It’s not a bad piece, something like a big summary, and brief, and there is a general glaring lack of the word genderqueer. Still, some nice bits:
Many scientists, he says, see gender as a continuum and acknowledge that some people naturally fall in the middle. Gender, Bockting says, “develops between the biological and the environmental. You can’t always detect gender by physical evidence. You have to ask the person how they identify themselves; in that sense, it’s psychological.”
and
But Drescher says he is certain of one thing after a lifetime of working with gender: “There is no way that six billion people can be categorized into two groups.” Now if we could only figure out the pronoun problem.
and
Instead, Drescher says, the committee is proposing changing the name to “gender incongruence” and making the diagnosis contingent on the person feeling significant distress over their gender confusion. “We didn’t want to pathologize all expressions of gender variance just because they were not common or made someone uncomfortable,” Drescher says.
and finally:
Bockting says it’s not uncommon for people undergoing sex changes to find that surgery doesn’t resolve all their gender-identity issues. “With time,” he says, “they accept a certain amount of ambiguity … We have this idea that people take hormones and undergo surgery and become the other gender. But in reality it’s more complicated.”
except I would add: except when it isn’t.
There is also a photo gallery of people – it’s not clear how any of them identify but all the portraits were taken at the LA trans job fair – and I really have mixed feelings about the photos. I’d love to hear what you all think of them.