ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the term cisgenderism to describe the individual, social, and institutional attitudes, policies, and practices that assume people with non-assigned gender identities are inferior, 'unnatural' or disordered and which construct people with non-assigned gender identities as 'the effect to be explained'. As a result many people with gender identities outside the binary have difficulty finding appropriate psychotherapy, even from binary-gendered therapists of trans experience or therapists with extensive trans experience. The utilization of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) to confer eligibility for gender variant people who need medical treatments serves as a confirmation that transsexual and transgender people are suffering from disorder and dysfunction. An additional suggestion is to remove GID from the psychiatric nosology and use the already extant diagnosis of Transsexualism described in the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Edition (ICD-10), an Axis III medical condition for medical treatments and reimbursement.
