It still is mental illness but it’s mostly agreed upon that you don’t need gender dysphoria to be trans.
Mental illness is a problem that is preventing you from properly functioning in society, and since gender dysphoria is a largely social problem they try to remove the mental illness aspect from it and try to change societies perception towards them, because if it wasn’t for people treating them differently it really wouldn’t be defined as one.
Basically it’s as much of a mental illness as being homosexual was.
Its because this is a very opinionated topic. And this view is viewed as homophobic or close minded.Don’t get me wrong i have nothing against gays or transgender people. I believe every one can live there lives how they want
Technically it is. There’s been a lot of conversations, particularly in trans circles about how while gender dysphoria is a mental illness it is not required to be trans – being transgender isn’t a mental illness, the dysphoria is. This is explained by APA I believe who say that not all trans people suffer from gender dysphoria (that said, from personal experience treatment rarely happens unless you can “prove” you’re dysphoric)
This is a loaded topic haha and I think we don’t quite have a full vocabulary for it yet which makes it all harder to discuss. But essentially, gender is a social construct. In some societies, it isn’t frowned upon to have a penis and also prefer a feminine lifestyle. In some cultures there are up to 5 different recognized genders even though there are mostly just the two sexes (accounting for intersex, etc).
In our Western culture, we have a norm that causes some people great distress. This all make it harder to classify and kind of blurs the lines of cultural norms vs disorders. So it is a disorder because of the distress is causes individuals but it also is a symptom of an oppressive/limiting society.