RE: https://mas.to/@KatyElphinstone/116206950705946989
Overdiagnosed.
Like a lot of people, I am very intersectional. Trans, intersex, autistic, trauma survivor.
These identities often clump together. Intersex people are more likely to be trans; trans people are more likely to be autistic; and the neurodiverse, gender diverse and sex-diverse often carry a load of trauma.
These identities have another thing in common... They are all "overdiagnosed". It used to be a best practice to underdiagnose intersex conditions, or to do surgery in an attempt to hide the diagnosis. There's just way too many autistic people, that can't be right? And those trans kids definitely aren't trans. It's just autism, but when they're adults, we'll say they don't have autism either.
In World War One, the British military ordered their doctors to stop diagnosing shellshock (trauma) because there was just too much of it.
Fuck overdiagnosis. It is rooted in the idea that diagnosis must fit itself around what the system can easily accommodate, instead of being about the observable facts of people's lives.
Subscribe to #trauma entries via RSS feed