Being Transgender No Longer Considered as Mental Illness in Denmark
Effective since January 2017, a transgender person is no longer considered mentally ill in Denmark. This makes the European state have the distinction of being the first nation in the world to remove the diagnosis of being transgender from the umbrella of mental disorders.
The Danish LGBT (lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgender) community lauded the initiative which removed the stigma of being a gender minority from the country's health system. Terms like "disorder," "dysphoria," "incongruence," "disturbance" and "problem" were dropped from the title of the new code.
"The change is symbolic, but important. It's important for transgender people to not be branded mentally ill when we are not," Linda Thor Pedersen, a spokesperson for LGBT Denmark, said. She added that the old system made indirect discrimination possible with job applicants being rejected because of a "diagnosis."
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The move was in reaction to the increasing number of transgender people accessing health services. The Sexological Clinic at Rigshospital in Copenhagen had expected to serve around 50 young people annually but had over 130 clients last year. A World Health Organization (WHO) study found an alarming suicide rate of 57 percent for transgender teens who don't have supportive families.
Danish politicians said the move was to challenge WHO which has not removed transgender from its International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems. But the disassociation of being transgender with mental illness has sparked concerns on how Denmark will address the medical treatment of transgender people in distress.
Proponents argue that the symptoms and distress are caused by the stigma, not by the condition itself. Still, the change in classification didn't make any change to the amount of psychological assessment a person must undergo before given access to hormone therapy or sex reassignment surgery.
International human rights groups like Amnesty International have lauded the initiative as groundbreaking and challenged other countries to follow suit. But the Danish Parliament said they were just acknowledging that transgender individuals are just normal human beings.
