Remarks on the History of the Terms Identity and Gender Identity

ABSTRACT

Presently, there is an ongoing international debate about deleting gender identity disorders from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association and about removing transsexualism from the International Classification of Diseases, Mental and Behavioral Disorders of the World Health Organization. The effort is based on the argument that such a psychiatric diagnosis automatically contributes to discrimination of gender-variant people. Parallel to this discussion, are petitions of three factions of the German parliament to include sexual identities into Art. 3, para. 3, of the German Constitution (Grundgesetz), a paragraph that lists factors such as sex, race, origin, belief, and native language for protection against discrimination. From both philosophical and practical points of view, it is important to know whether identity is something stable and unchangeable or something subject to permanent change. This article reflects on the history of the term identity in general and especially on sexual/gender identity and concludes that an amendment of the German Constitution is not needed.

KEYWORDS:

• Antidiscrimination
• gender identity
• gender variance
• sexual identity
• transsexualism
• transgenderism

Acknowledgments

Friedemann Pfäfflin is a professor emeritus and doctor of medicine at Ulm University in Ulm, Germany, where he was the director of the Department of Forensic Psychotherapy and the codirector of the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy. He is a past president of The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, Inc. (HBIGDA) and, together with Eli Coleman, the founder of the International Journal of Transgenderism.

An earlier version of this paper was published under the title “Sexuelle Identität ins Grundgesetz?” in the German journal Recht & Psychiatrie (3/2010), 28, 123–131, Psychiatrie Verlag.