At the same time, I resent people that just want to slap a label on us without dealing with our emotions. If they just call us off as a crazy, then they don’t have to worry about why we feel the way we do. All the sudden, it’s not founded in reason, it’s just our mental illness talking.

If BIID is considered a mental illness in that it means we will all be hospitalized for life, then no thanks. If it means we will get treatment that is comparable to sexual reassignment surgery for people with GID, then by all means call it a mental illness. As long as the real way to solve the dysphoria is not lost, it doesn’t matter what technical label we give it.

I can also relate to the “I was a burden on my family - a burden had to be removed” mentality. I have contemplated suicide on that account many a time. It’s hard to know you are a burden on your family. But if it’s any consolation you are also changing the lives of others positively.

@Phil and Chloe - you’re right, but let’s clarify what we mean by mental illness as opposed to psychological distress. I don’t think it is necessary to have suffered from one of the severe mental illnesses to be able to work well with sufferers of those conditions, but what is helpful is an awareness and ability to reflect on one’s own vulnerablities and to have a clear insight into emotional distress. That may well be from personal experience or close association with it. It’s this compassionate empathy that makes the best ‘talking therapists’ and is a quite different skill from straight psychiatry.

Since I am neither I can, with authority, pronounce you insane.

In the end, I don’t so much care what I am labelled. What I want, is access to surgery.

I fully understand the push of many transsexuals to have GID removed from the DSM. But there are major issues with doing that. If it’s not labelled as an “illness”, then it means funding for transition and surgery wouldn’t be available!

Probably too complicated for a discussion in comments here…

Personally, I subscribe to the impact definition. That is - how does this situation/condition/impairment/whatever impact your life. If it causes a problem and has a mental component, then IMO it’s a mental “illness”. For me BIID is mental and has an severe impact on my psyche.

Of course, when discussing these things, it helps to separate the cause of the “illness” (gonna keep using the quotes here) from the treatment. Someone may become depressed by a divorce, for instance. The solution may be CBT, or SSRIs or just plain-vanilla counseling. However, in almost all cases, marriage isn’t the answer - other coping and growth mechanisms were. In this way, the cause and the solution are asymmetric.

All this aside, there are very good points being made here and I appreciate the dialog.

As it happened, just before turning to ta.org for a break, I was at work ploughing through a massive master’s thesis relating to the etiology of intersex conditions as well as transsexualism. This is actually part of my job; my name appears in the list of references more than once. I had stopped to ponder a graph showing a very large incidence of partial 21-hydroxylase deficiency in transsexuals. This would seem to be further evidence, besides that already existing from neuroanatomical studies, that GID is indeed best classified as an intersex condition, along the lines of 5alpha-reductase deficiency.

So absolutely, I don’t consider myself mentally ill just because I’m a hermaphrodite. And yes, I can attest to the fact that the gender dysphoria, which many hermaphrodites experience, completely disappears with surgery.

It was wild to read your comment, just as I was pondering the etiology of GID as part of my work.

However… I have no problem with being labeled as mentally ill on account of BIID if it helps me get where I need to be. I’m not disagreeing with you. It’s just semantics. I’m mentally ill in any case, so BIID not being a mental illness is not going to make me not mentally ill ;o)

I’m going to disagree with you here.

If, as various people have claimed (and I have no reason to doubt them) it doesn’t respond to psychopharmacology or CBT or other psych therapy in all cases (rather than just in specific cases), then it’s pretty much not a mental illness.

It might be a brain difference — the way that GID is turning out to be. But that’s not a mental illness.

I mean, this is why TS people get surgical treatment — precisely because the drugs and the psych therapies don’t work.

Someone once described it as the only curable psychiatric disease — all the others are treatable, but they don’t turf the patients out never to see them again. Depression recurrs. MD-ives are on pills for life. Sociopaths are pretty much unfixable.

GID people? One set of fairly simple surgery and their GID *goes away*.

(Well. It seems simple now from five years recollection. At the time it hurt. But you know what I mean.)

Well. Isn’t that kind of freaky? The only “mental illness” where they send you to a urology surgeon and he cures it? Mmm. Can’t help but think that’s misclassified there then.

Likewise, BIID appears to be curable if the psychs decide they can’t do anything and one had better talk to a orthopaedics surgeon…

Which again, isn’t typically the hallmark of a mental illness.

I embrace the “crazy” label. I think it’s actually helped in telling friends about BIID. They already think I’m a bit nuts, from OCD and stuff, so it’s like “Of course Chloe wants to be paralysed; she’s nuts anyway”.