The other night, my roommate decided to get into an argument with me about transgendered people. He’s a fan of the political commentator Ben Shapiro, who makes the claim that ALL transgendered are mentally ill. He points to the high suicide rates of trans people as evidence of this claim. My reply was that while many trans folk have depression and anxiety issues, not all of them do. I see no reason to label 100% of them as mentally ill. If you are able to function well in life, hold down a job, obey the law, and have satisfying relationships with other people, I see no reason to label that person as having a mental disorder. I view it as a variation in human personality, like being gay or left handed.
I’m by no means an expert on this issue, so I welcome the feedback of the SDMB.
Apart from anything else wrong with your roommate’s argument, the inversion of causality is noteworthy. If you have lots and lots of people - including your parents, teachers, doctors, priests and elected officials - telling you that something fundamentally ingrained in your sense of self demonstrates that you are “mentally ill” (not to mention “sinful”, “broken”, “perverted”, “sick”, “evil”, “depraved”, etc.), you are much more like to suffer from depression, anxiety and suicidal tendencies.
Driving someone to suicide and then saying “See? I told you there was something wrong with them!” is not only a logical fail but a moral one.
Honestly, you are not going to make any headway with this person on any argument on any subject using any rhetorical or logical method. Best to just say, “Mmm, interesting” and change the subject. The whole MO of these political commentators is to make provocative unsupported statements, usually about some “other” that they consider beneath themselves. People who are fans of this type of discourse are to be avoided if possible.
Gender is not based on DNA XX,XY, but hormones or something released while in the womb at the time of sexual development determines gender. Therefore it does not seem discrete 0 or 1, but some continum. Add to that we are made to be sexual beings and also seek out love, and form our ‘love mapping’ from a early age , and we do and suppose to conform to our environment. As horny creatures by design there seems to be a lot of leeway.
So by that I would say it’s not a mental illness, but a design feature.
What may be a mental illness is for people to be so opposed to people with differing sexual preferences. Though enforced conformity is the force that forms societies.
Just to be clear here: gender identity is a separate issue to sexual orientation. The former is about who you are; the latter is about who you are attracted to.
Good point and catch but I don’t know it’s as separate as you make it sound either. Gender identity does have perhaps a primary role of ‘who am I’, but that does then bring in the ‘who are you, in relation to me’. And it does not mean male/female sex organs, but ‘I am this’, ‘I sense you are that’ and ‘I feel this towards you’ or perhaps more likely ‘I feel this from you’ (since love mapping is typically adult to child programming ).
I think both of you are wrong for stigmatizing mental illness as something that means a person is bad. Your roommate for using it as a justification for being a dick to trans people, and you for treating diagnosis of an illness as something shameful that means a person is bad. Mental illness is not a moral or personal failing, and both of your positions are hugely off-base. Lots of people have some degree of mental illness, and it’s certainly higher among trans people, but having a treatable medical condition isn’t a reason to look down on a person or justify treating them badly.
Lots of Vietnam veterans ARE mentally ill, treatment of PTSD used to be incredibly awful if it was even acknowledged as a diagnosis. Treating ‘mentally ill’ as an insult just makes it harder for them to get decent treatment.
Point of order: PTSD **is **a mental illness (or rather a “disorder” - I’m not sure if there is a nuanced difference between an “illness” and a “disorder” or whether the latter has replaced the former in common parlance) and one can draw a straight line between serving in Vietnam and suffering from PTSD. Comparisons to transgenderism are, at best, either very, very broad or very, very murky.
There is a HUGE distinction between “group X has higher rates of mental illness” and “X is a mental illness”, and it has nothing to do with stigma or insults.
By saying it is a mental illness you are saying the characteristics of X are symptoms of a mental illness, and should be treated no differently to the hallucinations a schizophrenic suffers. If being a Vietnam Veteran is a mental illness we shouldn’t be going around making memorials and documentaries about the delusional symptoms vets suffer, like remembering their fallen comrades. Likewise for transgendered people.
There is a danger of getting lost in a series of arguments about the definition of terms. With that said there are a variety of conditions dubbed Disorders of Sexual Development which Shapiro regularly includes in his description of transgendered persons.
It is simply ridiculous to suppose that a person with a 46XX chromosome complement who has Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia and who develops outwardly in a manner typical of a 46XY male is somehow mentally ill. The same can be said of a 46XY person with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome who appears outwardly female. CAH and CAIS are well studied medical issues cause directly by genetic factors, as are dozens more conditions which affect reproductive physiology.
And yet Shapiro parrots the outdated idea that all persons with XY chromosomes are male and all persons with XX chromosomes are female and anything that does not fit this binary must be due to a mental illness of transgenderism.
Ben Shapiro is trained as a lawyer. Don’t rely on him for medical advice.
In the US the DSM-5 is what designates disorders (i.e. what are recognized mental illnesses by medical professionals). Gender identity disorder was dropped from the manual thus, in the US, transgender is not a disorder in a medical or legal sense.
The World Health Organization is working to remove it as well:
Yeah. In Spain you need a diagnosis of “gender dysphoria” to have your gender changed in ID and to get sex reassignment treatment through the public system. Problem: since the previous sentence includes the word “diagnosis”, now you have a psychiatric diagnosis. People who have started the reassignment process while already in the police or fire departments are ok, but those who start it and later try to join aren’t allowed to due to having received a psychiatric diagnosis (the military does accept people in the second case).
Personally and given how easy it is to get a psychiatric diagnosis (just be one of the people reciving psychological/psychiatric counseling after a disaster, for example), the whole thing seems completely inside out. It’s not the only process that’s kind of backwards though: for example, most people will use in any kind of ID their name as it appears in their government-issued ID. What do you need in order to change your name in government ID? Well, among other things, two pieces of ID which display your preferred name.
Not the best example is this? So many vets came back seriously damaged. My sister’s best friend’s husband was one of the many delayed casualities that committed suicide not too long after his return from that hell.
You should tell your roommate that anyone who listens to Li’l Benjy for any real-world advice must be mentally ill. It’s more accurate than his take on trans people.