Fffff.

[voces]

Apparently a lot of the anti-psychiatry movement is epically transphobic--instead of saying being trans is a psychiatric disorder, they just claim that it doesn't exist, and is a form of body mutilation. This is just as bad as the psychiatric view, and...well, I'd say, even WORSE. BOTH mentalities reify physical sex, and consider personal identity

Comments

[sistahraven]

Grarg. For the love of all which is good, genitalia is not the be-all and end-all. I loathe that perspective. Genitalia does not dictate the mind!

[voces]

I know! It's really upsetting, because a few of the ideas that Szasz has are actually very good, but this transphobia (not to mention his hanging about with Scientologists) makes him lose a lot of his credibility with me.

~Kerry

[actourdreams]

Ugh, that's unspeakably privileged. I guess these people don't count the transfolk who were psychologically damaged, or even driven to suicide by early psychiatric attempts to "cure" them to be victims, huh?

Even as someone who thinks that a psych diagnosis is the wrong way to get transfolk help, I want to smack them with a rubber haddock.

[actourdreams]

*coughs* And by "help" I meant "hormones/surgery", since having them as treatment for gender dysphoria is pretty much the only way to get them (legally in the US). I didn't mean for that to come sounding so potentially wrong.

[voces]

It *is* incredibly, INCREDIBLY privileged. I don't think being trans requires pathologisation, but YOU ARE DISEASED MEMBERS OF $ASSIGNEDSEX THAT NEED TO STOP YOUR ANTIFEMINIST BULLSHIT is...well, WORSE than 'transgender is a pathology whose only cure is transition'. At least from the DSM-IV mindset, transition *is* the cure, not suppression.

~Kerry

[sethrenn]

I have never been too wild about most of the doctors who publically proclaim themselves to be anti-psychiatry, and this is an excellent example of why. I've certainly agreed with some of what Szasz has said about how the mental health industry is used as a tool of control to punish people whose behaviour and beliefs don't conform to social norms, but when someone starts insisting that the only humane/rational/acceptable/etc alternative is "compassionate psychotherapy," well, then they've pretty much lost me. Because it's just replacing one power system run by a privileged elite by another power system run by a privileged elite, and the extreme imbalance will cause problems no matter how good anyone's intentions are. The psychotherapist still gets to choose what the acceptable end goals are, and can be just as oblivious to how they're oppressing others. For all the talk of psychiatry punishing those who don't conform, Szasz's alternative still involves punishing people for body nonconformity, because his personal beliefs insist

[voces]

I can see why-even though they claim to be fighting one form of privilege and social control, all they're doing is instituting yet another form, which is part of what irritates me about this. It makes people like us (who have a mixture of such labels, some of which do us good, and vice versa) doubly marginalised, because even the movement that is designed to 'liberate' psych survivors seems to label the exact same people as having 'problems'. For trans people, the Szasz view of transgender identity is actually even *more* problematic than the standard psychiatric view of it. The psychiatric view claims that physical transition is the cure for people with 'Gender Identity Disorder', but the Szasz view is just that you're a fucked-up member of your birth gender who wants to mutilate your body, and should just STFU and suck it up. This is kind of tangential, but our old adherence to anti-psych ideas was one part of what delayed our coming to terms with the trans stuff