Gender Dysphoria

gender dysphoria (GD), also known as gender identity disorder (GID), formal diagnosis given by mental health professionals to people who experience distress because of a significant incongruence between the gender with which they personally identify and the gender with which they were born. The GD diagnosis appears in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5; 2013), the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA’s) official listing of psychiatric disorders. A clinical description of GID also appears in the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10; 1992). (The ICD-10 does not use the term gender dysphoria.) Although the diagnosis of GD is usually made by mental health care providers, much of the treatment for adults is endocrinological and surgical in nature and often follows World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People (2012).

Although gender nonconformity is not a mental disorder, GD is characterized by clinically significant mental anguish. Persons with GD often have impaired social and occupational functioning because of the marked difference between their expressed gender and their gender at birth. As transgender individuals, those with GD have a strong conviction that their feelings and actions are typical of the opposite gender, and they desire to live and be perceived as that gender. GD in children is marked by repeated verbalization of their desire to be the other gender as well as behaviours that indicate a strong preference to be/identify with the other gender, such as persistent cross-gender roles in make-believe play or a profound dislike for their sexual anatomy. In both children and adults, feelings of dysphoria must continue for at least six months for a diagnosis to be given.

With the development of successful surgical techniques and hormone replacement therapy, several thousand transsexual adults with persistent GD have undergone a permanent gender reassignment. Although both male and female transsexuals exist, the male-to-female operation is more common, because the genital reconstruction is more satisfactory. The male-to-female transsexual’s penis and testes are removed, and an artificial vagina is created; breasts may be implanted, although some breast development usually is promoted with the use of feminizing hormones. Female-to-male transsexuals may undergo mastectomy, hysterectomy, and hormone treatments to produce the male secondary sexual characteristics but may decide against a phalloplasty, as attempts to create an artificial penis have not been particularly satisfactory.