming a person has the flue like the last 37 people who walked through his door and completely misdiagnosing his brain tumor. I can't help speculating the truth to be uglier and deeper.
Despite its underlying premise of helping people, health care is BIG business. Like the ear tubes and tonsillectomies of the 60's/70's and the increase in the average breast size from 34B to 34 DD breast size over the last 20 years, is the gender change game another budding cash cow for the medical system? Is it at some level encouraging people who desperately need counseling to spend huge sums of money on surgeries that will never address the true source of their suffering by proliferating a machine that turns men into women??
The 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys who are victims of CSA is the ugliest elephant in society's living room. It does anything and everything it can to pretend we do not exist (http://victimsofcrime.org/media/reporting-on-child-sexual-abuse/child-sexual-abuse-statistics ). Does it go as far as deluding people that their suffering is because they are gender variant to avoid the truth?
Time and time again my posts get a cold shoulder reception on transgender forums because of how squarely my DID sits in the face of the LBGT agenda to validate and equate transgender people. Do medical professionals dare face the media and legal ramifications of suggesting there could possibly be ANOTHER reason a person might have for needing to express himself as another gender?
And then there is the insurance industry itself. Consider the savings of a few therapy sessions and a handful of physical mutilation surgeries of a person's choice for good measure compared to a decade of three times per week trauma recovery therapy. If I were a therapist, I know what my diagnosis would be...