GT 2008-06-23 (trigger warning), in which a grand jury declares that the Stark Count Ohio Sheriff’s Office did nothing wrong when a gang of several male and female deputies held Hope Steffey down in a jail cell, forcibly removed her clothes over her screams of protest while wrenching her arms behind her back, and then left her completely naked in a freezing jail cell in public view for six hours. (Cf. also GT 2008-02-05: the original story (trigger warning) and follow-ups on the case, including five more women who came forward with complaints about the use of retaliatory, humiliating, unnecessary strip-searches in the Stark County jail.) Steffey is pursuing a lawsuit in federal court.

GT 2008-06-26: State ownership of the means of reproduction (#2) in which I comment on the AMA’s recently adopted resolution calling for “model legislation” to prohibit women from choosing a midwife-assisted home birth.

GT 2008-06-11: Beating up your teenage daughter isn’t just a good idea. It’s the law. In which parents of several teenaged defendants sue for a restraining order against Justice of the Peace Gustavo “Gus” Garza, of Los Fresnos, Texas, and if possible his removal from the bench. After a 14 year old young woman was hauled into his court over skipping school, he ordered her stepfather to spank her with a heavy wooden paddle, in front of strangers in open court. Garza claims he didn’t “order” a spanking per se, and calls this a “punishment option,” because the threatened “alternative” was a $500 fine and a criminal record for the daughter if the stepfather refused to spank her. After the court-ordered spanking, Garza told the stepfather that he hadn’t hit her hard enough.

Several other parents have now come forward, including the parents of a 14-year-old boy with a muscular development disability who Garza ordered beaten as punishment for swearing at a bus driver, and have joined the lawsuit.

GT 2008-05-16: Women and the Invisible Fist, in which I try to offer a close reading and sympathetic reconstruction of Susan Brownmiller’s “Myrmidon theory” of stranger-rape (as presented in Against Our Will, and as against the crude but common misrepresentation of her views as some kind of conspiracy theory rather than the radical analysis of sex-class that they are), consider how the specific case illustrates important nuances that need to be incorporated into libertarian and anarchist theories of spontaneous order, and argue that considering the Myrmidon theory and the (nuanced version of the) concept of spontaneous order in light of each other helps illustrate how key parts of radical feminist and anarchist analysis can benefit from and enrich each other’s understanding of social and political power.

GT 2008-05-20: Cops are here to protect you. (#5), in which Officer Christopher Damonte, 250 pound hired thug for the city of San Francisco, keeps public order by screaming at a couple of “suspect” women, who may have been guilty of being drunk in public and perhaps also intent to commit jaywalking in the first degree, and then, when one of them — Kelly Medora, a 118 pound preschool teacher — had the temerity to ask for his name and suggest that his conduct might be out of line, proceeds to call in his posse, arrests her, and wrenches her arm behind her back, breaking one of her bones “with an audible crack.” The city’s lawyer says that “Damonte used an approved method of holding her arm, but she struggled. Then ‘in an effort to escape,’ she squatted down and ‘broke her own arm.’” The city government decided to pay out a settlement of $235,000 to Medora, while Damonte faces, at worst, “potential” administrative discipline from fellow cops — meaning that this violent, domineering control freak of a man will never face any legal consequences for this heinous assault and battery, except possibly a verbal reprimand, a forced vacation from work, or at the very worst losing his job — while a bunch of innocent San Francisco taxpayers, who had nothing to do with it, will get sent the bill for his violent rages.

GT 2008-05-14: Voyage of the S. S. St. Louis, in which I consider the ways in which anti-immigrant border laws condemn innocent people to misery, mutilation or death, in the name of segregating world population by nationality or in the name of an illusory need for control. Particularly when the victims of violence are women and when (therefore) the abuse and terror inflicted on them is categorized as a “personal” or “cultural” but not a “political” problem by the malestream opinions of a bureaucracy legally entitled to pick and choose who does and who does not count as Officially Persecuted for the purposes of the United States federal government.

GT 2008-05-10: Rapists in Uniform #3: Six women have come forward in the past four months about being subjected to unnecessary and humiliating strip searches at the hands of the Stark County, Ohio sheriff’s department. The most recent, Elizabeth was coerced into removing her clothes even though she never said she was suicidal, and left locked in her cell, naked, for eight hours. She’s now afraid to give her last name or show her face in press interviews, because she’s afraid of retaliation against herself or her family for speaking out.

Sheriff Tim Swanson says it was all done By The Book, which is apparently supposed to mean that it was O.K. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Stark County sheriff’s deputies are repeatedly using strip searches as a form of retaliation, to control and punish women they find uppity, unruly, or otherwise troublesome, under color of the law, and then, to crown all, to insult their victims by saying they did it all For Her Own Good.

