Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People

The Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People are non-binding protocols outlining the usual treatment for individuals who wish to undergo hormonal or surgical transition to the other sex. Clinicians' decisions regarding patients' treatment are often influenced by this standard of care (SOC).

Prior to the advent of the first SOCs, there was no semblance of consensus on psychiatric, psychological, medical, and surgical requirements or procedures. Before the 1960s, few countries offered safe, legal medical options and many criminalized cross-gender behaviors or mandated unproven psychiatric treatments. In response to this problem, the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (now known as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health) authored one of the earliest sets of clinical guidelines for the express purpose of ensuring "lasting personal comfort with the gendered self in order to maximize overall psychological well-being and self-fulfillment." These standards are still the most well-known; however, other sets of SOCs, protocols and guidelines do exist, especially outside the USA.

The Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), formerly known as the Benjamin Standards of Care, are the most widespread SOC used by professionals working with transsexual, transgender, or gender variant people. The WPATH-SOC are periodically updated and revised. The latest revision was released September 25, 2011. This is the seventh version of the WPATH-SOC since the original 1979 document was drafted. Previous revisions were released in 1980, 1981, 1990, 1998, and 2001.

Included in the guidelines are sections on purpose and use of the WPATH-SOC, the global applicability of the WPATH-SOC, the difference between gender nonconformity and gender dysphoria, epidemiology, treatment of children, adolescents and adults, mental health, hormone replacement therapy (female-to-male or male-to-female; HRT), reproductive health, voice and communication therapy, sex reassignment surgery, lifelong preventive and primary care, applicability of the WPATH-SOC to people living in institutional environments, and applicability of the WPATH-SOC to people with disorders of sex development.

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