Boy or Girl?

When it's possible a man to be perceived as a woman, even superficially, it says nothing about how the man perceives himself relative to what it says about how his society perceives women in general.

When a six year old boy cries himself to sleep at night because he honestly feels that he is a girl trapped in the wrong body ("About a Girl", Rolling Stone, Nov. 7. 2013), the real tragedy isn't his "dysphoria"; it's his world's emphasis on sexualized personal identity.

Strangely enough, given how often they are wrong, psychologists seemed to have had the right idea when they changed their official definition for this problem from "transsexual personality disorder" to "transgender dysphoria", hence identifying it at last as a societal disfunction, no longer a personal one.

(J.D. 22-11-13)