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Short story: I have to fill in an insurance claim form (UK), and want to add information about my tg side. Gender Identity Disorder? No. I'm quite sure what my gender identity is, thank you. So what can I call it so an insurance suit understands?
Long story: I have Fibromyalgia, and discovered by accident shortly after diagnosis that there's a waiver of premium clause in some of my insurance policies. This means I haven't been sending them money since this started four years ago, but they need a declaration every year to enable the waiver to continue.
There's all kinds of legal guff about making sure I fill out the form completely and honestly - which I do. I haven't mentioned my tg side at all so far, as I hadn't thought about emerging from the chrysalis until some time after my enforced idleness started, and it didn't seem relevant, but it occurred to me that mentioning it now (as a sort of side note) might not be a bad idea.
Problem is, what do I say? As I mentioned above, I don't think GID covers it properly. I'm not in the US, so I don't think anything on the Prescribed List of Actual Diseases or whatever it's called over there will be appropriate. The word 'Transgender' is a bit vague and probably doesn't convey what I want to say.
Do others here have any more experience of this kind of detail? When you write to officialdom, what do you say? I'm not currently undergoing or planning transition, even though that's a medium to long-term goal. I'm not entirely in the closet, and frankly I'm getting to the point where I don't care either way.
Thank you in advance for your thoughts.
Penny
I wrote a poem called "boxes"
that dealt with my struggle to fill out official forms. As for advice, perhaps if you are seeing a doctor about a transition, he or she could write a letter covering your status.
ICD-10
Perhaps you can find something in this: http://www.who.int/classifications/icd/en/
Sorry, I'm not actually kidding. The conditions listed there are generally "recognized". (I'm personally more familiar with the ICD-9, but only because I had to implement systems that provided a space for those codes.
Anne
PS Another way to look at GID is that your disorder is that the rest of the world perceives you to be different from how you really are, and the cure for GID is for the rest of the world to agree with your perception?
F64
Here's the relevant section:
A desire to live and be accepted as a member of the opposite sex, usually accompanied by a sense of discomfort with, or inappropriateness of, one's anatomic sex, and a wish to have surgery and hormonal treatment to make one's body as congruent as possible with one's preferred sex.
The wearing of clothes of the opposite sex for part of the individual's existence in order to enjoy the temporary experience of membership of the opposite sex, but without any desire for a more permanent sex change or associated surgical reassignment, and without sexual excitement accompanying the cross-dressing.
Gender identity disorder of adolescence or adulthood, nontranssexual type
Excludes: fetishistic transvestism ( F65.1 )
A disorder, usually first manifest during early childhood (and always well before puberty), characterized by a persistent and intense distress about assigned sex, together with a desire to be (or insistence that one is) of the other sex. There is a persistent preoccupation with the dress and activities of the opposite sex and repudiation of the individual's own sex. The diagnosis requires a profound disturbance of the normal gender identity; mere tomboyishness in girls or girlish behaviour in boys is not sufficient. Gender identity disorders in individuals who have reached or are entering puberty should not be classified here but in F66.-.
Excludes: egodystonic sexual orientation ( F66.1 )
sexual maturation disorder ( F66.0 )
Gender-role disorder NOS
The patient suffers from uncertainty about his or her gender identity or sexual orientation, which causes anxiety or depression. Most commonly this occurs in adolescents who are not certain whether they are homosexual, heterosexual or bisexual in orientation, or in individuals who, after a period of apparently stable sexual orientation (often within a longstanding relationship), find that their sexual orientation is changing.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who understand binary and those who don't...
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!
Yeah
That's the likely section...
Anne
Well, try
Well, try Gender Incongruence, which is what Gender Dysphoria and GID and intersexed are supposed to be lumped under in the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Diseases (shortened to DSM-V) and no longer listed or considered a Disorder.
Like Gender Dysphoria, it just means you have a mind body mismatch. The depression that accompanies it usually is social in source, in that the expectations of society and family are different from what you feel is right and proper for you, and the conflict creates stress to greater or lesser degrees. It can cause severe depression which can lead to stress generated dysfunctions in being able to work, which is why Gender Identity Disorder was defined so some people could get disability and not have to work in situations where social expectations make the depression worse. Symptoms include the gender "confusion" (which is also a cause), temporary obssesive behavior fixated on transitioning (stress related chronic medical illness due to societal and family expectations) which can be reduced by crossdressing in private in lesser severity cases, and transition and SRS in the most severe cases (GID) or one can find other places in between the two extremes (living as female without surgery, or living and defining oneself as gender queer) for example). The stress related depression can cause physical effects: high blood pressure, diabetes and other chronic diseases generated by long term stress, that are alleviated if you can remove the source of the stress. Anti-anxiety and anti-depressive drugs are not effective in the long term.
The AMA considers the complex of symptoms covered under GID or Gender Incongruence as a medical problem, not a mental one, but psychs see it as a cash cow and list it as a mental problem -- but since it can be cured by a medical procedure the mental effects are not from a mental disorder.
CaroL
CaroL
I hear you
What you write makes a lot of sense, and I'm certainly somewhere on that list, just not sure where, and I move about a bit :)
I don't think I suffer what most here would call "depression", although the quacks certainly try to get me to admit to it. I tend to go with "frustration" instead.
It has been suggested that my Fibromyalgia is at least partly caused by my gender difficulties. I'm not convinced entirely, although I would admit it probably wouldn't help, or the symptoms might be a lot less if I didn't have all this other stuff to deal with. Who knows? Part of the difficulty here is getting a quack to accept that it's entirely possible for a person to have more than one thing wrong with them at the same time.
As I'm in the UK, I'm a little wary of using any of the labels you use above which are presumably US-based. The UK medical profession doesn't do things in quite the same way as the US; I think they are more willing to accept that people have things wrong with them that don't originate within their borders.
You've given me a fair amount to think about. I think I'm going to write something minimal and then if they ask for more information, try and explain via a phone call. I don't think, in my case, that whatever I write or say is going to make very much difference to the end result - fortunately.
Penny
Unfortunately
this will have to go onto a form. Such forms are usually designed by people who have only a binary view of the world, and whose knowledge of medical conditions comes from a list.
You don't have a problem with your Gender Identity but, in order to convince an insurance company (not the brightest bulbs in the pack; I worked for one for 30 years) you probably need to provide information (a) that they can understand, and (b) that will compute.
Anything else could cause confusion and delay, probably to your financial detriment. Try to find out the answer that they want/need and provide it.
Susie