treating my homophobia

I knew about homosexuality when I was in my teenagers. Those who were homosexuals at my school were disgusting for me. They were abused by many as I can remember, and they were behaving like prostitutes. They got multiple partners, and they seemed always to be happy and showing a silly smile that made me irritable in their existence. We thought, as many Iraqi doctors still think, that the problem is in their anus, and not in their brain. They are described in the Iraqi slang language as “having worms in their anus”.

Today I have seen the first case of gender identity disorder as a psychiatrist. He was born as a male. He believed since he was 5 years old that she is a woman entrapped in a body of a man.

He is very polite. Presented with disturbed sleep. He accepted to be presented by one of my colleagues in a case conference. I thought at first that he likes to show himself. As if searching for a handsome man to have some affair with him. He came to the conference today putting a lipstick. I said to my self “he is impolite” when I first saw him.

As the conference reached the point of asking him some questions, I noticed how polite and clever he is. He told us about his suffering. He told us about his trials to change his feelings. About his feelings of guilt. About his prayers to God. He has only one partner at time being. He dreams about being a female and marrying to a man and having a baby.

He respects himself in spite of the guilt he has. He made us respecting him. It was very important for me to feel that I am not irritable next to someone who is homosexual. What helped me in that were his neutral eye contacts, respect, and politeness.

I studied about gender identity disorder.
I found that it was called before as Onanism. The term came from the name of Chevalier d'Eon de Beaumont, whom I searched for his picture in the net and found that as a child I saw a related cartoon named "Lady Oscar". The picture below is from the cartoon of Lady Oscar.

I remember that I liked the soundtrack of this cartoon like many Iraqi kids did.

It is not clear whether lady Oscar and d'Eon de Beaumont are the same person or not. But it seems that d'Eon is a real person while Lady Oscar is a hero in a novel.

In psychiatry literature, the condistion was mentioned by Esquirol in 1838. This a picture of a statue of Esquirol, a french psychiatrist, but I don't know where the statue is.


The condisiton was described in more detail by Krafft-Ebing in 1886. Below are two photos, the first is for him and his wife, and the other is a cover a one of his well known books. And in the recent time, Harry Benjamin had studies the condition and he found the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association. Here is his picture below.

I found that there is a syndrome after his name, the "Harry Benjamin Syndrome", but it is not mentioned in neigther of my 3 textbooks "Oxford (shorter); Companior to psychiatric studies; and kaplan and sadocks". It seems that it is another name for Gender Identity disorder which is also called transexualism.