Transgenders and Healthcare

A few weeks ago a lady named Pauline Park came and talked with my Gender and Social Change class about the struggles that transgender people go through to not only be able to change their sex and their name to go along with it, but also how they struggle within the healthcare system. When transgenders want to get a sex reassignment surgery (SRS) or hormone replacement therapy (HRT), they first need to to be diagnosed with gender identity disorder (GID). This "disorder" was introduced in 1974 in the Diagnositic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association. And this GID can be taken even further in that to obtain the papers that claim whether someone is male or female, one has to show intent on recieving SRS. This means that the person has to be diagnosed with GID in order to claim themselves as the sex they see themselves as. And usually when one wants to get paperwork showing their legal sex designation, they usually want to legally change their name as well. This causes problems when places require an ID and the person's claimed gender does not match their picture. This can cause barriers with employment, housing, public accomidations, healthcare, and social services. So what Pauline states is that, " if the apparent ’solution’ is to go for a change of legal sex designation as well as name, and if the former change – and in some cases, effectively, the latter – requires the diagnosis of GID; then in effect, the ability to access health care as well as employment, housing, and public accommodations requires a diagnosis of GID as well."
This is interesting because this "diagnosis" of GID is something that most possibly not exist at all. It is just something that the wealthy and educated doctors at the time decided was a mental disorder that need to either be diagnosed or treated. It's kind of like the sickness we talked about in class on Monday about the slaves that got both their big toes cut off because they were diagnosed with a sickness that caused them to flee. The GID just may be a modern day version of this. What the educated wealthy doctors may see as a disorder, I dare say that all of the LGBT community and many others outside of it see as just someone who define themselves as a gender different than what they were born. It's not something that can be diagnosed and treated. Because of the GID, transexuals face many difficulties when it comes to accessing health care or getting and keeping a job or recieving housing. They face difficulties with things that the wealthy, educated, and majority do not usually have struggles with at all because they have to first be deemed menatally ill before they can recieve some of their basic rights as humans.
If you want to read the whole article, here it is:
http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2011/04/transgender-health-human-rights-harvard-4-20-11/
This can be looked at through the symbolic interactionism theory. Transgender people are percieved by society to be different, odd, ill, or needing help. The labels placed on them were not made by the transgendered themselves, but by those around them. It's the majority who have claimed these people ill and different. So what part of our sociolization has created these labels and perceptions? I believe that most of society has a hard time accepting things that don't fit into the norm and their way of showing their disapproval is through teasing, name calling, bullying, and at a more advanced level, denial of healthcare, housing, jobs, and many other basic human rights.