crashchaoscats:From Follow-up of Females with Gender Identity Disorders by Elizabeth McCauley, PhD a
crashchaoscats:From Follow-up of Females with Gender Identity Disorders by Elizabeth McCauley, PhD and Anke Ehrhardt, PhD. The above is a description of therapy for gender dysphoric female people preformed at a gender clinic during the seventies. I’m not a fan of language like “gender confusion” but a lot of what they describe sounds like things I’ve heard detransitioned women say would’ve been helpful. In particular working out if their dysphoria was related to internalized homophobia or other sexuality issues and having their whole life situation addressed, not just their gender issues.These quotes come from a follow-up study of 15 people interested in transitioning female to male who were evaluated at the above-mentioned gender clinic. The clinic saw 60 people total, 19 of whom were FtM. Four of those 19 never completed the evaluation process. The remaining fifteen were the subjects of the study. At the time of follow-up, four of the original applicants were living as lesbians. One of the lesbians had lived as a man, took testosterone for two years, got a mastectomy and later detransitioned. Nine were living as men and had medically transitioned to some extent and two were still interested in transitioning and presented as men in some aspects of their life and as women in other parts.I have all kinds of feelings about this article. It’s intense just to read about other lesbians in the past who dealt with gender dysphoria and to find out that it used to be more common for clinicians to try to work out if gender dysphoria was connected to internalized homophobia. This is not the only article I’ve read that talks about homophobia contributing to dysphoria. “Self-stigmatizing homosexuals” used to be something you looked out for if you were a therapist specializing in gender dysphoria. Finding out that clinicians have been writing about women like me since at least the seventies has been both reassuring and infuriating. Some clinicians had already come up with therapy that could’ve helped some detransitioned women if they’d had access to it. At least some of our suffering could’ve been avoided. If things had gone differently, there could already be more resources for women with gender dysphoria. Instead, we’ve just started building them in the last few years and we have to fight to get our needs taken seriously. So I’m glad to learn about my history but I’m also pissed off because now I can see more clearly that our suffering was not inevitable. -- source link
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