It was brought to my attention that one of my recent posts left some of you scratching your heads, for which I apologise. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) has a long and very thorny history with the trans community. That’s putting it mildly.

Between the oral history and what I’ve gathered from Viviane Namaste’s work, I’ll construct a portrait for you. I am sure that it is romanticized and sensationalized but the key points ring true to this day: the trans community had to be very resourceful, self-reliant against an apathetic on the best of days, typically demoralizing medical industry and displayed its incredible resilience through the ongoing adversity.

At the onset there were determined and clever trans people, most of them women. They approached what was then known as The Clark in hopes of getting medical assistance in Canada, rather than trekking across borders. Read the full story

I went to the Rainbow Health Ontario conference last week and am still processing the wealth of information I absorbed. In particular there were representatives from WPATH giving an update on their recommendations to the APA as well as insight’s into the direction taken by the working group reviewing what is presently called Gender Identity Disorder for the upcoming DSM V (expected now in 2013.) There was discussion on the need to have one version of the condition per age group with NOS and whether or not there should be other subcategories. Welcome to the confusing world of “trans-speak”; acronyms are aplenty and only begin to give an idea of the daunting politics at play. I’m including a quick and dirty glossary of terms at the bottom of the entry. Read the full story