Transvestism
It used to be a thing.
The “Bible” of the psychiatric profession is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). DSM-I, the first version of the manual, was published in 1952. When I worked in the field of mental health for a few years in the late 1990s, the current version was the DSM-IV. Today, the authoritative edition is the DSM-V, which was first published in 2013, and revised in 2022.
In the first edition of the DSM, cross-dressing, or transvestism, was categorized as a “sexual deviation.” One’s motives for choosing to “identify” with the opposite sex were not considered in any diagnosis. If you were a man who liked to wear women’s clothing, wear makeup, and behave like a parody of a woman, you were subject to being diagnosed with a mental disorder.
In 1980, with the introduction of DSM-III, “transvestism” was removed from the official list of psychiatric disorders, and was replaced by “Transvestic Fetishism.” In order to be diagnosed with this disorder, the motivation of the cross-dresser had to be taken into consideration. Transvestism could now be considered a disorder only if a man chose to dress and behave as a woman because he was aroused by such behaviour, and if that behaviour caused him distress.
That “and” in the previous sentence is important. If the second part of the sentence were not true about this particular transvestite, there could be no disorder present. It was simply another way of choosing to live—perhaps a way that not many of us would choose, but hey, different strokes for different folks! DSM-V describes transvestism as a “paraphilia”, which “is not necessarily a mental disorder. A paraphilic disoder is diagnosed only if the paraphilia causes distress or impairment to the individual or entails personal harm, or risk of harm, to others.”
Similar language is used in DSM-V to describe “gender dysphoria.” If a man begins to believe that he is a woman, or vice versa, that delusion in itself is no longer enough to attribute any kind of pathology to that person. Gender dysphoria can only be diagnosed if the “incongruence between one’s experienced or expressed gender and one’s assigned gender” leads to “distress.” You’re not distressed? No problem.
We have become so accustomed to the widespread application of psychological and psychiatric labels, to diagnoses being readily available for any and every kind of behavioral tendency, that we may wish for a return to the halcyon days of 1952, when today’s “paraphilias” were our parents’ and grandparents’ “pathologies.” For those who understand that God’s Word is ultimately authoritative, that the real Bible is the absolute truth, and not the “Bible” of the psychiatric profession, that may seem to be a step in the right direction, at the very least.
But the ultimate issue at play here is not the politically-motivated re-classification of behaviours that were formerly classified as pathologies, or sicknesses. The evolution of the DSM over the course of a mere seventy years shows that the entire worldview of modern psychiatry is built on shifting sand. There is no stability to it. It has no foundation in reality.
What was an illness yesterday, cannot be spoken of as such today, let alone treated as an illness. In fact, attempting to do so may even be criminalized (see Bill C-4, 2021, which declares that any Canadian who participates in or promotes “conversion therapy” is “guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than five years), and crimes of the tongue such as “misgendering” someone may come to be classified as “hate speech” (see Bill C-16, 2017).
So what does the Bible say? There is one verse that speaks directly to this issue:
“A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD your God” (Deut. 22:5).
Much could be said about this text and its broader application (see the last section of the quote below for an example), and this may be one of the verses that Liberal Member of Parliament Marc Miller considers to be “hate speech,” and thus not to be cited publicly. But here’s what John Calvin had to say, back in pre-enlightened times:
“This decree also commends modesty in general, and in it God anticipates the danger, lest women should harden themselves into forgetfulness of modesty, or men should degenerate into effeminacy unworthy of their nature. Garments are not in themselves of so much importance; but as it is disgraceful for men to become effeminate, and also for women to affect manliness in their dress and gestures, propriety and modesty are prescribed, not only for decency’s sake, but lest one kind of liberty should at length lead to something worse. The words of the heathen poet are very true: What shame can she, who wears a helmet, show, Her sex deserting?”
The Bible speaks not of “illness,” but of “abomination.” And “abomination” is indeed a very strong word.
If you’re Canadian, you probably know what brought this subject to my mind—the school shooting that happened in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., earlier this week. In particular, it was an article that I read online that identified the victims according to their sex (a “female educator,” “three female students,” “two male students,” etc.) and referred to the killer as “she.”
Obviously this was a horrible event, there are many more issues at play than this one. But the number of similar events that have occurred in the recent past reveals something of a pattern, which must not, apparently, be acknowledged or even referred to in polite company. Meanwhile, the media continues to go along with the pretense, and winds up tying itself in knots, contradicting itself, and speaking nonsense. We find ourselves in Wonderland, populated by Humpty-Dumpties, all saying, scornfully, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.”
As long as the truth cannot be spoken, and reality stared in the face, we cannot expect anything to change.