Being Trans Is No Longer Considered A Mental Illness

2012 for the trans community is going to be celebrated as fondly as 1973 is for the gay and lesbian community.   When the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM V for short is published in May 2013, the term Gender Identity Disorder will be replaced with “Gender Dysphoria.”

What that means is that being trans is no longer considered a mental illness. 

We already knew that, but it took years of lobbying the American Psychiatric Association to change or completely remove the “mentally ill” characterization given to all trans people. Individuals may now be diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria, “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender.”


“All psychiatric diagnoses occur within a cultural context,” Jack Drescher, a New York psychiatrist and member of the APA subcommittee said. “We know there is a whole community of people out there who are not seeking medical attention and live between the two binary categories. We wanted to send the message that the therapist’s job isn’t to pathologize.”

“The label of mental defectiveness really places a burden on trans people to continually prove our competence in our affirmed roles,” said Colorado scholar and advocate Kelley Winters in an Associated Press interview

The new designation will have profound effects on our community both positive and negative, but one of the immediate benefits is that it takes away a right wing talking point they used to oppose trans human rights laws.  It will also affect us in the legal realm both positively and negatively, but there are arguments pro an con from trans legal scholars as to how it will play out.

But one thing we can all agree on is that it's a good thing to depathologize being trans.