A Chinese court has ruled in favor of an academic textbook that labeled homosexuality as a “mental disorder.”
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The decision was made on Feb. 9 by the Suyu District Intermediate Court in the Jiangsu province, four years after a 24-year-old student named Ou Jiayong aka Xixi filed a lawsuit against the textbook publisher Jinan University Press and JD.com. Xixi states that the 2013 edition of Mental Health Education for College Student listed homosexuality as a “common psychosexual disorder” which also included cross-dressing and fetishism as reported by the South China Morning Post. She argued that the textbook’s statement was wrong due to a lack of scientific evidence to back up their theory.
Xixi and the LBGTQ community in China have expressed their disappointment in the court’s ruling. PFLAG spokesperson Ah Qiang said in a statement that the publisher’s textbook and courts reflected old viewpoints that do not apply in modern society.
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“The editor of the textbook apparently used viewpoints that do not match society’s perception of sexual minorities today,”
Homosexuality was declassified as a mental disorder by the World Health Organization in 1990 and China decriminalized it seven years later. In 2001, it was removed from a list of mental illnesses.