GT 2008-03-10: Rapists on patrol (#2) in which David Alex Park, stalker and rapist, is acquitted on all charges, by a jury of eleven men and one woman. Not because he is anything other than a stalker and a rapist—which he as much as admitted in open court, and which was proven well enough anyway by phone records, license plate requests, and DNA evidence—but rather because he is a cop, and the woman that he harassed and sexually extorted danced at a strip club.

piny,

I didn’t mean to suggest that adolescents never consider or make a physical transition, or to attribute to Michelle the claim that there ought to be therapeutic intervention to “correct” GID in young kids because a failure to do so would lead to them ending up gay. I didn’t infer from her mention of the “outcome” statistics that that’s what she believes. If I did inadvertently suggest that, I apologize for being unclear.

The point I was trying to make about age is that, as I understand it, an issue that’s unlikely to come up at the age of 7 or 8 in a case like this one. A few years later, closer to adolescence, sure, but at that point we’re moving rapidly away from the diagnostic territory of “GID in Children” anyway, and towards “GID in Adolescents and Adults.” My understanding may be mistaken; if so I retract that claim, but I’d still make the more specific claim that it doesn’t have much to do with what this particular kid and her mother say they’re concerned about at this particular moment, or with the details of how the school is dealing with them. And I’d also fall back on the other argument against the basic problem with the way that the medical establishment holds medical aids to transition hostage to medicalized labels and “disorder” diagnoses.

The stuff about “outcome” statistics wasn’t meant to suggest that Michelle personally believed that there was something wrong with adolescents being gay. Rather that if one believes that there’s nothing wrong with being gay, nothing wrong with not being gay, nothing wrong with being trans, and nothing wrong with not being trans (which for all I know is what Michelle believes; otherwise I would have been arguing about that rather than just asserting it), then that correspondingly undermines the claim that there’s anything that ought to be called “disordered” or of “clinical interest” here, and to that extent it’s unclear why you’d need a diagnostic category for it, let alone a diagnostic category that’s used to justify psychotherapeutic intervention (at least not for children who don’t actively seek it out for themselves, rather than being shoved into it by anxious adults), let alone a diagnostic category that’s counted as a mental “disability” for legal purposes.

If I had to guess at Michelle’s motives I’d be very unlikely to guess that it had to do with personal attitudes of homophobia or transphobia, and much more likely to guess that they have to do with the tendency in our culture to elevate professionalized psychiatry and medicine as the primary or only way to understand the things that are most important to our lives, and the “mission creep” for medicalized labels that this inevitably leads to, no matter how ill-founded or inappopriate that model may be in a given area. But that’s just speculation, and I’ll happily take it all back if I’m wrong.

Rosehiptea,

As Holly mentions, the major distinction in types of treatment has to do with whether the diagnosis is made in childhood or later in life. Shrinks are generally respectful enough of their adults patients’ wishes and strongly held convictions, at least on this specific point, not to simple-mindedly force them into efforts to “correct” their transgenderism. Not so for children, where all kinds of nasty behavioral therapy are commonly employed to “cure” them.

Michelle,

I think that when the common features of “diagnostic category” are explicitly described “symptoms,” while the thing itself is explicitly labeled a “disorder” and it is classified as an Axis I Clinical Disorder, it’s a bit odd to suggest that the purpose of the diagnostic category is primarily descriptive, rather than prescriptive. When professional medical practitioners describe a set of behaviors and attitudes in terms that are directly and deliberately taken from the medical study of disease, and describes them as causes for “clinical attention,” it is pretty strongly suggested that there’s something wrong with people who have that “disorder.”

As for the professional ethics in sex-reassignment surgery, it has basically nothing to do with the use of Gender Identity Disorder as a “diagnostic category” in eight year old children, which was the context of the discussion. However, I think that if the sole raison d’etre for this diagnostic category is in order to pander to the prejudices of doctors who can only be persuaded to acknowledge their trans patients’ considered judgment when said patients can get another doctor to sign off on it in the form of an Official Diagnosis certifying that they’re “disordered,” that’s a pretty slender reed to lean on. I’d hope that maybe we can start talking about changes that are important for our lives without first having to get a medical label slapped on it.

As for the study of “outcomes” in children labeled as having GID, cf. Speck’s reply. (Incidentally, last I checked, the DSM-IV TR says that 3/4 of anatomical boys diagnosed with GID end up living as homosexual or bisexual males in their late adolescence; the corresponding figure for anatomical girls diagnosed with GID are said to be unknown.)

