The Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center released today a comprehensive report providing school leaders and state and local government officials more than 60 recommendations for overhauling their approach to school discipline. The recommendations focus on improving conditions for learning for all students and staff, strengthening responses to student’s behavioral health needs, tailoring school-police partnerships, and minimizing students’ involvement with the juvenile justice system.

By inspiring and engaging individuals and communities, the Human Rights Campaign strives to end discrimination against LGBTQ+ people and realize a world that achieves fundamental fairness and equality for all. HRC envisions a world where lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people plus community members who use different language to describe identity are ensured equality and embraced as full members of society at home, at work and in every community.

The Project on Addressing Prison Rape has developed a fifty state surveys of state criminal laws for confidentiality in a variety of sexual abuse response professions, including mental health and rape crisis/ sexual assault counselors, in order to increase understanding about legal responses and sanctions available for sexual abuse in custodial settings. We try to update these surveys yearly.

Findings revealed that transgender inmates do not consistently receive adequate or gender-affirming care while incarcerated. Factors at the structural level (i.e., lack of training, restrictive healthcare policies, limited budget, and an unsupportive prison culture); interpersonal level (i.e., custody staff bias); and individual level (i.e., lack of transgender cultural and clinical competence) impede correctional healthcare providers’ ability to provide gender-affirming care to transgender patients.

In the upcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), people whose gender at birth is contrary to the one they identify with will be diagnosed with gender dysphoria. This diagnosis is a revision of DSM-IV’s criteria for gender identity disorder and is intended to better characterize the experiences of affected children, adolescents, and adults.

The Fenway Institute conducts policy research on issues affecting LGBT health, HIV policy, hepatitis, sexually transmitted infections, and other issues. We also address the social determinants of health, which the World Health Organization defines as “the circumstances in which people are born, grow up, live, work, and age, as well as the systems put in place to deal with illness.”

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) is the product of more than 10 years of effort by hundreds of international experts in all aspects of mental health. Their dedication and hard work have yielded an authoritative volume that defines and classifies mental disorders in order to improve diagnoses, treatment, and research.

LGBT individuals encompass all races and ethnicities, religions, and social classes. Sexual orientation and gender identity questions are not asked on most national or State surveys, making it difficult to estimate the number of LGBT individuals and their health needs.

The American Psychiatric Association has revised its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and it no longer lists being transgender as a mental disorder, among other changes announced this past weekend.

Transgender people will now be diagnosed with "gender dysphoria," which means emotional stress related to gender identity. "Gender identity disorder" had been listed as a mental disorder since the third edition of the DSM more than 20 years ago.

Studies show that the prevalence of suicide thoughts and attempts among transgender adults is significantly higher than that of the U.S. general population. Using data from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, this report examines key risk factors associated with suiciality among a sample of transgender people.