NextSharkNextShark.com
Latest Newsletter🍵 New alcohol/cancer study in AsiansRead

Article

Vietnam declares being gay ‘not an illness’ 32 years after WHO declassification of homosexuality as disease

  • Vietnam’s Ministry of Health declared homosexuality as “not a disease” in a directive to provincial and municipal health departments on Aug. 3.

  • The announcement noted that homosexuality “is entirely not an illness” and therefore “cannot be ‘cured’ nor need[s] to be ‘cured’ and cannot be converted in any way.”

  • The belief that homosexuality is a curable disease has reportedly prevailed in Vietnam partly due to the government’s failure in adopting the World Health Organization’s initial and succeeding positions on the subject.

  • The American Psychiatric Association (APA), through its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) — the global gold standard for the diagnosis of psychiatric illnesses — first declassified homosexuality as a disorder in 1973 and completely removed it from the manual in 1987.

  • Aside from declaring homosexuality normal, Vietnam’s Ministry of Health stressed that any form of support to LGBTQ-plus individuals must be provided only by sexual identity experts.

Asian America Daily - in under 5 minutes

Get our collection of Asian America's most essential stories, to your inbox daily, for free!

Unsure? Check out our Newsletter Archive

Nearly 50 years after the American Psychiatric Association (APA) — the organization behind the world’s gold standard for diagnosing mental illnesses — first declassified homosexuality as a disease, Vietnam has followed suit earlier this month.

The “huge paradigm shift” came in an Aug. 3 announcement sent by the Ministry of Health to local government units, including provincial and municipal health departments.

In its announcement, which was also posted online, the ministry declared that being LGBTQ-plus “is entirely not an illness,” which means it “cannot be ‘cured’ nor need[s] to be ‘cured’ and cannot be converted in any way.”

With this, health professionals should not “interfere nor force treatment” on LGBTQ-plus individuals, and any form of support must be provided only by experts on sexual identity, the ministry added.

The declaration follows a series of progressive steps taken by the communist nation for its LGBTQ-plus community in recent years. In 2013, Vietnam permitted same-sex relationships, while it decriminalized changing one’s first name and legal gender for trans people in 2015.

However, the belief that homosexuality is a curable disease prevails in the country. This condition is reportedly influenced by the government’s failure in adopting the World Health Organization’s initial and succeeding positions on the subject.

Vietnam also lagged behind the APA, which publishes the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the global gold standard for the diagnosis of psychiatric illnesses. The manual’s second edition, DSM-II, which was first published in 1968, listed homosexuality as a mental disorder.

In 1973, 5,854 psychiatrists with the APA voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM. However, they replaced it with “sexual orientation disturbance” for people “in conflict with” their sexual orientation as a compromise to the 3,810 psychiatrists who voted to retain it.

It was only in 1987 when homosexuality completely fell out of the DSM. Thirty-five years later, Vietnam is catching up.

“This announcement that being LGBT is not a disease and condemning the practice of conversion therapy, this is like a dream,” Phong Vuong, who works as the LGBTI rights program manager at The Institute for Studies of Society, Economy, and Environment (iSEE), told Al Jazeera.

“It is something that we never thought would have happened, let alone coming from the most trusted source for medical information in Vietnam. … I think the impact on queer youth will be very, very evident.”

Kyle Knight, a senior researcher of health and LGBTQ-plus rights at Human Rights Watch, shared the same thoughts, saying “we cannot overstate how big a fix this announcement is.”

“While attitudes won’t change overnight, this marks a huge paradigm shift. As the most trusted source of medical authority in Vietnam, the impact on social perceptions of queerness will be enormous,” Knight said, according to The Guardian.

Vietnam is not the only Asian country that made strides for the LGBTQ-plus community this month. On Aug. 20, Singapore announced that it will decriminalize sex between men, ending a colonial-era law that punished offenders with up to two years in prison.

 

Featured Image via TMD Team

Support our Journalism with a Contribution

Many people might not know this, but despite our large and loyal following which we are immensely grateful for, NextShark is still a small bootstrapped startup that runs on no outside funding or loans.

Everything you see today is built on the backs of warriors who have sacrificed opportunities to help give Asians all over the world a bigger voice.

However, we still face many trials and tribulations in our industry, from figuring out the most sustainable business model for independent media companies to facing the current COVID-19 pandemic decimating advertising revenues across the board.

We hope you consider making a contribution so we can continue to provide you with quality content that informs, educates and inspires the Asian community. Even a $1 contribution goes a long way.  Thank you for everyone's support. We love you all and can't appreciate you guys enough.

Support NextShark

Mastercard, Visa, Amex, Discover, Paypal