Le Varianze di Genere e la loro iscrizione all'interno del sapere medico-psichiatrico: Una breve disamina storica e critica

In the West today Gender Variance, i.e. the possibility of there being a non-correspondence between an individual’s biological sex and their subjective experience of belonging to a given sexual gender, is to some extent shaped, and somehow even produced, by a series of discourses, which are first and foremost medical/psychiatric and define and mold its very nature. Gender Dysphoria, the clinical taxonomic category which the American Psychiatric Association has recently adopted to replace the existing Gender Identity Disorder, refers to an individual’s affective/cognitive discontent with the assigned gender and the distress that may accompany the incongruence between one’s experienced or expressed gender and one’s assigned gender, which in many, but not all, cases also involves a somatic transition by cross-sex hormone treatment and genital surgery (Sex Reassignment Surgery) (APA 2013). In any case, the work of preparation and drafting of the recent edition of the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (APA 2013), has been accompanied by a lively debate on whether or not it is legal to include the condition within the ranks of Mental Disorders. The result of this debate was to keep the condition in the manual, therefore interpreting it as a manifestation of a Mental Disorder. In the present paper, we will analyze the main historical stages of the process of inclusion of this condition within psychiatric knowledge. We will, therefore, discuss the main problems that this inclusion produces, questioning the very foundations of psychiatric knowledge.