Holland MI Right Wing Fighting for LGBT Equality

As anyone who has traveled to Holland Michigan will confirm its one conservative town. And to the casual observer of the human rights movement the fact that many of the residents are now fighting for LGBT rights seems a oxymoron.

The conservative minister pictured to the right? That's Bill Freeman. He's not espousing anti LGBT rhetoric. He's leading the fight for our rights!

However our conservative advocate allies in Holland are not unique, but they are Americans of the finest caliber. They are the embodiment of true American family values. They join the ground swell of unanticipated advocates who have stepped out of the crowd and declared, we are all equal.

NPR All Things Considered

Transgender and Health Activists to Demonstrate at the Texas Psychiatric Convention

In conjunction with the Global International Campaign to Stop Transgender Pathologization 2012 a group of health and transgender activists will be gathering at the Texas Psychiatric Convention November 12th. We will be drawing attention to transgender demands that we not be pathologized in the revised DSM-5 scheduled to be published in 2013, irregardless of the proposed softening of dichotomy.





Since the majority of participating Psychiatrists are APA members and the conventions curlicium does not include a discussion pertaining to the social responsibilities as physicians to transgender people it is felt a protest would be appropriate.

American Psychiatrists take their cues for treatment of transgender people from the DSM which also strongly influences the World Health Organization ICD which sets the Standards of Care (SOC) for the rest of the globe.

We will be bring attention progress made in Europe. In a statement September 29, 2011 the European Parliament announced it passed a resolution demanding that the World Health Organization stop treating transgender people as mentally ill.

From the Parliaments InterGroup on LGBT Rights : "In a resolution adopted yesterday, the European Parliament has called on the World Health Organization to stop considering transgender people as mentally ill. Gender dysphoria is currently classified as a ‘mental and behavioural disorder’ in the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases. (ICD F-64 Gender identity disorders)"

The text adopted yesterday “calls on the Commission and the World Health Organization to withdraw gender identity disorders from the list of mental and behavioural disorders, and ensure a non-pathologising reclassification in the negotiations on the 11th version of the International Classification of Diseases. (to be release shortly after the revised DSM) ”

Finally, we are directly speaking to all politicians. Our demands are clear:

We demand the removal of transexuality from the mental disorders’ manuals (DSM-IV-TR and ICD-10). To bring the treatments on intersex babies to an end.

We demand our right to change our name and sex in the official documents without having to go through any medical or psychological monitoring. We also think that the State should have no jurisdiction over our names, bodies and our identities.

We take here the words from the feminist movement in their fight for the right to abortion, and the right to your own body: we demand our right to freely decide whether if we want or not to modify our bodies. Our rights to be able to carry on with our decision, with no bureaucratic, political or economical impediments, nor any other type of medical coercion. We want the sanitary systems to take positions regarding the Gender Identity Disorder, for them to recognise the transphobia that this classification implies, and for them to rethink their healthcare programs regarding transexuality, making the psychiatric monitoring an unnecessary step, and the psychotherapeutic monitoring a voluntary option.

We demand also that the surgeries on intersex newborns stop.

We denounce the extreme vulnerability and the difficulties, when accessing the labor market, of the trans community. We demand granted access to the labor market and that specific politics are engaged to end marginalization and discrimination of our community. We also demand health and security conditions for sex workers and the end of the police’s besieging to these persons, as well as sexual traffic.

Vulnerability situations are stressed in cases of immigrant trans persons, who reach our country fleeing from extreme violence situations. We demand the immediate concession of political asylum in these cases, and at the same time we claim that the rights of migrant people are brought to the same level. We denounce the effects of the actual politics on foreign nationals over the most vulnerable social sectors.

While we shout that we are no victims but active beings and with the capacity of deciding over our own identities, we want to remember too all the aggressions, murders, and suicides of trans people due to transphobia. We signal the system guilty of this violence. Silence is complicity.


We finish showing the extreme rigidity with which the male/female binomial is imposed as the solely and exclusive option. Binomial that is built and therefore can be questioned. Our solely existence proves its falseness and points to a plural and diverse reality. Diversity that we dignify today.

When medicine and State define us as disordered, they are proving that our identities, our lifes, deeply disturb their system. That’s why we say that the illness is not in us but within gender binarism.

We make public that the International Network for Trans Depathologization is born to consolidate a worldwide coordination of our first goal: the removal of transexuality from the DSM-IV-TR in 2013. A first step for diversity, a first knock to transphobia.

For the diversity of our bodies and identities!

Transphobia makes us ill!

INTERNATIONAL NETWORK

FOR

TRANS

DEPATHOLOGIZATION