But, moreover, I don’t see what the point of bringing this up is in the first place. If 3/4 of GID-diagnosed kids turn out to be gay, then so what? There’s nothing wrong with being gay and there’s nothing wrong with not being gay. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to live as a girl (or boy) when you’re 8 and then deciding you want to live as a gay man (or lesbian) when you’re 16. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to live as a girl (or boy) when you’re 8 and then deciding that you want to continue living as a woman (or man) when you’re 16. There’s nothing wrong with changing the gender you want to live as every four months, if you feel like it. If only a few kids diagnosed GID end up seeking sex-reassignment surgery as adults, what of clinical interest follows from that? It’s certainly not any kind of argument for therapeutic intervention with the kids with strong, persistent cross-gender identification (either potential outcome—remaining trans or not remaining trans—is fine, so what’s the big deal?). Nor is it an argument for trying to get the government to treat 8 year old kids with strong, persistent cross-gender identification as if they had a mental “disability.”

ThickRedGlasses,

“The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.” […] People with Gender Identity Disorder are going to be significantly distressed by being in the wrong body, even if the social stigma goes away.

A significant part of my point is that the criteria having to do with “impairment in social [or] occupational … functioning” are basically bogus. They’re a way of shifting the responsibility for other people’s discrimination and bullying onto the victims of the discrimination and bullying. In reality, insofar as there’s a “disorder” here, it’s because other people have a problem, not because kids labeled as having GID have a problem.

As far as “clinically significant distress” goes, as far as I know, there’s been no positive evidence presented to the effect that the little girl in question feels that way, and I see little reason to assume that she does. Not everybody who wants to live as a member of a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth is especially concerned about the anatomical details of their body, especially not when they are still years away from puberty.

If, on the other hand, she does feel that way, then in any case that’s a separate issue from the accommodations that the school should or shouldn’t make for her. They don’t have much control over her personal feelings about her genitals. The issue at hand is how they will or won’t deal with the questions about her immediate social environment—whether or not teachers and classmates call her by her chosen name, allow her to to come to school dressed as a girl, do or don’t harass her, etc.

From a clinical standpoint, I’d question the utility of creating a gender-specific diagnostic category if the only purpose is to group together people who are (1) trans and (2) depressed or anxious or dysphoric about their bodies. There’s nothing wrong with (1) per se, and there’s already a ton of different diagnostic categories to cover (2), so why come up with a new one just to single out the fact that one subgroup of people who develop (2) are also (1)?

GT 2008-02-05: Rapists in uniform, in which an Ohio county sheriff declares that when a woman is thrown in jail on a bogus “disorderly conduct” charge, having a gang of cops, including two male officers, pin her down and strip search her over her screams of protest, and then leave her naked in a freezing-cold cell for six hours, counts as “us[ing] reasonable force to … protect prisoners in their custody.”

GT 2008-02-10: The Conservative Mind (second Sin Fronteras edition), in which we’re reminded that they’re not against immigrants; they’re just against illegal immigrants!

GT 2008-02-13: Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism, in which your humble blogger appears in print.

Holly:

Thank you for posting this. I love how the genital correctness blowhard brigade keeps falling back on the idea that anyone who doesn’t go out of their way to make life unpleasant for this kid (e.g. by refusing to call her by her chosen name, or by harassing or punishing her for wearing the “wrong” set of clothes to school) must, therefore be “bending over backwards” to suit her delicate sensibilities. Rather than, you know, just not going out of their way to be obnoxious to an eight-year-old kid in the name of heteropatriarchal social engineering.

ThickRedGlasses:

Wouldn’t this child be considered disabled under the Americans with Disabilities Act? Gender Identity Disorder is considered considered a mental disorder, so shouldn’t this girl be covered by ADA?

I think we’d be better off not going there.

So-called “Gender Identity Disorder” is a basically political, not medical diagnosis. It’s been used repeatedly as an excuse for quack psychiatrists and anxious or controlling parents to inflict all kinds of torture, mislabeled “therapy,” in the name of “curing” their trans kids, or even mildly gender-deviant kids, of their “disorder”. In fact there is absolutely nothing wrong or crazy or disordered about a kid born anatomically male who wants to live as a girl (or vice versa), and I think it would be a serious mistake to reinforce and institutionalize the notion that there is, whatever short-term advantages you might hope to gain from it.

A few decades ago, Homosexuality was considered a mental illness and included as a category in the DSM. But if that diagnosis were still on the books, I think it would be counterproductive, to say the least, for gay liberationists to try and use it to get accommodations under the ADA.

In which I discuss Veterans Against Individual Freedom and More Veterans for Vandalism and Petty Thieving.

In which I hear from the experts.

In which I note that last Thursday was A Day of Remembrance.