'Invisible' no more, detransitioners finally get their own diagnosis codes

The Stonewall uprising of 1969 birthed the modern gay rights movement, with New Yorkers coming out of the shadows of their gay bars to protest repeated police raids and arrests based on their sexual orientation and practice.

Fifty-seven years later, victims of the ideology that raided the gay rights movement and handcuffed it to the medicalization of gender-related distress – arguably a form of conversion therapy – are poised to emerge from the shadows of a medical system that hides their existence, thanks to the Trump administration.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced new diagnosis codes taking effect Oct. 1 to document detransitioners who seek to reverse and mitigate regretted hormonal and surgical procedures to resemble the opposite sex, making them visible in medicine and easing the path for them to get restorative treatment and insurance coverage.

The additions to the International Classification of Disease, Tenth Revision, closely follow a Department of Health and Human Services report that found rampant alleged billing fraud in so-called gender-affirming care for minors, especially misclassification as unspecified endocrine disorders and precocious puberty to secure insurance reimbursement.

HHS touted positive responses to the report Tuesday from members of Congress, medical professionals, conservative activists, detransitioners and influencers in new and old media, notably British comedian Russell Brand with 10 million followers on X.

Medical watchdog Do No Harm's medical director, Kurt Miceli, proposed several new ICD-10 codes to recognize detransitioners nearly a year ago, shortly after the assassination of detransitioner ally Charlie Kirk, when the CDC's ICD-10 Coordination and Maintenance Committee was considering recommended additions for HHS. 

He presented more codes at a March meeting, several of which were approved.

ICD is an abbreviation for the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases. Doctors and hospitals use them to record diagnoses, symptoms, injuries and causes of death. 

They also use them – as do patients and other billers – to get payments or reimbursement from health insurance companies. The ICDs also help track public health data and secure payment. The codes take effect October 1. 

Do No Harm touted the additions, chief among them code F64.A, "Gender identity disorder, in remission," which indicates people once diagnosed as transgender no longer show a "marked incongruence" between their sex and "experienced/expressed gender." 

It's the first acknowledgment in the ICD that gender confusion can end, despite observed desistance rates up to 80% when confusion is not medicalized, affirmed or reinforced by authorities such as parents and schools..

Even starting gender-affirming care isn't a guaranteed lifelong path, according to a groundbreaking study of children and spouses of soldiers who received treatment through the U.S. Military Healthcare System. Nearly a third stopped treatment within four years.

Several new codes recognize "personal history" of various forms of gender confusion, including "social gender transition" (presenting as the opposite sex without related medical treatment) and "gender detransition" (returning to presenting as one's own sex).

Other new codes for personal history of "medical gender transition" and "surgical gender transition" allow doctors to further specify what treatment a patient received. 

Except for gender detransition, the "personal history" codes are subsets of a preexisting code, Z87.890, for personal history of "sex reassignment." That unscientific term has also fallen out of favor within gender ideology, whose adherents erase sex and speak of affirming or "confirming" gender by social or medical means.

ICD recognizes orca attacks and 'sucked into jet engine' but not detransition 

"Our country will become the first in the world to finally give [detransitioners] the attention they need," long denied by a medical establishment "infected" by the activist "dogma that sex-changes are all gain, no pain," Do No Harm senior fellow Aida Cerundolo, an emergency medicine physician, wrote in The Hill. " ... if these patients ever tried to go back – and restore the body they were born with – they were effectively invisible to medicine."

Gender transition has been meticulously documented in ICD-10 codes since 2015, yet "if these patients ever tried to go back – and restore the body they were born with – they were effectively invisible to medicine" because of the activist "dogma that sex-changes are all gain, no pain," she said.

Cerundolo has written about a 20-something detransitioner who had her ovaries removed and experienced menopause 20 years early. Because of missing detransition codes, the woman received the wrong treatment – dangerously high estrogen intended for males presenting as women – and it couldn't be reimbursed by insurance anyway, Cerundolo said.

At least some of the estimated 14,000 minors who received gender-affirming treatment, as tracked in Do No Harm's database, will need "hormone replacement for surgically removed sex organs" or "serious mental health treatment, given the pain and confusion they will have endured," which the new codes will facilitate, she wrote.

The approved codes will enable physicians to "more accurately document an individual’s clinical state to support the appropriate delivery of care" and benefit public health, as the resulting clinical data inform "future practice and guidelines" and give researchers visibility into previously hidden "real-world health information," Do No Harm wrote.

Its X post sharing the new codes spread far and wide courtesy of reposts by gender-critical Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling, women's tennis great Martina Navratilova and anti-gender transition activist "Billboard" Chris Elston, arrested by Madrid police for engaging passers-by and targeted for global digital censorship by Australia.

"Many detransitioners have complained that insurance readily paid for their gender transition interventions, but seeking coverage for detransitioning was nearly impossible," gender medicine journalist Ben Ryan wrote of the approved codes.

Detransitioner Claire Abernathy, an "ambassador" for the Independent Women's Forum, marveled that ICD-10 has three codes for "bitten by orca" going back to 2015 despite "fewer recorded cases of orca whales biting humans in all of written history than there were detransitioners who attended Detrans Awareness Day 2026."

Do No Harm emphasized another rare-occurrence ICD-10 code, "sucked into jet engine," which happened this summer when an aircraft obliterated a man who walked straight into its landing path on a Denver runway.

Our Duty founder Keith Jordan, whose international group supports parents of gender-confused children, said he used to work on "a computer system that processed aircraft damage claims including things being sucked into jet engines." Some of them "were as unbelievable as the current trans medical scandal."