There’s a petition doing the rounds at the moment on pathologisation of Trans people in medical classification.

Please don’t sign it.

The petition misses some important caveats that are critical to ensuring Trans folk continue to get healthcare and it is not clear if the authors of the petition realised this.

Many people believe that if being homosexual could be removed as a disorder, so can gender dysphoria. But you don’t need a doctor to be gay. I don’t need a doctor to be Trans either, but access to surgery and HRT makes life liveable. If Gender Dysphoria is no longer recognised by the WHO, Health Services will see less need to provide services. In many countries, including the UK, health care for Trans folk is already poor to non-existant in places.

For an example of the details have a look at the European Parliament motion they reference on the same topic: they asked the WHO “to withdraw gender identity disorders from the list of mental and behavioural disorders while ensuring a non-pathologizing re-coding in the 11th version of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).”

The latest petition misses the nuance and just calls for “ICD 11…to stop considering transexuality as an illness.“