Is being transgender a mental illness? WHO classification system suggests it is

It is, perhaps, a peculiar fact involving an obscure medical text, but it is one that is now taking on outsized importance: The World Health Organization, in a compendium of conditions and diseases, lists being transgender under the umbrella of mental illness.

The WHO publishes a standardized coding system used around the globe to classify medical conditions, for research purposes and health-care billing. In the document, being transgender is currently included in a section with kleptomania (the overwhelming impulse to steal), trichotillomania (the compulsion to pull out one’s own hair), and pedophilia (a preference for having sex with children).

Being transgender does not belong in that company, critics say, and they argue it is long past time for the world’s leading health body to drag the document — last revised in the 1980s — into the 21st century.

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