World Health Organisation removes transsexualism from 'mental disorder' category

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The World Health Organization will no longer classify transgender people as mentally ill and India has declared them as a separate sex person and made it mabdatry as a separate clolumn in every application or appointment form or submission.

             The new draft of International Classification of Diseases (ICD) has removed transsexualism from the list of 'mental disorders.' This move will help non-binary and transgender people get better access to healthcare. The World Health Organisation expects that the move will improve the social acceptance for the transgender community.In an explanatory note, ICD said, "Gender incongruence, meanwhile, has also been moved out of mental disorders in the ICD, into sexual health conditions. The rationale being that 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.

           The summary of the report says, ""Revisions in inclusions of sexual health conditions are sometimes made when the medical evidence does not back up cultural assumptions. For instance, ICD-6 published in 1948 classified homosexuality as a mental disorder, under the assumption that this supposed deviation from the norm reflected a personality disorder; homosexuality was later removed from the ICD and other disease classification systems in the 1970s."

                 The ICD is a health care classification system that serves as the most important diagnostic tool for epidemiology, healthcare management and clinical assessments. These revisions will be presented at the World Health Assembly in 2019 and will come in effect starting January 1, 2022.

"It was taken out from the mental health disorders because we had a better understanding that this wasn't actually a mental health condition and leaving it there was causing stigma. So in order to reduce the stigma while also ensuring access to necessary health interventions, this was placed in a different chapter," Dr Lale Say, coordinator of WHO's Adolescents and At-Risk Populations team.

LGBT groups across the world held the move by WHO.

"This is the result of tremendous effort by trans and gender diverse activists from around the world to insist on our humanity, and I am elated that the WHO agrees that gender identity is not a mental illness," Julia Ehrt, Executive Director of Transgender Europe.