Non-Binary Gender Identity

• A person's experience of their gender i.e. gender identity may not always conform with their physical characteristics. When it is clear, structured, long-standing and independent of any concomitant mental disorders, gender identity other than cisgender is a part of healthy gender diversity.
• Non-binary identity refers to a situation where a person does not identify with either binary gender (female, male). The person's gender identity may be somewhere between male and female, partially male and partially female, completely outside this classification or genderless.
  • For transgenderism, see Transgenderism
• Non-binary gender identity may be associated with anxiety i.e. dysphoria about either the social role or the body's features and/or impaired psychosocial functioning. Some people with non-binary identity wish to have sex reassignment therapy to alleviate such effects. The appropriateness of wishes concerning any treatments that change the body is assessed in specialized gender identity clinics.

Differential diagnosis

• Identification with the gender defined at birth may be transiently challenging, resembling a non-binary identity, during the period of growth in adolescence and when reaching adulthood, and more permanently in people with autism spectrum disorders or emotionally unstable personality.
• Experiencing one's own body as alien may occur in association with eating disorders, unresolved trauma or dissociation.
• People with such challenges may also have a non-binary gender identity.

Treatment

• Any other need for psychiatric treatment should be assessed and such treatment organized in primary health care, and patients should be referred to a specialized gender identity clinic, if they so wish and provided that the local criteria for referral are met.
• Find out about local and national availability of such services and their instructions for referral.
• Treatment should always be planned individually, hearing the patient's wishes.