GIRES Research Award for 2011
See the GIRES Annual Research Awards page to read about the awards and the criteria used by the GIRES trustees in evaluating entries for the annual award.
The Trustees of the Gender Identity Research and Education (GIRES) are very pleased to announce that the charity’s award for 2011 is to the 34 members of the Standards of Care Revision Committee for the new (7th) edition of the Standards of Care published by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). It has been clear for some time that respected clinical opinion was moving forward from the previous edition of the Standards, published in 2001.
GIRES welcomes the endorsement in these latest standards of how far best practice has evolved in the intervening years. The charity supports fully the statement in the new document that “transsexual, transgender and gender noncomforming individuals are not inherently disordered.”
GIRES has presented papers at all WPATH symposia since 1999. The charity applauds the inclusion of “World” in WPATH’s new title and will actively support the Association’s fulfilment of that broad mission. GIRES wishes to see the new Standards adopted not only in the in the UK but also internationally.
It is similarly committed to achieving international dissemination and acceptance of the Guidelines for the Endocrine Treatment of Transsexual Persons published by the Endocrine Society, that obtained the GIRES Award in 2009.
With the support of the eight authors of the Endocrine Society Guideline, including a large personal donation from Professor Louis Gooren, GIRES established a fund that can be applied to the translation into other languages of both their document and the WPATH Standards. Already WPATH has agreed to establish its own International Fund for translating its Standards, which will pave the way for translating the Guideline too.
GIRES, which numbers four members of WPATH among its trustees, has pledged a donation of $20,000 to the WPATH International Fund and will also support the translation of the Endocrine Society’s Guideline.