welcoming and/or requesting the repeal of anti-sodomy laws, the Committee has acted in a progressive manner by additionally welcoming or condemning anti-discrimination as well as anti-hate crime legislation protections. Time for Change at the World Health Organization: “Undoing” Homosexuality In 1990, some changes had been underway at the World Health Organization (“WHO”); under Norwegian Director-General Gro Harlem Bruntland, the WHO eliminated the phrase “homosexuality” from its list of International Classification of Diseases (“ICD10”).34 Here there can be only slight suspicion over the correlation between Director-General Harlem Bruntland’s background and liberal stance on homosexuality and the elimination of the phrase from the ICD-10 in 1990, during her tenure of the WHO. 35 Furthermore, since 1975, the American Psychological Association, the largest of its kind in the United States, had already dissociated “homosexuality” from a mental disorder: “homosexuality per se implies no impairment in judgment, stability, reliability, or general social and vocational capabilities.”36 Given the influence of the United States’ government at the UN in general, the discursive developments seen within the country’s leading psychological association can also be interpreted has having had relative impact at the WHO. This discursive shift within the WHO constitutes the deconstruction or undoing of “homosexuality” as a medical anomaly. This shift is ever more paradigmatic because the ICD-10 is the world’s most widely used medical classification list, along with the American Psychiatric Association’s “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” (“DSM”).37 Canadian activist Françoise Girard, referring to Foucault’s work has linked this
34
The ICD 11th revision is due by 2015. See: http://www.who.int/classifications/icd/revision/en/index.html
35
Homosexuality was decriminalized in 1972 in Norway. See http://old.ilga.org/Statehomophobia/ILGA_State_Sponsored_Homophobia_2010.pdf 36 Fox, R. E. (1988). Proceedings of the American Psychological Association, Incorporated, for the year 1987: Minutes of the annual meeting of the Council of Representatives. American Psychologist, 43, 508-531. doi: 10.1037/h0091999 37 At this point, only the USA and China have their own medical classification list.
10