Transsexuality

(also called 'gender identity disorder')

Put simply Gender Identity Disorder (or GID for short) is a mental disorder wherein one exhibits a persistent (meaning it doesn't go away) urge to exhibit traits of a different sex. These traits may be the somewhat ethereal and short lived cultural elements assigned to a given sex. Or these traits may be a simple self conceptualization and involvement with the social group of a given sex. Or these traits may be the actual physical bodily structures that arise from the developmental path of a given sex (not necessarily all of them either). Or all three. GID doesn't specify, so it covers an epic shit ton (technical word) of symptoms.

GID is often characterized by dysphoria, which causes this urge and is persistent in and of itself. This dysphoria has triggers and normally the triggers are traits of one's birth sex. It's often described as a feeling of foreignness or wrongness to one's body parts and/or social and cultural roles and expectations and/or sociological group and conceptual description as assigned at birth.

Okay, maybe not so simple. My fault for being a biologist and loving technical terms. To make it a little bit less sciencetastic: Your body's sexed traits (penis, breasts, vagina etc) and/or your grouping in society (guys, chicks or androgynes), and/or your social/cultural roles and expected expressions (how society expects you to behave) causes you to hurt a lot and makes you want to change one or more of those things.

from this post (http://genderbitch.wordpress.com/2009/09/22/hbs-fallacious-reasoning/) on the excellent http://genderbitch.wordpress.com/

Transsexual people identify, and often live, as a different binaried gender to that assigned to them at birth. They may change their legal sex, their social roles, and seek medical treatment to help align their physical sex with their identified gender. Powerful negative feelings of dysphoria and bodily dissonance generally prompt sufferers to seek help.

Research into physical features of the brains of transsexual individuals have shown certain areas to have more in common with their identified gender than with their biological sex. GID is acknowledged by the medical profession as a serious and genuine condition. Currently it is officially viewed as a psychiatric condition that responds well to treatment with hormones and surgery, though many doctors hold a similar view to trans people: that the problem is in the body, rather than in the brain: that it is physical sex that causes the dissonance, not the gender identity (the term 'gender identity disorder' may well be changed to 'gender dysphoria' in the future to reflect this.)

Copyright L Demtchenko, 2010. If reproducing elsewhere, please include credit and a link back.