{"id":30418,"date":"2015-02-27T02:00:20","date_gmt":"2015-02-27T07:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30418"},"modified":"2015-02-24T21:05:33","modified_gmt":"2015-02-25T02:05:33","slug":"the-changes-in-language-describing-changing-gender","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/02\/27\/the-changes-in-language-describing-changing-gender\/","title":{"rendered":"The changes in language describing changing gender"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charlotte Allen<\/a> discusses how quickly the language has changed when talking about transsexuality over a very short time:<\/p>\n

In 2012 the board of trustees of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) approved a set of proposed revisions to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the new version is the DSM-5), designed to remove the stigma of mental illness from the transgender classification. Earlier versions of the DSM had defined transgenderism as \u201cgender identity disorder,\u201d which seemed to imply illness. The DSM-5 changed that term to \u201cgender dysphoria.\u201d The change paralleled the association\u2019s removal of homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973. It signaled that whatever problems transgenders might experience were not due to a pathological misconception that their bodies and gender identities were mismatched but to the fact that their bodies and gender identities were mismatched. Hormones, surgery, cosmetics, and different clothes might still be the \u201ccure\u201d (enabling transgenders to qualify for medical reimbursement for a variety of procedures), but the APA was making it clear, as far as it was concerned, that the problem was not inside the transgender\u2019s head.<\/p>\n

The medical evidence for a mismatch between brains and bodies is ambiguous. The two studies cited most frequently by transgender activists, published in 1995 and 2000, examined the brains of a total of seven male-to-female transgenders and found that a region of the hypothalamus, an almond-shaped area of the brain that controls the release of hormones by the pituitary gland, was female-typical in those brains. But those studies have been criticized for not controlling for the estrogen\u200b\u2014\u200bwhich affects the size of the hypothalamus\u200b\u2014\u200bthat most male-to-female transgenders take daily in order to maintain their feminine appearance.<\/p>\n

Accompanying the APA\u2019s change of classification was a change of vocabulary. Ever since the days of Christine Jorgensen (1926-1989), the World War II serviceman whose surgery in Denmark during the early 1950s brought transgenderism under the media spotlight for the first time, the procedure was known in popular parlance as a \u201csex change operation.\u201d Then in the 1990s, when the idea of one\u2019s \u201cgender\u201d as something distinct from one\u2019s biological sex began to take hold (thanks to the efforts of academic feminists and other postmodernists, who argued that gender is \u201csocially constructed\u201d), the preferred term became \u201cgender reassignment surgery.\u201d Now the preferred phrase seems to be \u201cgender confirmation surgery.\u201d The change in terminology renders more credible transpeople\u2019s claims to have always belonged to the gender to which they have transitioned.<\/p>\n

The once commonly used word \u201ctranssexual\u201d has thus become pass\u00e9 \u200b\u2014\u200b even verboten<\/em> in the most sensitive circles \u2014\u200b just during the past decade. For example, Washington Post<\/em> reporter Abby Ohlheiser issued a severe scolding to news media for using the word \u201ctranssexual\u201d in reference to a 27-year-old male-to-female victim of a grisly murder and dismemberment at the hands of her 28-year-old male lover (who subsequently committed suicide) in Brisbane, Australia, in October 2014. \u201cAlthough some individuals do identify as \u2018transsexual,\u2019 the term is often viewed as old-fashioned and not an appropriate umbrella word,\u201d Ohlheiser wrote in a column deriding the coverage of the crime as \u201ctransphobic.\u201d Ohlheiser also objected to media describing the victim, Mayang Prasetyo, as a \u201cprostitute\u201d (Prasetyo had been working as an escort before her death) and reproducing photos of Prasetyo\u2019s busty self clad in a tiny swimsuit that she had posted on the Internet. \u201cMany of the articles covering the murder are laden with provocative photographs of the victim in a bikini, as if any story about a trans person is an excuse to view and scrutinize trans bodies,\u201d Ohlheiser wrote.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charlotte Allen discusses how quickly the language has changed when talking about transsexuality over a very short time: In 2012 the board of trustees of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) approved a set of proposed revisions to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the new version is the DSM-5), designed to remove the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,13],"tags":[196,906,139,255],"class_list":["post-30418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-science","category-usa","tag-lgbt","tag-mentalhealth","tag-psychology","tag-sexuality"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7UC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30418"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30419,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30418\/revisions\/30419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}