Throw together some criteria, approve it by vote, and anything can become an official psychiatric disorder—which means that the manual has long been a mirror for biases that would horrify many people today. Fifty years ago, a man who wanted to have sex with other men would have been classified as mentally disordered, and this would have been supported by the DSM’s entry for homosexuality, which wouldn’t be fully dropped until the 1980s.24 Today, a man who has little interest in partnered sex is still considered to have a psychiatric disorder. Both diagnoses arise from narrow-mindedness.
