by Margie Nichols, Ph.D. Check out Margie’s blog on Goodtherapy.org about the problem of suicide among LGBT teens and young adults. Gay, lesbian, bi and trans and gender non-conforming kids make more suicide attempts than other adolescents – but we can do something about this!
Category: Queer Mind: LGBTQ and Beyond
Bisexuality – Still A Hotly Debated Issue – By Straight And Gay People Alike
by Margie Nichols, Ph.D. The blog I wrote for Goodtherapy.org about bisexuality must have touched a nerve – more people have commented than any other blog I’ve written. Who knew, more than 20 years after I came out as ‘bi’ in the 1980’s, that it would still be such a hot-button topic? Read it HERE
How Same-Sex Relationships Can Inform The ‘Opting Out For Motherhood’ Discourse
by Margie Nichols, Ph.D. On August 11 2013, The New York Times published an article by Judith Warner in its Sunday Magazine, entitled “The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In,” a revisiting of the women interviewed in Lisa Belkin’s 2003 Times article “The Opt-Out Revolution.” The women, who had all given up high-powered jobs to be full-time mothers, now were working – or wanted to be. Sixty percent had returned to work, and some others were trying unsuccessfully. Not surprisingly, given that Warner’s sample is upper middle class, some had re-entered the work force with ease. But others could not find paying jobs and still others had to take whatever they could find because they had to bring in money after divorce or because husbands lost jobs. After the publication of the article, some reporters focused on the clear class bias and how working class and many middle class families cannot afford the choice to ‘opt-out.’ Some commentary focused on another problem highlighted by the account: none of the women wanted to return to the 50-70 hour work week they left, but there are still few employers who take part-time workers seriously. As a feminist, I resonate with this second critique. … Read more »
What Same Sex Couples Teach Us All
by Margie Nichols, Ph.D. Starting in the 1980’s a small handful of social science researchers began to study same sex couples, mostly to see their relationships lasted as long as straight folk and whether kids raised in gay households grew up to be ‘normal.’ Along the way, the studies have revealed a lot more about similarities and differences of heterosexual versus gay and lesbian relationships. Read the blog article I wrote for GoodTherapy.org: https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/what-same-sex-couples-can-teach-heterosexuals-about-marriage-0812135
The ‘Other’ Gay Rights Issue
By Margie Nichols, Ph.D. Marriage equality laws continue to make change, but in the therapy world, people are still fighting Sexual Orientation Change Efforts. Also called ‘conversion therapy’ ‘reparative counseling’ or simply ‘ex-gay’ therapy, SOCE is considered unethical by all major professional counseling or therapy organizations worldwide. Yet in the United States, it is still practiced, mostly by Christian Right groups. Read about the efforts to make it illegal to force this therapy on children in my first blog for Goodtherapy.org: https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/other-gay-rights-movement-0611136
The DSM And NIMH: Why Insel Got It Right And What It Means For Sexology
By Margie Nichols, Ph. D. In a move that is causing consternation among psychiatrists, Thomas Insel, Director of the National Institutes of Mental Health, announced that NIMH will be ‘re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.’ Insel called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the Bible of psychiatry, nothing more than a dictionary at best. He made it clear that it is founded on symptom-based categories, and that this method of classifying disease has become outmoded in every other area of medicine. He says NIMH will replace the DSM with what he is calling RDoC, or ‘Research Domain Criteria.’ In this new system, mental illnesses will be categorized not by symptoms but by genetic, neural, and cognitive data. Only problem – the system doesn’t exist yet – because the data doesn’t exist. In other words, Insel is saying having no category system at all for mental disorders is better than the current DSM. He did acknowledge that the DSM will still be useful for mental health treatment (although that is questionable) and will certainly be in place for insurance purposes for quite some time. But he was emphatic in stating that it would be a disaster to base scientific research on… Read more »
GSD: Not Just Another Queer Alphabet Soup
by Margie Nichols, Ph.D. A couple of weeks ago, the Pink Therapy group in the UK made news by proclaiming ‘GSD’ – Gender and Sexual Diversities – as the new umbrella term for a community that seems to add letters by the season. Seriously, I’ve seen: LGBTQQIAA- lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, allies. And lots of groups – nonmonogamous people, kinky people, those who identify as pansexual, for example, aren’t included in that mouthful of letters. At first I thought it was just the brilliant Brits. And then I did a little research and discovered that the term is already in use in some academic and educational circles here in the U.S. Pink Therapy is publicizing a growing cultural shift. I’m jumping for joy! I feel like I’ve waited a lifetime for this trend. Because this isn’t just a new alphabet soup. This is a different paradigm, a reversal of the pattern of making finer and finer distinctions of sex and gender that prevails in all areas from identity politics to scientific discourse. They say in scientific thinking there are ‘splitters’ and ‘lumpers; ’different issues at different times require both approaches. LGBT activism started in the 1970’s with organizations that just… Read more »
Is the LGBT Community ‘Recruiting the Young?’
