Just a word or two about the DSM:
1. The DSM is touted way too much by LGBT supporters. The DSM was meant to be a guide for psychiatrists and other medical professionals, not the Bible or gospel truth or anything like that.
2. The DSM is published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). As such, it doesn't necessarily mean other nations like the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand will follow the DSM to the letter. It's not as if psychiatrists in these other nations genuflect to whatever the APA says is true.
For example, here's what an Australian psychiatrist has said:
Studies show 50 per cent of western populations would now be diagnosed with a mental disorder under DSM-5, says Professor Gordon Parker, the founder of Black Dog Institute and a University of New South Wales Scientia Professor of Psychiatry. "For 50 per cent of the population to now be regarded as having a psychiatric condition strikes me as straining credulity," Parker said at a recent media briefing.
3. Also, even within the US, there's considerable dissent from the most recent update to the DSM - i.e. the DSM-5. For instance, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which falls under the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has said and done the following:
[T]he NIMH did not waver from its initial ruling that it would no longer use diagnoses listed in the DSM for its' funded studies.NIMH director Thomas Insel wrote in a statement earlier in May that the NIMH felt the proposed definitions for psychiatric disorders were too broad and ignore smaller disorders that were lumped in with a larger diagnosis.
"The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever," Insel said.
The bottom line is there's debate over the DSM-5 even among secular psychiatrists and other relevant scholars and professionals.
4. What's more, I recently read someone claim: "The psychiatric and psychological professions have long since removed gender dysphoria from the DSM."
a. That's just flat out wrong. I have a copy of the DSM-5 in front of me. There's an entire section on "gender dysphoria." See Section II: Diagnostic Criteria and Codes.
b. Besides, just because the DSM doesn't classify something as a mental illness doesn't mean it's not a mental illness. Or just because something isn't in the DSM doesn't therefore mean it doesn't exist. If a mathematics textbook failed to include a mathematical truth, it doesn't mean this mathematical truth doesn't exist.
c. To say there's no such thing as gender dysphoria or to imply that gender dysphoria isn't an illness is actually something that many LGBT advocates would disagree with because that's how they'd justify having sexual reassignment surgery, hormonal treatment to turn them into the gender they feel they truly are, etc.
