In 1973, the same year that the American Psychiatric Association stopped calling homosexuality a mental disorder, Dr. Stephen Levine finished his residency in psychiatry. Within a month, an unforgettable patient crossed his path.
The man was sitting in his backyard, under an oak tree. He had shoved a gun in his mouth and was threatening to pull the trigger—unless he could surgically transition to appear as a woman, Levine said in a recent podcast interview.
That was Levine’s first contact with a person suffering a disconnect between perceived gender and apparent biological sex, which was then called “transsexualism.”  It’s now called “gender dysphoria.”…