In pursuit of health care

The Rainbow Center's "Out to Lunch" lecture series continued yesterday afternoon with a lecture from speaker Pauline Park. In her lecture "Transgender Health: Reconceptualizing Pathology as Wellness," Park shed light on the harmful treatment of transgendered people in the field of health care and the obstacles facing transgendered individuals seeking medical treatment.

Park then moved on to discuss Gender Identity Disorder (GID), which has been officially documented in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). GID acts as a broad diagnosis for individuals who are believed to display behavior of gender variance.

The lecture raised the question: does transgender identity fall under the jurisdiction of GID and should it be considered a mental illness? According to Park, a transgendered person herself, the perception of transgender as being abnormal should not be viewed as a personal issue, but a cultural one.

"I don't think I have a gender identity disorder," she said. "I think society has a gender identity disorder."

Nevertheless, in order for transsexual and transgendered people to receive transitional treatments as hormone replacement therapy and sexual reassignment surgery, they must first be diagnosed with GID. While many individuals seeking such treatment consider the diagnosis of GID as a necessary step in the process, the implications speak to the greater issue of transgender's cultural stigmatization.

"In order to get access to hormones or surgery, you have to get yourself declared mentally ill," Park said.

While the GID label is a pressing issue for adults who identify themselves as transgender, Park revealed that the majority of people diagnosed with GID are children, particularly those who are gender-variant. Since parents have the power to enforce gender conformity in their children, they can choose to subject their children to aversion therapy - a treatment designed to repress the patient's "abnormal" behavior.

"This treatment is not only perfectly legal, but perfectly consistent with the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder," Park said.

To correct the issues of prejudice in the field of health care and culture in general, Park proposed a "Wellness Model," wherein transgender and gender-variance are viewed as naturally occurring and normal - merely a numerical minority that carries no stigma of abnormality.

While Park expressed doubt that social and legislative activism could lead to GID's removal from the next iteration of the DSM, which is soon to be released, she is hopeful for improvement in the coming decades.

"I think that 50 to 60 years from now, we're going to wonder why there was a debate at all," she said.

Park emphasized that society continues to wrongfully look at individual-level behavior when addressing transgender issues, rather than the societal level of an enforced gender binary. Increased acceptance for the transgendered population as a small, but normal minority could help to abolish the binary as an oppressive force for all people, regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation.

"Transgender," she said, "is about all of us."