There was the equivalent of a 8.0 Earthquake in the psychiatric community this past May. Although very few people outside the trans community noticed it, there was a casualty. It’s name was Gender Identity Disorder (GID). The funeral was poorly attended, and the only people mourning it are right wing ideologues and rabidly anti-LGBT organizations who feel that LGBT people need to be as stigmatized as possible by the medical and psychological communities.
Gender Identity Archive
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16 Oct 2012
Coming to terms with childlessness
I never wanted to be a mother when I was young. Seduced by the freedom I could have as a single woman, at varying levels of “being about to take care of myself” financially and psychologically, I pushed onward. When I was 19 and in college I had an abortion. The father was irresponsible and unemployed, and I wanted to graduate. I wanted to live an exciting, satisfying life and knew if I kept the child I would be doomed to poverty and single-mother-dom before I had even gotten started.
15 Oct 2012
Staying In vs. Coming Out
I have no beautiful words to share or anything to make the pressing issue of coming out an easier one. I have nothing to offer but the advice I have been given and continue to follow in protection of myself.
It is very much okay to stay in. It is very much okay to find safety in the proverbial closet. Staying in, is in itself, sometimes needed for survival. It is okay to keep your sexuality/lack thereof, gender/lack thereof, tucked away and safe within your chest.
07 Sep 2012
Envy
Trigger Warning: mention of abuse
When I was a freshman in high school, my English teacher assigned the first essay of the semester. The topic was “time I felt different”. This proved to be a surprisingly difficult topic for me to write about. Why? Then, I had no idea what it was like to fit in. I had no frame of reference.
15 Aug 2012
An Interesting Hypothesis
In the early 1950’s, a well known Canadian psychiatrist named Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron developed the concept of “psychic driving.” The idea was that mental illnesses could be cured by reprogramming new narratives into subjects. He recruited from the local community to participate in his studies. Most of his volunteer subjects suffered from relatively minor psychiatric complaints, such as neurosis or depression.
08 Aug 2012
First Therapy Session
In late June of 2010 our last child, a boy, was born. I could sense the distance between my wife and myself growing even further. Intimacy was non-existent, and she could barely stand to touch me now that I clearly had breasts. I had been blaming it on the pregnancy, but the gulf was widening, and I had no idea how much she really knew (which was in reality almost all of it). I was careless, barely even hiding it because she was so conspicuously ignoring it. At home, I was short fused and out of control, although less so since I quit the reserves.
30 Jul 2012
Today, Like So Many Others, Is A Great Day
Editor’s note: This story mentions some severe triggers. Please be careful about reading this story if you are easily triggered by the topics mentioned in our trigger warning.
Trigger warnings: Abuse, including torture and child sexual assault, forced confinement, rape, violence, bullying, and hate crimes.
Yesterday/today was/is a great day. A day to celebrate. Any day that slaps me upside my head and and asks, “WTF you bitching about?” is always a great day!
09 Jul 2012
Shifting Identities
I have roughly four major identities. I am autistic. I am mentally ill. I am asexual. I am genderqueer. The first three identities, I have known about for a while. They’re concrete. My autism won’t go away tomorrow. Neither will my mental illness. I won’t suddenly wake up with the desire to fuck people. Yet, being genderqueer is different. I might go to bed agonizing over one identity, yet it’s gone in the morning, replaced by a different identity.
22 Jun 2012
Involuntary Invisibility: How It Hurts LGBT*Q People Mentally
We clearly have this need to see ourselves in and to identify with some of the images we’re being shown daily. It satisfies two of our humanistic needs: to belong and to have self-esteem. If we do not see ourselves represented in politics and the media, we might not feel included; we might not get that sense of community we need. Furthermore, if we do not see ourselves in these images and are being given the message that these images are the “right” or the “normal” way to be, we will most likely have a lower self-esteem.
18 Jun 2012
The Table Scraps Mentality
But it’s budgets, of course. No one’s fault, per se. And you can’t argue with a budget. Universities are following the WalMart model of pump and dump cheap employment, and desperate graduates are the casualties. This is not likely change, and is only likely to get worse, as the turnover rate of recent PhDs increases seemingly exponentially.