Elham Shirazi, - Board of Psychiatry, Board of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Mental Health Research Center, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran,

Gender nonconformity refers to the extent a person’s gender identity, and expression differs from the people of a particular sex. Gender incongruence refers to identifyingstronger with the other sex than with the sex assigned at birth. Certain gender nonconforming people experience gender dysphoria at some point in life. Gender dysphoria refers to the discomfort/distress caused by incongruence between the person’s gender identity and sex assigned at birth. Gender dysphoria is a universal phenomenon which occurs in all societies, cultures and countries. Its origin is suggested to be neurobiological and insensitive to environmental influences. The prevalence of gender dysphoria reported in the literature is increasing over the last 50 years. The sex ratio over the past 30 years reveals less difference between the sexes than has often been described in the literature and it is being increasingly almost equally found in both sexes. In childhood the sex ratio continues to favor birth-assigned males, but in adolescents, there has been a recent inversion in the sex ratio to favoring birth-assigned females.

Adolescent, child, gender dysphoria, prevalence, sex ratio