WHO: Transgender Identity Not Mental Illness

Gender incongruence, otherwise known as gender dysphoria, is no longer classified as a mental illness by the World Health Organization.

The United Nations health agency announced Monday that gender incongruence, which is described as "characterized by a marked and persistent incongruence between an individual’s experienced gender and the assigned sex," has been reclassified as a sexual health condition to remove stigma applied to transgender people.

"While evidence is now clear that it is not a mental disorder, and indeed classifying it in this can cause enormous stigma for people who are transgender, there remain significant health care needs that can best be met if the condition is coded under the ICD," reads a WHO summary of the change.

Other conditions addressed in the newest edition of International Classification of Diseases, or the ICD-11, include sexual dysfunction, changes in genital anatomy, paraphilic disorders, and some sexually transmitted infections.

The European Parliament called on WHO to remove what was then called gender identity disorder from its list of mental illnesses in 2011. The previous edition of the ICD included referred to transgender identity as “transsexualism” under a list of gender identity disorders.

France was the first country to declassify transgender identity as a mental illness, doing so in 2010. Read more via Advocate

Dr Lale Say, Coordinator, Adolescents and at-Risk Populations Team at the World Health Organization discusses changes in the classification of gender incongruence (transgender) in the new ICD-11. For more information: www.who.int/classifications/icd/en/

ICD-11: Classifying disease to map the way we live and die

Coding disease and death

There are few truer snapshots of a country’s wellbeing than its health statistics. While broad economic indicators such as Gross Domestic Product may skew impressions of individual prosperity, data on disease and death reveal how a population is truly faring.

The International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD) is the bedrock for health statistics. It maps the human condition from birth to death: any injury or disease we encounter in life − and anything we might die of − is coded. 

Not only that, the ICD also captures factors influencing health, or external causes of mortality and morbidity, providing a holistic look at every aspect of life that can affect health.

These health statistics form the basis for almost every decision  made in health care today − understanding what people get sick from, and what eventually kills them, is at the core of mapping disease trends and epidemics, deciding how to programme health services, allocate health care spending, and invest in R&D. 

ICD codes can have enormous financial importance, since they are used to determine where best to invest increasingly scant resources. In countries such as the USA, meanwhile, ICD codes are the foundation of health insurance billing, and thus critically tied up with health care finances. 

Crucially, in a world of 7.4 billion people speaking nearly 7000 languages, the ICD provides a common vocabulary for recording, reporting and monitoring health problems. Fifty years ago, it would be unlikely that a disease such as schizophrenia would be diagnosed similarly in Japan, Kenya and Brazil. Now, however, if a doctor in another country cannot read a person’s medical records, they will know what the ICD code means.

Without the ICD’s ability to provide standardized, consistent data, each country or region would have its own classifications that would most likely only be relevant where it is used. Standardization is the key that unlocks global health data analysis.

Read more via WHO