May 30, 2008  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO J  | COMMENTS     

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.

“[T]here is absolutely no possibility that the diagnosis of homosexuality will be put back into the DSM — anyone that tells you that it can be, could be, would  be, or will be put back in, knows not of what they speak,” Drescher said in a May 13 statement.

The APA removed homosexuality from its DSM classification as a mental disorder in 1973 following a lobbying campaign by gay activists in which veteran D.C. gay rights leader Frank Kameny played a key role.

Zucker could not be reached by press time. A statement released on his behalf by the APA on May 23 says Zucker does not advocate change therapy for transgender adults or for trans youth in all cases, and he opposes change therapy for gays under all circumstances.

“The goal of his therapy is the opposite of conversion therapy in that he considers well-adjusted transsexual, gay, lesbian, or bisexual youth to be therapy successes, not failures,” the APA statement says.

Drescher noted that Zucker was one of 10 people serving on the Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders Work Group and that “hundreds” of other experts, including scientists and academic researchers, would be contributing to the base of knowledge and information on which any changes are to be made concerning transgender issues.

“No single person will have a controlling influence over this process, which takes four years,” said Drescher, who has also been appointed to serve on the Work Group.

Despite those assurances, the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force issued a statement Wednesday questioning the APA’s decision to appoint Zucker and a second member of the work panel, Ray Blanchard, a University of Toronto psychiatry professor. Blanchard has argued that certain manifestations of transgender behavior should be classified as a “paraphelia” or “tranvestitic” fetish, terms to which transgender advocates object.

“These appointments are raising great concern within the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community,” the Task Force statement says.

“Zucker has built his reputation on the position that children can be directed away from nonconforming gender expression via therapy, while Blanchard has a long list of articles [labeling as pathological] commonplace expressions of sexuality and gender,” the statement says.

A separate statement released this week by four transgender organizations, including the National Center for Transgender Equality, stopped short of specifically criticizing Zucker and Blanchard. The statement — also signed by the Transgender Law and Policy Institute, Transgender Law Center and Transgender Youth Family Allies — expressed confidence ...