The parliament of Denmark, on New Year's Day voted in favor of removing the stigma from being transgender..."separating them from association with words such ads 'problem,' 'disorder,' or dysphoria.'"

Words matter. It was very important that terms like “incongruence,” “disturbance” and “problem” were left out of the code title used by the country’s medical community to track care.

The change makes it a code instead of a diagnosis.

--Linda Thor Pederson, LGBT Denmark

The Lancet Psychiatry has released results of what is being called the first field study on the topic of transgender mental health: Removing transgender identity from the classification of mental disorders: a Mexican field study for ICD-11

The conceptualisation of transgender identity as a mental disorder has contributed to precarious legal status, human rights violations, and barriers to appropriate health care among transgender people. The proposed reconceptualisation of categories related to transgender identity in WHO's forthcoming International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-11 removes categories related to transgender identity from the classification of mental disorders, in part based on the idea that these conditions do not satisfy the definitional requirements of mental disorders. We aimed to determine whether distress and impairment, considered essential characteristics of mental disorders, could be explained by experiences of social rejection and violence rather than being inherent features of transgender identity, and to examine the applicability of other elements of the proposed ICD-11 diagnostic guidelines.