The Peruvian government classified transgender, non-binary and intersex people as “mentally ill,” according to several reports.
Reportedly, the country’s health ministry made the decision to classify these groups of people as “mentally ill” so that public health services could “guarantee full coverage of medical attention for mental health” for them.
Going forward, the decree will change the language in the Essentials Health Insurance Plan to emphasize that transgender people have a mental disorder (via Daily Mail):
Under the decree signed by President Dina Boluarte, 'transsexualism, dual-role transvestism, gender identity disorder in childhood, other gender identity disorders and fetishistic transvestism' are now all recorded as mental illnesses.
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Peru's government argues the decree will make 'psychological treatment' freely available to those affected and said it 'categorically reaffirms respect for the dignity of the person and their free actions within the framework of human rights, providing health services for their benefit'.
Peru classifies trans, intersex people as ‘mentally ill’ https://t.co/l1LMKYpbht pic.twitter.com/H8cjZfPvXf
— New York Post (@nypost) May 15, 2024
Predictably, left-wing groups across Peru came out against the decision.
“100 years after the decriminalization of homosexuality, the @Minsa_Peru has nothing better to do than to include trans people in the category of mental illnesses,” Jheinser Pacaya, director of LGBTQ+ organization OutfestPeru, wrote on X.
Percy Mayta-Tristan, a medical researcher at Lima's Scientific University of the South, told Daily Mail that the decree showed a lack of awareness of “complex” LGBTQ+ issues.
“You can't ignore the context that this is happening in a super-conservative society, where the LGBT community has no rights and where labeling them as mentally ill opens the door to conversion therapy,” Percy Mayta-Tristan told Yahoo News.
In the United States, a 2022 study conducted by researchers at UCLA’s Williams Institute claimed that 0.5 percent of all American adults, 1.3 million people, and about 300,000 youth 13 to 17 years old identify as transgender, which Townhall covered. Despite this, pro-transgender advocates claim time and time again that social contagion and gender ideology curriculum do not play a part in these numbers.