The World Health Organization announced a plan to develop a guideline for the healthcare of transgender individuals.
“This new guideline will provide evidence and implementation guidance on health sector interventions aimed at increasing access and utilization of quality and respectful health services by trans and gender diverse people,” a press release reads.
According to the organization, the guideline will focus on five areas: “provision of gender-affirming care, including hormones;” “health workers education and training for the provision of gender-inclusive care;” “provision of health care for trans and gender diverse people who suffered interpersonal violence based in their needs;” “health policies that support gender-inclusive care;” and “legal recognition of self-determined gender identity.”
The guideline will be developed by a “guideline development group” (GDG) on February 19-21, 2024.
The Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) published a response to the WHO’s declaration.
“There are several concerns related to this WHO announcement,” the group wrote. “Specifically, they include a biased guideline panel composition, an inappropriately handled public comment period, and the rushed guideline development process overall.”
SEGM noted that “no quality systematic review of evidence and no quality long-term study has been able to identify credible benefits of gender transition to mental or physical health.”
“Additionally, no study to date has been able to identify an immutable biological factor leading to a transgender identity—a fact acknowledged by the Endocrine Society’s scientific statement on sex and gender identity.”
Instead, studies have shown that gender reassignment surgeries do not benefit the patient’s mental health.
A Finnish study found that those with gender dysphoria have “many more common psychiatric needs than do their matched population controls, even when medical GR interventions are carried out,” the study said.
The researchers explained that while the number of individuals seeking gender transitions has increased “throughout the Western world,” the “reasons for these increases are not known.”
“Both those [gender dysphoria] patients who had proceeded to medical [gender reassignment] and those who had not were more likely to need psychiatric treatment after the index date than were the control,” the authors wrote.
The authors added that as the number of individuals contacting gender identity services (GIS) has increased, “their needs for psychiatric treatment have increased.”
