Dear Fellow WPATH members:

I hope you enjoy reading the International Journal of Transgenderism (IJT) as a perk of your WPATH membership. Over the past few years the Associate Editorial Board and I have been trying to establish IJT as a competitive, internationally renowned, valuable vehicle for scholarship and new thinking in theory and practice in transgender health.

We shared a vision for the future of IJT with you in the editorial entitled “Moving Forward” in 2016.  Basically, we had 3 objectives to achieve for IJT to become one of the leading academic journals in the field of transgender health.  These objectives included (1) to obtain an impact factor; (2) to obtain PubMed Central (PMC) inclusion; and (3) to finalize a name change of IJT.

We want to update and share some good news with you regarding the achievement of these objectives.

Firstly, IJT became listed by Thomson Reuters and in June 2019 our first Impact Factor (IF) for 2018 was announced as 2.345. This is a measure based on yearly citations of articles published in IJT. The Impact Factor is a proxy measure for the impact the scholarship published in IJT has on the larger field. Top journals, which publish in the field of transgender health, such as LGBT Health, Journal of Sexual Medicine, Archives of Sexual Behaviour, and Journal of Sex Research have a current impact factor of between 3.0 and 4.0. Compared to them, IJT has made a promising start! This is very good news as we exceeded expectations our publisher (Taylor & Francis) had for us this year.

Secondly, our PubMed Central (PMC) application has been accepted and IJT has just passed the “technical check” with PMC, our publisher will soon start uploading IJT content from 2018.  Being included in PubMed will significantly increase the exposure for IJT, and all manuscripts published there, it will also mean that our impact factor will continue to grow. It is already incredible that, without inclusion in PMC, we were able to obtain an IF of 2.345 so quickly. More exposure for IJT internationally also further contributes to the prestige of our organization, WPATH, as well as to the growth of the field of transgender health. As ever, we continue to encourage WPATH members to submit empirical research papers and systematic and meta-analytical literature reviews.

Last, but certainly not least, beginning in 2020, IJT will be renamed the International Journal of Transgender Health (IJTH) to reflect a change towards more appropriate and acceptable terminology in our field, and to closely link IJTH’s name to WPATH.

If you have any questions about IJT(H), don't hesitate to contact me as Editor-in-Chief. My email is walterbouman@PROTECTED. Thanks for reading and contributing to our Journal.

Walter Pierre Bouman, MD, PhD

Editor-In-Chief