Author Archives: Jon Garvey

Yesterday I posted a piece on a news report about the World Health Organisation’s recategoration of “gender identity disorder” as “gender incongruence,” and was taken to task by a new commenter, Nick Townsend. I’ve decided I can give a more adequate response to his well-argued post in a new OP rather than in the limited format of the comments software.

My pastor drew my attention to this BBC article last week. I’m not entirely sure how much this is new news, and how much old news repackaged, in that I have been aware that “gender identity disorder” has been rebranded in various national indices of medical disorders as a “gender dysphoria.” The “news” seems to be the ratification of this by the “World Health Assembly” last week, so it will appear in ICD-11, the international gold standard of diagnostic categores, as “gender incongruence, a marked and persistent incongruence between a person’s experienced gender and assigned sex.”

The recent press story of mass global warming extinctions came from a policy summary published well in advance of the scientific survey on which it is said to be based (so that governments get their policies in place before being distracted by  complicated science?). But the core of it was based on the IUCN Red List of endangered and recently extinct (vertebrate) species, of which a graph was included on a century by century scale, indeed showing a dramatic escalation from the 16th century.