Stuttering has always been socially constructed as a deviant and pathological behaviour. In the last century, stuttering was medicalized as a mental disorder, and specifically, a communication disorder. The biomedicine of stuttering has proposed, in the last eighty years, numberless definitions, etiological hypotheses and treatments, which have hardly contributed to the comprehension of the phenomenon, and have caused adverse secondary effects which Illich (1976) called iatrogenic.
As a reesult, the medicalization stuttering yields no advantages and the very nature of stuttering remains unknown. Conversely, it could be argued that the medicalization brings about much harm, especially a stereotype that stigmatizes the stuttering community, damaging their personal identity. Therefore, I propose demedicalizing stuttering and the construction of a term–Transfluency-to design stuttering. Demedicalizing means conceiving a phenomenon as a distinctive feature or a manifestation of human diversity, but never as a pathological symptom. Transfluency is a manifestation of diversity in speech pattern, as being black, homosexual and left-handed are expressions of diversity in race, sexual orientation and hemispheric dominance. Transfluency is a natural attribute of the speaker. Transfluency is a dramatically different speech pattern, but as human –or as natural-as the fluent one. Both are not modifiable because belong to human nature. Transfluency is a natural speech pattern. Demedicalizing and dignifying stuttering requires to carry out the process known as Coming out. Coming out dignifies stutterers because it transforms their way of life, mysterious, erratic and lonely into an authentic and transparent one, which allows him to participate in the feast of communication, and thus, to feed off human contact. Self-help groups are becoming the most adequate social spaces to start the process we have termed coming out, because members do not suffer from clinical influence or stigma.