TUCSON, Ariz., June 14, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The New York City Commission on Human Rights now requires employers to use a person’s preferred pronouns, such as “ze/hir,” under threat of hefty fines. To call a man who believes himself to be a woman “delusional” represents “discrimination on the basis of gender identity,” according to the New York Commission, writes psychiatrist Boris Vatel in the summer issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
Vatel cites the dictionary definition of “delusion”: “a false belief or wrong judgment held with conviction despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.” Examples include an emaciated anorectic who believes herself to be fat, and a hospitalized patient who believes the FBI has inserted a computer into his head in order to manipulate his thoughts.
“Dealing with psychotic individuals means having to distinguish between a subjective reality that exists only in the mind of the patient, and the objective reality in which the rest of the world lives,” he writes. To do this requires “a philosophical, linguistic, and physical basis on which a belief can be labeled as wrong.” This is grounded in objective reality.
The discomfort or “dis-ease” that one feels about one’s own sexual anatomy that causes one to “identify” as a person of a different sex or no sex at all “is not psychiatrically normal unless we abandon the very notion that there is such a thing as normality,” Vatel writes.
“That the NYC Commission on Human Rights finds it necessary to change how society functions around such individuals ironically speaks to how much functional impairment they experience in normal everyday life as a result of their false beliefs. The only way to normalize them as the NYC Commission is trying to do is to paint reality itself as pathological or irrelevant,” he continues.
Vatel states that individuals experiencing such discomfort deserve psychiatric treatment no less than others whose false beliefs cause emotional and functional impairment.
The language mandated by New York City for use with “transgender persons” represents “a fundamental loss of honesty and consistency with which we view reality and treat our patients,” he states.
“We cannot start telling lies to others without also lying to ourselves,” he warns.
The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons is published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a national organization representing physicians in all specialties since 1943.