Why isn't homosexuality considered a mental illness anymore?

Asked on Quora Answered by Anne L. Hugue-Boucher, Former Supervised Therapist "In the 1940s and 1950s, researchers began to really focus and study homosexuality. A man named Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues studied it, and from their research, the Kinsey Scale was developed. The scale was published in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male back in 1948. As Kinsey put it: Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. It is fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories...The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. (Kinsey, et al. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) p.639). From there, professionals all over started to wonder- hey, if there's a scale for this, and people aren't so binary in their orientations and behavior, then maybe, just maybe, homosexuality isn't deserving of being pathologized. But this was an extremely unpopular opinion. Of course, homosexuals were sick. If they weren't sick, they'd be heterosexual! In the 1950s and 1960s, groups of disenfranchised people everywhere started to say that they didn't deserve to be considered less-than ill, or otherwise unstable. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) ignored this and put homosexuality in as a mental illness in 1952 in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) as a type of socialpathy and a personality "disturbance". In 1968, the second DSM (DSM-II) came out, and homosexuality moved from a sociopathic personality disturbance to a sexual deviation, ranked among fetishes and pedophilia. Civil rights started to become more and more prominent. People demanded being treated like people. That's around the time Gender and Sexual Minorities started to say "look, doc, we're not sick. We're not unable to function. Stop making being gay a mental illness." Then that little organization called the American Psychiatric Association came together again in 1973 and sat down with all their statistics, studies, and paradigm shifts and said, "you know what? These sickos aren't sickos at all. Homosexuality is a sexual orientation just as heterosexually is. This really doesn't belong in the DSM." So they removed it because they found there was no true scientific basis for keeping it in there. As much as some people would love to tell you it's "all political", etc., it wasn't. While people did note the world was changing and they were willing to change along with it, this was a controversial decision at the time and it was not a popular stance the ADA took. It took almost thirty years of discussion, peer-review. and hard work for the APA to come to the conclusion that they were wrong for years and with the scientific data and evidence, along with pressure from psychiatrists who knew that homosexuality wasn't a mental illness, they were willing to change their minds. Science is a progression. When new and repeatable evidence is presented, good scientist will realign their views, because they base things on facts, not feelings." NOTE: We all have our opinions. Please respect mine and do not write any negative comments about this subject.