Gender dysphoria (GD) is the distress a person experiences due to inconsistency between their gender identity—their personal sense of their own gender—and their sex assigned at birth. The term replaced the previous diagnostic label of gender identity disorder (GID) in 2013 with the release of the diagnostic manual DSM-5. The condition was renamed to remove the stigma associated with the term disorder. The ICD-11, which does not consider it a mental disorder, uses the term gender incongruence (GI) instead of gender dysphoria, defined as a marked and persistent mismatch between gender identity and assigned sex, regardless of distress or impairment.
Not all transgender people have gender dysphoria. Gender nonconformity is not the same thing as gender dysphoria and does not always lead to dysphoria or distress. In pre-pubertal youth, the diagnoses are gender dysphoria in childhood and gender incongruence of childhood.The causes of gender incongruence are unknown but a gender identity likely reflects genetic, biological, environmental, and cultural factors.
