Gender Identity Disorder

Gender identity disorder (GID) or gender dysphonia is a controversial neuropsychological disorder

. The disorder is classified as the feeling that one was born the wrong gender. Most view the disease as a medical mystery, while others do not see it as a valid diagnosis. Neuropsychological evaluation can help diagnosis the disorder, but treatment can be harder to acquire.

One of the main controversies in the world of clinical neuropsychology is how to treat affected people. Some clinicians believe that encouraging people to undergo hormone therapy or gender re-assignment therapy is the proper course of treatment. Other clinicians think it is better use therapy to make the person suffering from GID feel more at home in their physical gender.

These questions can be particularly difficult in the realm of pediatric neuropsychology. When a child begins developing and his gender becomes more pronounced, he can start facing real problems. The sooner he begins hormone treatment, the better he can control how his puberty manifests itself, but putting that kind of medical decision into a child's hands is asking a lot. At the same time, many parents think that GID is better cured by accepting ones gender and social norms as opposed to physically changing it. These clinicians point to research showing that in some cases, the brain of a GID suffer is more in line with that of the gender that he feels that he is.

Some of the resistance is from people who behave outside of the gender norms. For example, people that cross dress are not mentally ill; they simply like doing something that challenges most people's gender norms. These people do not want to be classified as mentally ill. At the same time, most feel comfortable in their physical genders and simply enjoying acting in a way that some people deem to be abnormal for their genders. It was not too long ago that certain activities that go against gender norms (homosexuality, transexuality) where classified as mental illnesses.

Others say that GID is not a disorder because gender is a societal construction. Although it is true that many people chose to live in a way that doesn't conform to one gender or another, that does not mean that they are unhappy with their physical genders, which is a characteristic of a GID sufferer and the main difference between someone who exhibits transgender behaviors and someone with GID.

People who suffer from GID are at risk for other mental disorders as well, such as depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, and suicide. This is due mainly to the fact that they are discriminated against and ridiculed, not as a direct medical consequence of GID.

by: Mark Etinger

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