pictures, props, and "Diagnosing Difference"

[gusl]

Since some of my profile pictures are really old, today I had porphyre take pictures of me. We walked around the neighborhood and took advantage of benches, tree shadows, swings and hills. We took advantage of reflectors (gold and silver) and a diffuser (white), and some run-down streets with funky colors.

To my (unjustifiedly) great surprise, she knows pvck.
... and she helped me get rid of my Vaio computer (which I bought from peamasii in 2005). So there is progress in my ToDo list.

On my way back, I wandered inside Prophouse Café, a neat little place that seems to have lots of filmmakers in its clientèle, for good reason. Apparently customers can use the kitchen and play with the crazy furniture and random toys. The guitars are the least interesting props there.

---

Then I watched "Diagnosing Difference" with Charlene. It's a documentary about trans people and medical care. I agree with the main message, and I think it also applies more broadly about mental health in general... Basically: much clinical practice follows the idea of cookie-cutter people (as a result, many a M2F have learned to behave like "Stepford wives" in order to get their hormones). People who want to express gender (or other characteristics) in non-standard ways are often treated like they're crazy; and most trans people have to deal with gatekeepers who know much less than they do. It seems like, in the universe of gender-queer-ness, one can change any subset of {name, hormones, genitals}. One of the most confusing ones was someone who used a female name and grew a beard. (I still can't guess what their sex at birth was.)

(And, tangentially, it seems like many mental clinics are guilty of human rights abuses, right here in the first-world. A minor, but vivid, part of the film for me was the story of a female-born person telling about being involuntarily committed throughout high school in the early '80s, undergoing femininity training every day; the result resembles PTSD: daily nightmares, etc.)

Comments

[jenarael.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the honest "Diagnosing Difference" review -- I've been meaning to see it!

[marymcglo.livejournal.com]

It would seem like medicine is a double-edged sword: it's hard to treat something without first pathologizing it. (Of course, I could imagine things being different if we had a different political lobbying system or a different pharmaceutical marketing system.) Did the documentary propose a different way of looking at medically providing for trans people? Is SRS not considered to be a "treatment" for the abnormal condition of being born with the wrong parts? Or is the solution just giving the patient more voice in the course of treatment?