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Removing gender identity disorder from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: a call for action.

Article Excerpt
In 2012, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) plans to release the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). In July 2007, APA named a 27-member task force to oversee development of the new edition, which will constitute the first major revision of the document's diagnostic categories since 1994. Gender identity disorder (GID) is probably the most widely contested diagnosis in the current DSM; APA's revision process provides social workers with the opportunity to weigh in on the debate about GID, and it is imperative that we do so. This diagnosis, which is used to justify "treatment" for gender-nonconforming children and for adults seeking sex-change surgery, has implications worldwide, given the influence of the DSM on other diagnostic tools, such as the World Health Organization's International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (2007). Social workers should support the elimination of GID from the DSM now, as we supported the declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness in the 1970s. Similar to the depathologization of homosexuality, removing GID from the DSM will have wide-ranging and liberatory effects for gender-nonconforming people currently labeled "gender disordered" and for standards of gender expression for the general population.

The DSM diagnostic criteria define GID as follows:

A. A strong and persistent cross-gender identification (not merely a desire for any perceived cultural advantages of being the other sex.) In children, the disturbance is manifested by four (or more) of the following: 1) repeatedly stated desire to be, or insistence that he or she is, the...

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