Gender Identity Disorders In Childhood And Adolescence :

The debate continues as to whether or not a diagnosis of gender identity disorder (GID) is wanted or needed today, especially for children. Indeed, some are calling for the complete removal of GID from the DSM (Isay, 1997), with the reasoning that GID is used to pathologize gender-variant children. Others suggest that GID has the potential to derail biological priming and places children at risk for distress. While arguments from both sides of the scientific and political spectrum are likely to persist for some time, this paper seeks to review the work of perhaps one of the m ore prominent researchers in this Zucker (2005) presented the principal findings of research on children and adolescents manifesting the " sex-typed behavioral patterns that co rrespond to the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder (GID). " This review summarizes three topics in the research literature: diagnosis and assessment, associated psychopathology, and developmental trajectories. Diagnosis and assessment. Zucker attends to the questions of whether GID can be diagnosed with reliability and validity. Concerning children, the clinical research literature has scarcely addressed the issue of reliability except for a single study (Zucker et al., 1984) which demonstrated that the diagnosis can be reliably made. In addition, the author cites many studies that provide strong evidence for the discriminant validity of GID. To support this contention of discriminant validity, Zucker describes factor analyses of two psychometric instruments: the 11-item Gender Identity Interview for Children, which was administered to child subjects, and the 16-item Gender Identity Questionnaire for Children, which utilized parent reports. The mean factor scores significantly differentiated subjects from controls, with the factors accounting for approximately 48% and 44%, respectively, of the variance for the two instruments. In contrast to children, there are relatively few st udies investigating adolescents, and none dealing with reliability. The auth or points out that this dearth of research likely reflects the low numbers of adolescents who are treated for GID.