The gaming industry has been quite vocal about the World Health Organization adding video game addiction as a disorder to the ICD-11 revisionary index, causing the issue to spread far and wide throughout media regarding the issue and sporting a number of responses from industry committee groups. However, during the same weekend where the World Health Organization added gaming disorder to the ICD-11 index, they removed transgenderism from the list of disorders.
Metro.co.uk reported that on May 25th, 2019 just a day before gaming disorder was added to the list, the World Health Organization removed transgenderism from the list of disorders, writing…
“The World Health Organisation (WHO) has passed legislation that will no longer categorise being transgender as a mental health condition.
“The move has been said to have the potential to ‘liberate’ trans and non-binary people worldwide, making the route to legal transition draw closer.
“The decision was approved on Friday 25 May by the World Health Assembly, the WHO governing body that represents 194 member states, and should trickle down to national policies.”
The Metro article is almost entirely in favor of this decision, claiming that transgenderism as a disorder was more-so influenced by lack of social acceptance than any kind of mental issues coming from the individual.
They selectively quote specific people who have been pushing to normalize transgenderism, especially among the youth, such as Graeme Reid, the LGBTQIA rights director at Human Rights Watch, who wrote…
“Transgender people are fighting stigma and discrimination that can be traced in part to medical systems that have historically diagnosed expressions of gender non-conformity as a mental pathology.
“But it’s the stigma, discrimination, and bullying—and not anything inherent in gender nonconformity—that can inflict mental health problems in transgender people.”
Unfortunately we live in an age where mentally distressing conditions like gender dysphoria are being hand-waved away as not being a sign of mental illness. Hence, removing it from the list of disorders means that people may not receive the proper treatment that they need. Instead, it appears as if the media wants to convince people to either get corrective surgery or binge on hormone pills instead of seeking help for mental illness first and foremost.
Outlets like Your Tango, have attempted to convince the public at large that the symptoms and effects of gender dysphoria as being a disorder are ill-conceived. It’s not hard to see how the media comes to this conclusion when the National Health Service in the U.K., have openly denounced gender dysphoria as a mental illness, writing…
“While biological sex and gender identity are the same for most people, this isn’t the case for everyone. For example, some people may have the anatomy of a man, but identify themselves as a woman, while others may not feel they’re definitively either male or female.
“This mismatch between sex and gender identity can lead to distressing and uncomfortable feelings that are called gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is a recognised medical condition, for which treatment is sometimes appropriate. It’s not a mental illness.”
What’s amazing about this is that there has been an absolute about-face on the information propagated to the public regarding gender dysphoria. For instance, back in 2010 there was consensus that gender dysphoria should remain in the DSM as a mental health disorder, with Gail Knudson, Griet De Cuypere, and Walter Bockting explaining in a piece published on September 17th, 2010…
“The consensus process was collaborative, interdisciplinary, and evidence based. A majority (but not all) of the participants believed that a diagnosis related to Gender Identity Disorder should remain in the DSM, and many advocated changes in name, diagnostic criteria, and placement within the DSM. The proposed name is Gender Dysphoria, and the diagnostic criteria should be distress based. Placement should be outside the chapter on Sexual Disorders and possibly within Psychiatric Disorders Related to a Medical Condition. If there were to be a diagnostic category for childhood, there should also be separate categories for adults and adolescents. A Not Otherwise Specified category should be retained, and Disorders of Sex Development should not be an exclusionary criterion for Gender Dysphoria.”
There were constant debates and arguments about de-stigmatizing transgenderism, and part of that included reclassifying the labels to push them further away from what would be considered a “disorder”.
What’s interesting is that even with a paltry supply of almost non-existent research the World Health Organization still added gaming disorder to the list while removing transgenderism, even though the latter has been part of a hot-topic discussion about mental illness for years. A lot of this usually crops up when discussing suicide rates among trans individuals, which is many magnitudes higher than the national average, with the Williams Institute having reported that suicide attempts among trans men were at 46% and at 42% for trans women.
A separate study from Russell B. Toomey, Amy K. Syvertsen, and Maura Shramko that was published over on Pediatrics back in October of 2018, found similar results, which stated…
“Nearly 14% of adolescents reported a previous suicide attempt; disparities by gender identity in suicide attempts were found. Female to male adolescents reported the highest rate of attempted suicide (50.8%), followed by adolescents who identified as not exclusively male or female (41.8%), male to female adolescents (29.9%), questioning adolescents (27.9%), female adolescents (17.6%), and male adolescents (9.8%). Identifying as nonheterosexual exacerbated the risk for all adolescents except for those who did not exclusively identify as male or female (ie, nonbinary). For transgender adolescents, no other sociodemographic characteristic was associated with suicide attempts.”
The question is: are gamers who have been classified as addicts exhibiting similar detrimental behavioral traits as suicidal trans people?
If there is ample enough data showing some kind of behavioral breakdown from those with gender dysphoria or mental discomfort, how does that not classify as a disorder compared to playing video games for a set number of hours in the day?
As reported by GamesIndustry.biz, even trade organizations like the ESA, K-GAMES, and Association for the U.K., Interactive Entertainment have spoken out against the World Health Organization adding video game disorder to the ICD-11 index without independent and properly peer reviewed research to accommodate the inclusion of gaming, saying…
“The WHO is an esteemed organization and its guidance needs to be based on regular, inclusive, and transparent reviews backed by independent experts. ‘Gaming disorder’ is not based on sufficiently robust evidence to justify its inclusion in one of the WHO’s most important norm-setting tools.”
So to sum it all up with a TL;DR: a condition that has had a long and controversial history of being labeled as a disorder has been taken off of the World Health Organization’s disorder list, and an ill-defined condition that hardly has any research to back it up as an actual condition is being added to the list.
I suppose one shouldn’t expect much consistency or common sense in the Age of the Clown.
(Thanks for the news tip johntrine)
(Main image courtesy of ImNotDexDex)
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