Gender Dysphoria. General Theoretical Considerations and Bioethical Aspects of Medical Treatment

Abstract

The concept of being transgender or gender variant goes back to Asia and India where there was a third recognized gender, Hijra. More recently, there has been a significant increase in the awareness of people who are not comfortable with the sex assigned to them at birth and who choose to assume gender roles of the opposite sex, and even resort to medical treatments or surgery to change their sex. assigned in the opposite sex. In recent centuries, this topic has been treated differently, for example, in 1972 an educational book for children, William's Doll, was published by an influential American writer, Charlotte Zolotow, about a boy, William, who desperately wants a doll. to love despite his father's persistent desire to play with traditional male toys. In addition, over the next four decades, children's books have been developed on this topic, such as how to approach boys who wanted to wear dresses. To understand this disorder in the broader context of sexual disorders, we first ask ourselves: What is gender dysphoria? As a general definition, gender dysphoria can be presented as a condition that causes a person discomfort or suffering because there is a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity. Or, as otherwise defined, a condition in which the gender of a person assigned at birth and the gender with which he identifies are incongruent. (Davy, 2018). Until the adoption of the ICD-11 (International Classification of Diseases Review 11) by the WHO, it was called a sexual identity disorder and later the condition was renamed and moved from the Mental and Behavioral Disorders section to get rid of the stigma associated with the term disorder. Along the same lines, in the 5th edition of the Handbook of Diagnosis and Statistics of Mental Disorders, the American Psychiatric Association changed the diagnosis of gender identity disorder into Gender Dysphoria (DG). In the literature, this initiative has been praised, precisely for excluding the term “disorder” (Davy, The DSM-5 and the Politics of Diagnosing Transpeople, 2015). Keywords: gender, gender dysphoria, treatment.