Identity Issue
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How could it happen that today, at the beginning of the 21st Century, in a country that pretends to be (actually claims that it has always been) European, we have attempts within the institutionalized psychiatry, to “treat” homosexuality with hormonal therapy? How can a person, certified as competent by the official system, believe that homosexuality is a biological condition, an illness, that can be treated as physical aberation? I say “believe” on purpose, having in mind that a scientist’s or physician’s understanding and opinin is greatly based on a given ideology (worldview, phylosophy) embedded in the allegedly neutral scientific thought.
This conclusion is not some sort of my personal “revolutionary” insight, but a position that is axiomatic of the mainstream contemporary social thought in the last several decades of the past century. The emblematic figure of this scientific coup that destroyed the myth of the objective scientific thought, was Michel Faucault, through his anthropological-phylosophic analyses of “clinical ideologies”. Faucault, but also other prominent thinkers of the post-modern era, demonstrated that the ideological horizon of a given era manage to find invisible paths to infiltrate the allegedly objective science. Therefore, today iven the so-called exact sciences (quantum physics, molecular chemistry, genetics) take much care about the influence that perception and even “behaviour” of the research object can have on the topic. The fact that science is greatly influenced by ideology is illustrated by the fact that, in 1973, homosexuality was deleted, by decree (official document with legal power) of the American Association of Psychiatrists, from the official list of conditions and diseases. Similar decrees were issued by a number of similar associations, globally relevant in their field. Ergo, we need “decrees” to transform and develop healthcare institutions. When I say transformation and development, what kind of transformation and development do I have in mind? I have in mind primarily their transformation and development in terms of their democratization. The clinical practice and the clinic as an environment are (or should be, to be precise) submitted to process of democratization themselves. What would that democratization process include, which activities and values should it introduce? One pillar of democracy, at least in its contemporary sense, is the respect for different identities. The term gender covers all aspects of living of a human being in the sense of social meetings attributed to its sex, both in terms of normalcy and aberations from that normalcy. The gender is a concept that refers to the existential dimension (of meaning) of being within one’s sex. For that reason, gender is identity and homosexual positioning within one’s own gender is an identity category. Therefore, in order to democratize our clinic, but also the other institutions, we need a “decree” to adopt the position that homosexuality is a matter of gender and sexual identity, and not a biological or psychilogical anomaly. By this I mean the need from a legal guarantee that homosexuality will be seen as a matter of choice and as identity category. Such a guarantee should be accompanied by a guarantee that this identity difference will be incorporated (just like the other gender, cultural and other identities) into the policies of the institutions of the system. On the other hand, in order to pretend to such legal guarantees, it would be necessary to promote the concept of gender as identity category, opposed to the sex as a biological term. This last point should provide for new, more sensible policies in the clinics that would perceive women as identity category and not as biological-reproductive function, while the homosexuals will be seen as gender-sexual identity, and not as hormonal abberation. Katerina Kolozova is Director of the Gender Studies Centre with the Euro-Balkan Institute. |
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