Critical and depathologising inputs on psychological assessment of gender diversity

Abstract

Psychology's emphasis on individual experience has created idealised prototypes for gender identity, promulgated through traditional tools of psychological evaluation. Transgender and gender nonconforming people have been urged to fit into binary conceptions of such evaluations, at least until the recent depathologisation approved by the World Health Organization. The present theoretical study examines how psychological discourses around gender diversity and corporeality have been transformed. To this effect, it appeals to four arguments: to the activist mobilisation against homogeneous definitions of transness, to the applicability of taxonomic systems' categories, to the resistances against psychometric tests' validity scales, and lastly, to issues concerning cross-cultural adaptation of terms, measurements and conceptions of bodily and gender identity.