How gender dysphoria and incongruence became medical diagnoses – a historical review

Marc-Antoine Crocq
2021 Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience  
This article is a historical review of the medical and psychiatric diagnoses associated with transgender people across epochs. Ancient Greek and Roman writings already mention gender change. Before a diagnosis even existed, historical documents described the lives of numerous people whom we would consider transgender today. The development of medical classifications took off in the nineteenth century, driven by the blooming of natural sciences. In the nineteenth century, most authors conflated
more » ... uestions of sexual orientation and gender. For example, the psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing reported cases of transgender people but understood them as paranoia, or as the extreme degree of severity in a dimension of sexual inversion. In the early 1900s, doctors such as Magnus Hirschfeld first distinguished homosexual and transgender behaviour. The usual term for transgender people was transvestite, before Harry Benjamin generalised the term transsexual in the mid-20th century. The term transgender became common in the 1970s. This article details the evolution of diagnoses for transgender people from DSM-III and ICD-10 to DSM-5 and ICD-11.
doi:10.1080/19585969.2022.2042166 pmid:35860172 pmcid:PMC9286744 fatcat:bawegkbgfbgvnhbypyph2knvgq