Gender Troubles: What's Wrong With the WHO Proposal for Gender Incongruence in Childhood, by Dr. Sam Winter
http://gidreform.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/gender-troubles-whats-wrong-with-the-who-proposal-for-gender-incongruence-in-childhood-by-dr-sam-winter/Guest Post by
Sam Winter, Ph.D.
7/17/14
As most visitors to the GIDReform Advocates site will know, the World Health Organization (WHO) diagnostic manual (commonly known as the International Classification of Diseases) is currently under revision. The new edition, ICD-11, is slated for approval in 2017. I was a member of the WHO Working Group on Sexual Disorders and Sexual Health (WGSDSH), the eleven-member group which proposed a number of revisions relevant to trans people. The original WHO plans, for all our proposals to be loaded in October 2012 onto a website, for all the world to see (and comment on), never happened. Indeed, the WHO Secretariat running the show have imposed, apparently as it suits them and somewhat inconsistently, fairly onerous confidentiality rules which have prevented WGSDSH members and others from openly sharing what is going on. That said, WHO has shown itself to be comfortable with releasing material from time to time, particularly at academic conferences, as well as in the odd journal article.
One such article, in late 2012, was the one by Jack Drescher, Peggy Cohen-Kettenis and myself (all of us WGSDSH members) in which we reported a key proposal, that current ICD diagnoses commonly used with trans people (the flagship diagnosis for adolescents and adults being transsexualism) should be replaced by one called gender incongruence, and that this diagnosis should be moved out of ICD's Chapter 5 (Mental and Behavioural Disorders) and into another chapter. Our rationale was that it was important to retain access to gender affirming healthcare for those trans people who needed it, but that the classification as a mental disorder actually undermined that goal, as well as adding to stigma. Our preference was for placement in a stand-alone chapter, but (with this prospect unlikely) an alternative was placement in a broad chapter on sexual and gender-related health.
