International Medical Manual Entering the Late 20th Century?

Break out your platform glitter shoes: The World Health Organization might just be preparing to party like it's 1973.

That was the year the American Psychiatric Association deleted homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, depathologizing American sexual minorities and helping open the door to decriminalizing gays and lesbians and their families. The socially rightward -- at least, the backward among the rightward -- have keened and wailed over that decision ever since, while LGBTs have gone on to show that not only are they as healthy and diverse as everybody else, they also make for parents that are just as nurturing and successful as their heterosexual counterparts... if not better.

The American Psychological Association Council of Representatives subsequently removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1975, and the WHO, after lagging shamefully behind, finally woke up to objective scientific reality and followed suit in 1990.

But the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), the world's most relied-upon diagnostic manual, still contains remnants of an earlier attitude that castigated LGBT persons and disregarded them as sick or mentally impaired -- an attitude that remains prevalent in some major religions (most notably the Vatican, which has dismissed same-sex loving relationships as "disordered" and "inherently evil"), but which has no place among reputable scientists, given the extraordinary amount of evidence that supports the idea that homosexuality is one area in a healthy range of naturally-occurring sexual orientations.

Enter a WHO panel, which, after looking into the issue, concluded that five "diagnostic classifications" regarding same-gender romantic and sexual attraction should be expunged from the ICD. Among those classifications: Something called "ego dystonic sexual orientation," a vague and broadly conceived "condition" in which individuals wonder whether they might be gay, or even conclude belatedly that they always have been.

"For example, if a woman found after 10 years of marriage to a man that she was attracted to women, she could be considered mentally ill," an article in Science Magazine noted. New York Medical College's Jack Drescher scoffed at that classification, telling Science that it was "created out of air," and noting that a similar elimination of lingering anti-gay animus had to be conducted with the APA's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)," which included a diagnosis termed "ego dystonic homosexuality" from 1980 - 1987.

Science Magazine reported on the panel's findings in July, quoting the panel's head, Susan Cochran, in a passage that explained how the panel's conclusion is that, "All such classifications need to be eliminated from the ICD not only because they lack scientific basis or clinical utility, but also as a 'human rights issue.'"

Science also quoted Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Chris Beyrer as acknowledging that the current wave of anti-gay animus driving harshly punitive legislation in countries around the globe was sure to make the recommendation controversial. However, Beyrer said, those very same legislative attacks mean that this is "precisely the right time for the WHO to stand up, take an evidence-based approach and say [homosexuality] is not a pathology."

In a Sept. 1 "Breaking News" report on the story, The Advocate noted that "the WHO will now do field [tests] in several countries including South Africa, Mexico, India, Brazil, and Lebanon, to see if the 'new criteria help clinicians make more accurate diagnoses, using case examples as well as real-life health settings.'"