Why The Drive For Medical Transition Should Be Re-Psychopathologized
Description
🚨 15 years after WPATH's 2010 de-psychopathologization campaign, Genspect launches the counter-campaign to restore psychiatric safeguards
Mia Hughes and Stella O'Malley explain why recognizing the drive for extreme body modification as pathological is the most compassionate, evidence-based response to protect vulnerable youth from the harms of WPATH's de-psychopathologization.
The Critical Distinction: A teen exploring trans identity? Not pathological. A teen obsessively fixated on removing healthy body parts, pursuing lifelong medicalization, destroying their endocrine system? That's pathological behavior requiring mental health support—not celebration and scalpels.
"You could develop a trans identity and not want any medical interventions. And arguably your behavior is not yet pathological. It's when you're going into actual harmful medical interventions that are going to harm your body. Now your behavior is pathological." - Stella O'Malley
What Happened: In 2010, WPATH's de-psychopathologization campaign declared trans identities "natural and healthy," dismantled all psychiatric guardrails, and triggered a social contagion among youth. By 2013, the DSM-5 replaced "Gender Identity Disorder" with "Gender Dysphoria"—the identity was now healthy, only the distress was pathological. By 2018, the WHO's ICD-11 went further, moving it entirely out of mental health into "conditions related to sexual health."
The result? Kids started falling into an ideological abyss with no safeguards to catch them.
Campaign hub: https://genspect.org/re-psychopathologization-campaign/