Head of psychiatry panel favors ‘change’ therapy for some trans teens
LOU CHIBBARO JR Friday, May 30, 2008
Transgender activists have raised strong objections to a decision by the American Psychiatric Association to name a prominent Canadian child psychologist as head of a committee that will recommend changes in diagnosing persons with an ailment defined by the group as gender identity disorder.
In a flurry of blog postings and an online petition, trans activists and some gay rights supporters have called for the removal of University of Toronto psychiatry professor Kenneth J. Zucker as chair of the psychiatrist association’s Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders Work Group on grounds that Zucker supports therapy to discourage transgender children and adolescents from changing their biological gender.
The Work Group is charged, among other things, with making recommendations for changes in how transgender persons are classified under the APA’s internationally recognized Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is being revised for publication in 2012.
“We believe being transgender is just as innate as being gay or lesbian,” said transgender advocate and blogger Mercedes Allen of Alberta, Canada.“Our concern is that Zucker favors a form of reparative therapy for trans youth that amounts to the suppression of their true gender identity,” said Allen. In a telephone interview Tuesday, Allen said Zucker’s treatment philosophy for trans youth appears to yield to societal norms about gender conformity rather than acting in the best interest of the transgender child or adolescent.
But a prominent gay psychiatrist and former chair of the APA’s gay advisory committee, Dr. Jack Drescher, said the fears by trans activists are unfounded and that Zucker, while favoring possible therapy for some trans teens, supports gender reassignment therapy in most cases — for both youth and adults.
Drescher said he was especially concerned about claims by some trans bloggers that Zucker and at least one other member of the APA’s Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders Work Group would push for reinstating homosexuality as a diagnostic disorder under the APA’s revised diagnostic manual in 2012.
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By his own admission on the NPR expose, Zucker tries to influence the development of child patients such as the Bradley child. He tries to influence "Bradley" to grow up a gay man in preference to a heterosexual transwoman in the event that the child turns out to be androphilic.
In what way is influencing a person to increase the likelihood they will grow up gay rather than straight not "therapy to change sexual orientation."?
Therapy to change sexual orientation has been denounced as unethical by the APA which should not tolerate its members practicing it.
It is immaterial whether Zucker is or is not trying to change the child's gender identity in line with Money's theories, that is not at issue here. But this irrelevancy will be argued by Zucker to try to cloud the issue.
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