India’s apex medical regulatory authority on Thursday announced that it had “withdrawn and cancelled” its revised educational curriculum which two doctors had criticised as being “queerphobic” and downgrading emphasis on disability education.

The National Medical Commission (NMC) said the Competency-Based Medical Education (CBME) 2024 curriculum stands “withdrawn and cancelled” with immediate effect and new guidelines will be uploaded in due course.

Two doctors had earlier this week complained to the Union health ministry that the CBME 2024 curriculum for the MBBS programme “blatantly violates” legislation relating to disabilities and transgender rights and courts’ orders.

The CBME 2024 curriculum, in its section on forensic medicine, had included the terms “lesbianism” and “sodomy” among “unnatural sexual offences”, and “transvestism”, or cross-dressing, among sexual perversions.

The curriculum had also disregarded the need to include disability education as a component of educational courses for university teachers, doctors, nurses, and paramedical personnel, a mandatory requirement under India’s Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016.

These curriculum changes are “outdated and archaic” and “ableist and queerphobic,” Satendra Singh, professor of physiology at the University College of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, and Air Commodore Sanjay Sharma (retired), chief executive officer of the Association for Transgender Health in India, had written in a letter sent to the Union health ministry on Tuesday.

The doctors had sought the health ministry’s intervention to “correct this wrong”, saying it impacts the interests of persons with disabilities, of transgender and gender-diverse individuals, and of persons with variations in sexual orientation.

They had pointed out that the NMC, after being admonished by the Madras and Kerala high courts for an earlier version of the curriculum, had in October 2021 instructed all medical universities not to approve content with “unscientific, derogatory, and discriminatory information about the LGBTQ community”.

The CBME 2024 curriculum violates the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2019, conflicts with the Supreme Court’s 2019 judgment on transgender persons’ rights, and constitutes contempt of judgments by the Madras and Kerala high courts, Singh and Sharma had said.

“We must wait to see what’s coming next and cannot afford to be complacent as the NMC has a history of making U-turns,” Singh told The Telegraph on Thursday after the NMC’s announcement withdrawing the curriculum.