The Madras High Court, on Wednesday, September 19, expressed its concerns about the National Medical Commission’s (NMC) Competency-Based Medical Education (CBME) 2024 guidelines for using the term “Gender Identity Disorder”.
The high court has issued a notice to NMC, demanding a report regarding the same before the next hearing, which is scheduled to be on January 6, 2025.
In its order, the Madras High Court highlighted several other concerns raised in this regard by Dr L Ramakrishnan in an authored article published by EdexLive, titled Curriculum Content Disorder.
Raising the matter on social media platform X, doctor and disability rights activist Dr Satendra Singh asked the NMC to submit a report, specifically dealing with the issues raised in the article.
A Madras High Court bench comprising Justice N Anand Venkatesh clarified that there is no psychological disorder involved in a person belonging to the LGBTQIA+ community and held that "such a mistaken understanding must be corrected by making appropriate changes in the curriculum. Unfortunately, once again the work "disorder" has found its place even in the new curriculum and it has to be immediately removed."
The CBME 2024 guidelines, first released on August 31, were scrapped after a week by the NMC after receiving criticism from the medical community, LGBTQ+ advocates, and disability activists. This was because the guidelines categorise sodomy and lesbianism as “unnatural sexual offences” under the “sexual offences” section of the clinical forensic medicine course in the MBBS curriculum.
Other controversial matters included the reintroduction of topics like ‘virginity and hymen’, which were scrapped in 2022 on the orders of the Madras High Court.
The NMC released fresh guidelines on September 12, 2024.