The American Psychiatric Association
has updated the DSM by publishing DSM-5, the first major overhaul in eighteen
years. And this time around, the psychiatric community is finally admitting
that gender identity is not a mental illness. They are removing “gender
identity disorder” from their list of illnesses: people who believe they were
born in the wrong gender will no longer be considered mentally ill.
The real fun comes when the wingnuts
realize that science has rejected their addled beliefs once again. I can’t wait
to hear Rush and Sean howl that even the medical community has been overrun by
degenerate liberals. Expect a lot of shrill arias about “confused” people like
Chastity Bono.
Far from being the bastions of a
nation with a center-right majority, the wingnuts, day by day, year by year,
are becoming lonely Islands of Crazy in a Sea of Sane. And each time the world
of the sane delivers another shock like this gender identity thing, the
wingnuts on their islands see the waters creeping higher up their shorelines,
and wonder when their little islands will disappear forever. Each year, as the
semi-literate white baby boomers begin to die off, the Islands of Crazy sink a
little deeper into the waters. In the 2012 election they saw Ohio, Virginia and
Florida sink beneath the waves.
And they know Texas is next. And
they know that even in ruby-red Mississippi, if six percent of the electorate
had changed sides Obama would have won the state. And they see their future:
fifty years from now, the only place wingnuts will feel safe, is in tiny
enclaves in Idaho, Utah, Oklahoma, Wyoming. They will cling bitterly to their
Bibles and guns, cling to their survival shelters dug deep into the caves of
the Rockies and the Great Plains, and await the apocalypse.
They are incapable of considering
the notion that all those people out there whom they hate and fear so much,
gays who live openly in our towns, women who make their own decisions, Latinos
who no longer need to cringe and hide when a pissed-off sheriff drives by, that
freaky-looking Sikh guy who runs the gas station, might not be so bad.
Taliban-like, they would rather hide in a hole in the ground than deal with all
the incomprehensible weirdness of the twenty-first century.
