Bizzaro Land Alert: The End of Transgender as a Mental Illness

Published on December 6, 2012

The march forward for trans civil rights proceeds apace, its momentum unflagging. It was one year ago this week that Judge William Pryor of Alabama, a man not known for his sympathies for the LGBT community, stated in the 11th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals in Atlanta that trans persons were a protected class under the 14th Amendment. Now the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has ratified the DSM-5, the fifth edition of what is known colloquially as the “psychiatrists’ bible,” so as of Dec. 1, trans persons are no longer classified by the medical community as mentally ill, this decision coming 39 years after homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness by the same organization.