Multiple Personality Disorder: How many passports do you need ?

by Theodore Dalrymple

The Canadian government, I see, is thinking of issuing sex-neutral identity cards, presumably on the grounds that some people have not yet chosen the sex they want to be. This, of course, is not going nearly far enough. Has the reactionary and highly oppressive Canadian government never heard of Multiple Personality Disorder, now called Dissociative Identity Disorder in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association?

According to the Manual, the disorder consists of ‘disruption of identity characteristics by two or more personality states’ that involve ‘marked discontinuity in sense of self and sense of agency, accompanied by related alterations in affect, behaviour, consciousness, memory, perception, cognition, and/or sensory-motor functioning.’ These changes can be reported by the person himself (or should I say themselves?) or by third parties.

According to the DSM-5, ‘the 12-month prevalence of dissociative identity disorder among adults in a small U.S. community study was 1.5%. The prevalence across genders in that study was 1.6% for males and 1.4 per cent for females.’ In the United States, therefore, assuming the sample to have been representative, there were more than 3 million people last year who were actually more than one person.

By comparison, again according the DSM-5 (which is used almost everywhere, including by British judges, with a credulity worthy that makes the average mediaeval pilgrim seem like a cynic), the prevalence of gender dysphoria, the necessary prelude to a voluntary sex change, is 0.005 to 0.014% for ‘natal males’ and 0.002 to 0.003% for ‘natal females.’ Taking the maximum figures, we come to the conclusion that the prevalence rate in adults of gender dysphoria is about 0.0085 per cent.

Here, then, is a clear case of discrimination against people with Dissociative Identity Disorder who are more than 150 times as numerous as people with Gender Dysphoria. While the latter are to be assuaged, accommodated or appeased by changes in identity cards, the former are not.

There is only one solution, of course, to this gross act – or contemplated act – of discrimination by the Canadian government: the removal of names from identity cards, or at least their replacement by a letter of the alphabet as is proposed for the sex of the holder. After all, who is to say that Mrs Smith today will not be Princess Anastasia tomorrow, or even in five minutes’ time, or possibly (if it comes to that) Jamila Begum? How can you punish the latter for what the former did?

I call on everyone to protest against the Canadian government’s unjust and intolerant discrimination against people with Dissociative Identity Disorder.

First published in Salisbury Review.