Fffff.

[voces]

Apparently a lot of the anti-psychiatry movement is epically transphobic--instead of saying being trans is a psychiatric disorder, they just claim that it doesn't exist, and is a form of body mutilation. This is just as bad as the psychiatric view, and...well, I'd say, even WORSE. BOTH mentalities reify physical sex, and consider personal identity

Comments

[voces]

I can see why-even though they claim to be fighting one form of privilege and social control, all they're doing is instituting yet another form, which is part of what irritates me about this. It makes people like us (who have a mixture of such labels, some of which do us good, and vice versa) doubly marginalised, because even the movement that is designed to 'liberate' psych survivors seems to label the exact same people as having 'problems'. For trans people, the Szasz view of transgender identity is actually even *more* problematic than the standard psychiatric view of it. The psychiatric view claims that physical transition is the cure for people with 'Gender Identity Disorder', but the Szasz view is just that you're a fucked-up member of your birth gender who wants to mutilate your body, and should just STFU and suck it up. This is kind of tangential, but our old adherence to anti-psych ideas was one part of what delayed our coming to terms with the trans stuff.

What bothers me about all these people is that, as you said, they seem to be just as anti-self-determination as the psychological and psychiatric establishment seem to be, although they do it under the guise of 'protecting' former psychiatric consumers. It's still the same 'everyone must be NT/cisgender/whatever' that society at large promotes, although they try to wrap it up in rhetoric of 'freedom' and 'choice'.

~Kerry