Kathryn Sandra Kaur Hall (born 1958) is a Canadian psychologist who with coauthor Yitzchak M. Binik has promoted pathologizing ideas about sex and gender minorities. Their 2014 book Principles and Practice of Sex Therapy presents the response to the 2003 anti-transgender book The Man Who Would Be Queen as that of “some militant gender activists.” It also allows psychologists Kenneth Zucker and Nicola Brown to make the case for non-affirmative models of care for minors. Zucker was fired the year after the book’s publication.
Background
Hall earned her Bachelor’s degree from Queen’s University in 1980 and her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from McGill University in 1986. Her husband is sports psychologist James L. “Jim” Mastrich, Jr. (born 1952).
Passage from Principles and Practice of Sex Therapy
The Future of Sex Therapy
The relationship between sexual dysfunction and the other sexual disorders might be best characterized as a DSM-arranged marriage. Paraphilia and gender dysphoria clinicians and researchers have usually not been sex therapists. Yet in the view of previous DSMs and most of the North American mental health community, all sexual and gender issues are alike. The net result is that the sexual dysfunctions, paraphilias, and gender identity disorders have all been thrown into a single DSM chapter. This is not true in the World Health Organization (WHO) International Classification of Diseases (ICD) classification.
Whether sexuality is an important defining characteristic for gender dysphoria is matter of some controversy. Brown and Zucker (Chapter 11) point out that autogynephilia—that is, sexual arousal to the idea of oneself being a woman—may be a crucial mechanism in male-to-female gender dysphoria and that this “erotic location error” is considered by some as a sexual orientation. This theory has aroused bitter controversy, as evidenced by the recent brouhaha between J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern University and some militant gender activists (see special issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, June 2008). Brown and Zucker also review the intervention literature and summarize the substantive changes in the DSM-5 diagnosis.
References
Binik YM, Hall SKS (2014). The Future of Sex Therapy. In Principles and Practice of Sex Therapy, Fifth Edition. Guilford Publications. Edited by Yitzchak M. Binik and Kathryn SK Hall. ISBN 978-1462513673
Resources
Dr. Kathryn Hall (drkathrynhall.com)
Prabook (prabook.com)