By Margie Nichols, Ph.D. Recently I saw a special report put out by the Gallup organization on the results of polling done last year. Gallup asked 120,000 people the following questions: ‘Do you, personally, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender?’ This is the largest number of Americans who have EVER been polled about their sexual orientation in history (by comparison, the highly regarded NORC survey done by University of Chicago asked 2,000 people). The results are fascinating, and upend some of the more common stereotypes about queer people. 3.4% answered ‘yes,’ 92.2% answered ‘no,’ and 4.4% said they didn’t know, or refused to answer. It’s important to understand that the 3.4% represent people who are willing to publicly declare their queerness to a pollster, and that this number is far smaller than: The number of people who identify this way but won’t disclose this, which in turn is smaller than The number of people who live an LGBT life but don’t self-identify, which is smaller than The number of people who experience LGBT attractions and inclinations but don’t act on them Anyway, you get the idea – a very significant minority of people are at least a little bit… Read more »
The DSM 5 and LGBT Rights: Still Crazy After All These Years?
By Margie Nichols, Ph.D. Two things recently have made me think about that important piece of LGBT history, the ‘de-classification’ of homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973. The first is the news, released this week, that the fifth edition of the ‘Bible’ of psychiatric illness, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, will be published in Spring of 2013. The second was the election, and the two are related. In the November election, LGBT people made up 5% of voters – enough to make the difference. And it showed. The election results were almost unimaginable for someone like me who came out in the mid-70’s. The gay Congresspeople, the lesbian Senator, the four Marriage Equality ballot initiatives that won – I still have to pinch myself. So it made me reflect on the progress of the ‘gay agenda’ since the ’70’s. Many LGBT people don’t fully understand the critical role that the political action against the mental health community played a in advancing lesbian and gay rights. Soon after the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969, the new gay activist movement took on the task of getting homosexuality removed from the psychiatric ‘Bible,’ the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders (DSM). Before 1973,… Read more »
Why Maxwell Zachs’ Petition Is So Important
By Margie Nichols, Ph.D. Last week this was all over the Internet: a London transman named Maxwell Zachs began a petition to the World Health Organization to remove ‘transsexualism’ from its list of ‘mental disorders’ in the ICD, the international disease classification system. Zachs says: “There is nothing wrong with me. I am perfectly healthy. I just happen to be transgender.” But his move has generated a lot of controversy even among trans rights activists. If you don’t know a lot about transgender issues, you might not understand the significance of Zachs’ petition. You might not know why the issue is a big deal in the first place. If you don’t know – you need a refresher in LGB history. Before 1973, homosexuality was classified as a ‘mental disease,’ and this reinforced social views that ‘those people’ were deviant, unstable, and deficient. It legitimized all kinds of discrimination, not to mention providing the basis for unvoluntary psychiatric commitments and other ‘treatments,’ being discharged from the Armed Forces or teaching – well, you get the point. In fact, most queer historians consider the removal of this diagnosis one of the pivotal ‘gay rights’ events of the last forty to fifty years…. Read more »
