Prepare to Say Goodbye to the Transgender Moment, by Bruce Bawer

It didn’t happen overnight, but it sure felt like it. My own copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the standard American reference book in the field — which is also the standard almost everywhere else in the world — is the fourth edition (DSM-IV), published in 1994. As I noted in The American Spectator’s fall 2022 print magazine, when I wrote on the explosion of transgenderism among children, the DSM-IV included an entry on gender identity disorder, whose sufferers experience the delusion that they are, as the saying went, “a woman trapped in a man’s body” or vice versa. The book treated this delusion quite frankly as a mental disorder that is an eminently suitable subject for psychiatric treatment. The book’s subsequent edition, the DSM-5, published in 2013, reflected a major change in the profession’s view of this phenomenon, and the “text revision,” DSM-5-TR, issued in 2022, contained further changes, largely involving the introduction of, in the publishers’ own words, “updated culturally sensitive language.” ….