im confused how alt text works or if i did it correctly so i am also going to paste it in the body
“you’re a man” \ ad hominem
“you were born a boy” \ sunk cost fallacy
“you’re amab” \ false dichotomy
“you have xy chromosomes” \ false equivalence
“trans people are mentally ill” \ non sequitur
“changing your sex isn’t possible” \ skill issue
DSM5 has to be taken with scepticism rather than as gospel because it’s got some very problematic stuff in there. I’ll try and get examples later from my friend who knows more
Absolutely not gospel, but it is an authoritative source in terms of clinical definition.
What problematic elements come to mind?
It is a solid diagnostic manual, however fundamentally flawed and really should be replaced with a more modern structure, with modern schools of thought.
I’ve been told that the text revision (2022) may have solved some terminology issues, but it has consistently, even now pathologised queer lifestyles and DSM has referred to them as mental disorders (such as being transgender, mentioned above, and the act of crossdressing), and has some extremely outdated views like those in the section on paraphilias. It also has origins in the American slave economy, with its precursors being created to categorise Black escapees with mental disorders and convince the public that incarceration is for their benefit.
Gender Dysphoria is distinct from transgenderism itself, which made explicit by the manual. Other diagnoses follow suite. Almost all of them have criteria about causing distress or harm or impacting one’s ability to function. There are a lot of gaps: my favorite example is that financial resources can be a deciding factor as a consequence, if clinicians were to be pedantic; many disorders only manifest as impacting function and quality of life when material conditions make it so (a 9-to-5 and trustfund kids may have the exact same underlying problems but one may be clinically significant and diagnosable while the other isn’t just because their life has less stressors or more opportunities for coping etc). That harm, in whatever fashion, is what makes it a pathology.
Cross-dressing (and a bunch of paraphilias) aren’t inherently diagnosable by mere fact of the colloquial understanding; its usually down to pathological effect on the patients life, and its the clinician’s job to sus out whether the behavior is a disorder or maybe they’re just a drag queen or trans or nonbinary or nonconforming etc etc. Any clinician who thinks cross-dressing is categorically pathological isn’t much of a clinician. While terminology and this sort of guidance should be improved and made more evident in the text itself, most of the people who would act in the way you’re eluding to aren’t proper clinicians; that’s mostly just religious conservatives in America… Like those fake abortion clinics that just waste people’s time and try to preach at them, or the Jehovah Witness camps that beat the gay out of kids; just abuse co-opting the aesthetic and terminology of the domain and it’s professions.