Gender identity is envisioned as an individual’s sense of being male or female regardless of biological sex. Social factors, such as family and community norms, play a part in influencing it. At the moment, there are more than 60 comprehensive gender clinics in the United States.
They include many therapists and doctors in private practice who are seeing young patients with gender-identity issues. According to a report by the Williams Institute, a research center at U.C.L.A.’s law school, about 1.3 million adults identify as transgender. While about 300,000 U.S youth aged 13 to 17 identify as transgender.
Scott Leibowitz is a pioneer in the field of transgender health care. He and his co-authors believe that the increased visibility of trans people in entertainment and the media had played a positive and major role in reducing stigma.
It has helped many kids express themselves in ways they would have kept buried before. Besides that, the authors acknowledged that, the rise in trans identification among teenagers could partly be a result of what they called “social influence,” absorbed online or from peer to peer.
There was a study designed to determine whether the gender identities of African American male and female middle-class individuals are like those of their Anglo-American male and female counterparts. Compared to Anglo-American men and women, African-American men and women were found to be more androgynous.
There have been educational inequality towards some individuals of African-American descent. Especially those in the LGBTQ community. Dr. Bianca Wilson is the Rabbi Zacky Senior Scholar of Public Policy at the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute.
She states that “In terms of education, we see that, while it appears that LGBT and non-LGBT Black folks have similar rates of education, that’s driven a little bit more by the similarity in rates between Black men for LGBT and non-LGBT. We do see among Black women, Black LGBTQ women, a lower college education rate compared to Black non-LGBT women.”
Mental health diagnoses specific to transgender and transsexual people have been very controversial. They have received a lot of criticism because they add to the stigma in a population which is already stigmatized.
As a matter of fact, there have been insinuations that the label “mental disorder” is the main factor causing prejudice toward trans people. According to The American Psychiatric Association, the diagnosis of “gender identity disorder” got amended into one of “gender dysphoria.” Psychiatric diagnosis was thus restricted to those who, at some point in their lives, get troubled about living with a gender they encounter as incompatible with their gender identity.
Gender dysphoria is not a synonym for transsexuality, nor should it describe transgender people in general. Moreover, it is a clinical term used to describe the symptoms of excessive pain, agitation, restless, and malaise that gender-variant people seeking therapy often express.
