Being trans person is no longer a mental disorder: the ICD-11 has been published

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently announced the end of the CIE-11 and published online the original version. The link will be shared in the next hour, once the embargo is finished.

The announcement does not mark the end of the process of the ICD-11, but the beginning of a new phase, focused on the implementation and evaluation at the country level. The new version of the ICD will be presented for its final approval in the World Health Assembly on May of 2019.

As will be anticipated, all the categories related to trans people have been deleted of the CIE’s chapter on mental and behaviour disorders. At the same time, new categories have been incorporated in relation to trans people: adolescence and adulthood gender inconsistency and childhood gender inconsistency. These categories have been included in a new chapter of the CIE, the chapter 17 on conditions related with sexual health. Therefore, the WHO determines that being a trans person or a diverse gender person it does not mean suffering from a mental disorder. Today, a shameful history of pathologization, institutionalization, “conversion” and sterilization come to an end.

The work of depathologizing lives of trans and diverse gender is far from and end:

• The engaged and organized activism will be more necessary than ever to ensure the effective implementation at country level, to eliminate the pathologize regulations at the moment that full access to a legal gender recognition and to the gender affirming procedures are guaranteed.
• The gender inconsistency must be reviewed and replaced, as soon as possible, by a category able to conserve its utility while its normative content is eliminated.
• The childhood gender inconsistency must be eliminated from the CIE-11, through national, regional and international mobilization in favour of the full depathologizing of the childhood gender diversity.
• The trans and diversity of gender depathologization in the CIE-11 must be accompanied by a determined reaffirmation of our final objective: total depathologizing based on human rights and, especially on universal access to health care.
• Many people around the world have harshly suffered the impact of the pathologization. As any other victim of human rights violations, they have the right to the truth, to rehab and recovering.

To review and analyse the results of the CIE-11 process, to plan the next steps and to organize the global strategies, at the ICD-11 international initiative, the partner organizations will organize a set of web seminaries, ¡stay tuned!

In solidarity,

GATE, AKAHATA, TGEU, APTN, ILGA, Coalición Trans-postsoviética, Iranti.org, STP International Campaign Stop Trans Pathologization

Translation: Javiera Saavedra R.