Critics contest WHO’s classification of transgender identity as mental illness

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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

It is, perhaps, a peculiar fact involving an obscure medical text, but it is one that is now taking on outsized importance: The World Health Organization, in a compendium of conditions and diseases, lists being transgender under the umbrella of mental illness.

Being transgender does not belong in that company, critics say, and they argue it is long past time for the world’s leading health body to drag the document — last revised in the 1980s — into the 21st century.

Danish lawmakers have issued an ultimatum, telling the WHO that Denmark will move unilaterally if the global health agency doesn’t make the change over the next few months — although it’s unclear how they might do that.

The document at the center of the controversy is the International Classification of Diseases — the ICD for short.

The current edition, ICD-10, was revised in the 1980s, approved in 1990, and was put into general use in 1994.

Read full, original post: Is being transgender a mental illness? WHO classification system suggests it is

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