This document was read by Joshua Sehoole in representation of the 40+ trans and intersex activists from all regions participating in the WPATH Conference in Amsterdam, and submitted shortly after. It seems that *now* WPATH and USPATH realize that pathologizing us can be a political issue. Guess what? Colonizing us while just ignoring us is another -and the same- political issue.
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The signatories of this document, advocates from different communities, movements and professional backgrounds, that participated in the last WPATH International Symposium (Amsterdam, June 17-21, 2016) manifest our deep concern with the continued pathologization of trans, intersex, non-binary, gender diverse and gender non-conforming people, their bodies, identities and expressions; with the persistence of unethical forms of visual and oral representation; with the hegemony of Global North/Western psycho-medical perspectives and the concomitant colonialist attitude towards knowledge produced in the Global South and the Global East; with the limitations to diverse membership imposed by unaffordable membership fees. In the context of our collective struggle to ensure full compatibility between human rights and access to healthcare, we request WPATH to consider the following recommendations:
• Embrace and promote a people-centered approach to healthcare fully compatible with human rights standards.
• Establish an Ethical Protocol for visual displays and case presentations, and provide adequate training to members for its implementation.
• Establish a committee to set standards for ethical research and its use, and include them in the next Standards of Care (SOC) revision.
• Ensure full compatibility between scientific language and human rights standards during all proceedings, including the avoidance of misgendering language.
• Implement an archival system to document sessions and make their recordings available for communications, accountability and research purposes.
• Rename the WPATH journal, the International Journal of Transgenderism, to the International Journal of Transgender Health, and make the journal open access to ensure that research is free and accessible to activists, communities and practitioners around the world; find ways to fund open access publication without charging publishing/author/article processing fees.
• Commit to greater inclusion of human rights-based sessions at successive WPATH symposiums, and encourage professional clinic members to credit attendance at these sessions to their continuing professional training.
• Establish interpreting services during the WPATH symposiums, starting with plenary sessions.
• Decolonize psycho-medical frameworks, approaches and language, acknowledging their diversity and dismantling the imposition of Global North/Western perspectives on different regions.
• Diversify and expand its membership by adopting affordable membership fees.
• Recognize activists’ expertise and fully integrate it into institutional proceedings and promote collaborative research.
• Support the struggle to depathologize access to legal gender recognition and transitional healthcare around the world.
• Adopt a firm position in favor of deleting trans-related categories from the Mental Health Chapter in ICD-11.
• Support the placing of a new category for adolescents and adults (GIAA) in ICD-11 Chapter 05 on Conditions Related to Sexual Health.
• Second the demand for removing the proposed category “Gender incongruence of childhood” (GIC) from the ICD-11 Beta Draft.
• Support the inclusion of non-pathologizing references to pre-pubertal children in ICD-11 (for example, under Z codes or similar codes) to ensure their access to healthcare, including counseling, information and support.
• Adopt an equally firm position against the language of Disorders of Sex Development (DSD) and of those medically unnecessary and unconsented interventions aimed to ‘normalize’ intersex bodies.
• Support children’s full access to legal recognition, education and healthcare on the basis of the rights of the child.
• Join the international movement for depathologization, denouncing human rights violations based on pathologizing classifications and interventions, and providing adequate care and support to those people affected by those violations.
• Adopt the position that access to gender affirming healthcare is a human right and that it should be widely available and accessible, and demand that the World Health Organization similarly adopt this position, as well as put pressure on governments to provide gender affirming healthcare services accordingly.
QueerAnarchism 