This is really important to me and I need a real answer, not just one that someone shoots out their butt. I am hoping that there is a psych person lurking here, please?
I knew I was female at 4, like many of us. I experienced such savagery that I quickly found out that to live I would have to hide her, and I did, so deeply that I forgot she was even there.
Skip ahead around 30 years, and my wife and I had gone to a counselor to see if there was some help for my melancholy. It wasn't actually depression I reasoned. I thought I was just naturally one of those calm, never laughing people. They exist, right?
I quickly figured out that the Kaiser Permanente counselor was as useless as tits on a bull, so we went to see one privately. I think on the second visit, she told me that I was suffering from GID. On the first visit, she had given me a book called "Co-dependent No More", so on the next visit she asked me how reading the book had gone. I told her that out of about 12 items on a check list in the book, I had 11 of them.
Toward the end of the second visit, she suddenly blurted out that she felt I had Gender Identity Dysphoria. She said, right in front of my wife of 15 years that I should be living as a woman. This was around 1980. I remembered nothing about my childhood abuse, my coming out, my trying to dress as a girl. We quickly sought out another counselor, a christian one, because we knew that this previous counselor was in league with the devil.
Can someone identify you as GID that fast? Really? I was doing my best at being a tough, gruff electrician.
The next counselor was a fruit cake. He put me in a group for Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse. And then is when I started to remember things, and in a few weeks it all came flooding in.
Well, it took another 25 years but it was stupid to fight it off. By Early 2005 I was living as a woman. Though I had been slowly working up to it since around 1990.
Is GID that obvious? Can someone identify it in you when you do not even know yourself?
Comments
yes and no
On the first day of psychology 101 the professor stands up in front of class and states "Don't try to diagnose yourself with any of the conditions, you all have traits of being bipolar, sociopathic, and any other disorder we bring up, it is a matter of degrees." So you might have been displaying traits or a certain level of femininity, but that does not make someone GID.
Can you be diagnosed with a disorder second time seen. No. And it was professionally unethical for her to bring it up in front of your wife. I know people come here to read transgender stories, but I'm guessing there aren't as many transgender people visiting as we all think. I don't know of a guy or girl alive who hasn't wondered once in their life what it would be like to be the opposite gender... it's all a matter of degrees.
Katie Leone (Katie-Leone.com)
Writing is what you do when you put pen to paper, being an author is what you do when you bring words to life
No psych at all
I am by no means a psych but i honestly think it depend on the
psych since, if the person has had alot of experience with people
who has GID it might make it easier to spot it.
One thing i know for sure is that some people are more capable at
spotting such things than others.
just one thing to remember, that even tho a psych might be good at
reading peoples feelings, they might not always get them correct
after all "blah blah everyone got flaws."
( pretty sure you know that already tho :D )
I hope my rambling was not totally useless and unreadable, been up
all night and English is just not my native language.
<-Night->
It is not that I say transition is invalid
My main question is how something like this can be diagnosed in two visits. Of course, this was before Hippa, so she could have shared with the Kaiser Counselor.
That I am a woman is not worth arguing. No one who knows me will say I have a shred of male in me.
I so desire that we can be identified at or before birth and have our paths guided to a life worth living.
You want to know if you can be read
Sadly, you are not alone wondering if you can be read when you are in hiding. Actually yes people can be read. What makes you think doctors don't know what's wrong with you until you tell them why you're sick? Do you not understand it is the same way with those who have studied the boy-girl for years or maybe are one themselves?
We can't look at the boy-girl and say, "You need SRS." It doesn't work that way. Everyone is unique and an individual. We look and make our best guess if they are one. Maybe their emotions can be satisfied with cross dressing every now and then. Are they transvestite? No, they just aren't full blown MtF or FtM trans which we rate at as a ten. Even some tens aren't emotionally capable of making the transition even if funds were available.
There are so many factors at play, I hate rule books claiming if a person shows these signs then they are...? Sadly, most of the data about TS comes from those who never were. We are still hung up on their concepts because they had MD or Ph.D tag on the name. They made the studies and rules in the beginning. We are still fighting the ignorance that came along about then.
To answer your question in simple terms. Yes we can sometimes but not always. We are dealing with unique individuals. No two snowflakes are alike and neither are people. And sometimes even if they are they won't admit it. That boy-girl concept scares them too even when they are one.
Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl
Hi Gwen.
You more or less know my take on this subject but I write as a reply to Barbie Lee because she is pretty much on the nail.
From my own life experiences I know that gender identity can be a very fluid and uncertain condition so that makes me fairly tolerant of others, ranging from those who know from the very earliest years right up to those who dither uncertainly right into their seventies.
I believe there are so many degrees of 'GID' that it can only be determined individual by individual. Each of us knows eventually where we are roughly on the GID scale but any psychiatrist or therapist has to be much more circumspect when deciding about us.
This, naturally, because any gender therapists will meet the whole range of gender variants during their careers and they are therefore very circumspect about jumping to conclusions. To the individual presenting for the consultation, the counsellor/therapist/psychiatrist tends to appear a slow, indecisive, procrastinating ditherer but they have to be honestly certain about what they appear to be seeing. Especially when living in such litigious societies as ours are today.
Furthermore as more is being learned and accepted by the medical profession they are becoming necessarily more circumspect but fortunately more compassionate and less judgemental as science surpasses and nullifies cultural prejudices.
That's all I can say at this stage Gwen.
Not in my case....
As a matter of fact, it came as a surprise to everyone who knew me, including those I went to school with. (And I thought it was the most obvious during those years). It's always bothered me a bit--have I been mistaken all these years about my pre-transition self, and in fact was convincingly masculine?
Livin' A Ragtime Life,
Rachel
on my first visit to a gender specialist
he listened to me, and then proscribed for me a testosterone blocker. He was that sure of what I was, even though I had gone there more than half expecting that he'd tell me I just needed to "man up" ...