How medicine corrected its mistake about being transgender
Dr Helen Webberley on Heretics: the gender debate, with Andrew Gold, Heretics
Being transgender is a mental illness, or at least a psychological condition that needs to be treated rather than accepted. If it were simply part of who someone is, medicine would say so.
Medicine did say so, in 2011, when being transgender was formally declassified as a mental illness and recognised as part of a person's identity. What I was pointing to in that clip is that this is not the first time medicine has had to correct itself: being gay was once classified as a mental illness too, and people were institutionalised for having syphilis. We look back at those moments and see them clearly for what they were. The 2011 reclassification is the same kind of correction. It does not mean trans people changed; it means our understanding caught up with reality. The illness was never in the person.
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