Transgender Home » Transgender Community News » Dr. Leis Reports on The Global Transgender Symposium

Dr. Leis Reports on The Global Transgender Symposium

The Editor | Mar 17, 2014

Spread the love

(Bala Cynwyd, PA USA) – Acclaimed transgender surgeon and founder of The Philadelphia Center for Transgender Surgery, Dr. Sherman Leis, has recently returned from the WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Surgery) Symposium in Bangkok, Thailand. While in attendance at the Symposium, themed Transgender Health from Global Perspectives, Dr. Leis was able to share thoughts and ideas with other leading professionals in the industry from around the globe.

At the conference, WPATH presented its newly updated Standards of Care, which presented the organization’s official position on defining the transgender experience and medical care standards. It will serve as the basis for transgender-related medical policy worldwide. This seventh and most recent version of the Standards of Care has done much to address the concerns of transgender activists who have criticized previous WPATH standards as being overly restrictive and pathological.

In addition to loosening the requirements for access to care, the revisions established clear advocacy on transgender issues and no longer refer to gender nonconformity as a disorder.

“I believe this is a much bigger phenomenon than people realize,” said Leis. “With these amendments to the WPATH’s Standards of Care, we see a broadened definition of what it means to be transgender and will set the standards for embracing a broader section of the transgender community who were otherwise overlooked because they may have been in stages of transition not previously recognized and supported by world standards.”

WPATH is the leading global interdisciplinary professional association, founded in 1978, to improve understandings of gender identities and to standardize treatment of transgender, transsexual, and gender-nonconforming people.

The WPATH published the original version of the Standards of Care for the treatment of gender dysphoria in 1979, and though updated numerous times since then, remain some of the most influential clinical guidelines for individuals gender-identifying as the opposite sex. The association holds a major conference every two years in different countries around the world.